RULE 5

Spiritual Capital Is the Start of True Wealth—Own Your Power

We are not human beings having a spiritual experience.

We are spiritual beings having a human experience.

PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN

Life is all about energy. Think about everything that is important to you and in your life. I’m talking about love, charity, compassion, faith, belief, vulnerability, joy, confidence, self-esteem, empathy, sympathy, and countless other feelings of the heart.

But what do most people obsess about? Things. Homes, boats, cars, jewelry, clothes, and other things that blow away with the winds of time.

And this is precisely why most people are, well, miserable. Most people are looking for love in all the wrong places. In things.

If you want to get rich, then fine, focus your energy on things.

But if you want to gain wealth, true wealth, then learn to think differently, which I first talked about in Rule 2. Ambassador Andrew Young told me, “Real wealth comes from how you think, and not what you obsess about. Real wealth is about a certain view of the world. A perspective. A certain view of yourself.”

There is a difference between being broke and being poor. Being broke is a temporary economic condition, but being poor is a disabling frame of mind, a depressed condition of the spirit, a broken view of oneself.

True poverty has little to do with money.

To be clear, I am not talking here about sustenance poverty. Everyone deserves a roof over their head, food to eat, and the ability to take reasonable care of their health. Human dignity, basically. Everyone deserves this. But what next?

I am talking about building wealth beyond acquiring food, shelter, and basic health care needs.

I am talking now about a path to financial dignity—which begins with having spiritual wealth.

First of all, I am talking about self-esteem and confidence, which is half of the challenge in dealing with poverty and wealth. Because if you don’t know who you are at 9 a.m., by dinnertime, someone else will tell you who you are.

I am talking about role models and your environment. Because if you hang around nine broke people, I can guarantee that you will be the tenth. Moreover, if you hang around nine wealth builders, you will also likely be the tenth.

The grandmother of my friend Dr. Regina Benjamin was an entrepreneur. She ran a business in town, and she was a landowner. Living in the rural South in the 1920s and 1930s, she was a role model, a transformational presence in her small town. Both Dr. Benjamin’s grandmother and mother were strong female role models whose self-esteem, confidence, and spiritual wealth seeped into Regina’s bones.

College was a forgone conclusion for Regina. It was not K–12 in her family—an education in her family meant K–college. Regina was also a joiner. She loved joining clubs. Well, the most popular club at Xavier University was for premed students, so she joined that club with confidence. Before she knew it, her environment was a network of type A achievers in the medical field.

In 2009, Regina became Dr. Regina Benjamin, our nation’s eighteenth United States surgeon general.

Dr. Benjamin’s family taught her the art and practice of hope, which leads me to my next point: I am talking about aspirations and opportunity. Aspiration is a code word for hope. And just as dollar bills are the currency of economic capital, hope is the currency of spiritual capital. Hope is the outward sign of spiritual wealth within.

Not only is the most dangerous person in the world a person with no hope, the opposite is also true: the most powerful person in the world is a person rooted in their own sense of hope.

Not in what people think about them.

Not in what their public image is.

Not in whether they are liked or not liked.

Not in whether they are admired, even, or whether they can play the game just right.

And certainly, not in what their net worth is or how many things they own or possess.

I am talking about a hope rooted in faith, based on love, and inspired by something larger and more important than oneself.

Hope is light in the world even when darkness is all around us. Hope has its own “true north” even when everyone else is pointed in the opposite direction. Even when everyone else may disagree, hope lives on.

Only with hope can you become “reasonably comfortable” in your own skin—and the most powerful asset you can have in your life is to be reasonably comfortable in your own skin. For me, it has been the essence of my spiritual power, and it has created my spiritual wealth. It is my personal secret sauce.

You cannot have hope, particularly when the world seems to be working against you, without being reasonably comfortable in your own skin.

Dr. Cecil “Chip” Murray once told me, “It’s not what people call you, it is what you answer to that is most important,” and to “never, ever, answer out of your name.” That’s what you do if you are reasonably comfortable in your own skin. If you have built spiritual capital. If your path is fueled by hope.

Hope reminds us that badness is failed goodness. It reminds us that darkness has no definition without light.

Even that punk Lucifer from the Bible was once an angel, which means that even God Almighty gives the devil permission to exist. That is how powerful hope is—it is a first cousin of the One That Is.

Human evil does not exist outside of yourself, nor does spiritual goodness. All of it actually rests inside of yourself. And both sides are fighting for domination of your day. Every. Single. Day.

So the questions become: Who is winning, and what does winning take? Better still, do we need to fundamentally rethink what winning looks like?

Real Power Allows Everyone to Win

My best friend, Rod McGrew, once told me, “When you really have the power, you don’t need to use it.” He is right. But you won’t have the power, or even truly understand it, if you can’t get out of your own way.

Let’s go back to the question of what “winning” looks like. The traditional view is that in order for me to win, you must in turn lose. But in Dr. King’s, Andrew Young’s, and Nelson Mandela’s worldviews, the aperture opens wide enough to allow everyone to win. In fact, their worldviews pretty much require it.

Dr. King believed that a minority group could not win based on raw, brute strength. He had no military and no inventory of bombs and bullets, and so, his movement needed a different strategy to win, one in which the persecuted minority group took the moral high ground in every instance. His brilliant strategy was to wrap up the interests of the so-called enemy in the win for the oppressed minority group.

As a result, Dr. King was often the only black leader talking constructively to white America, at a time when the majority of black leaders were talking exclusively to Black America. In the latter example, it was far too easy to fall back on the unseen and unheard pain of the oppressed. The publicly expressed pain of the black community that came as a result often became the product itself or the “win.” But in reality it was only emotional, short-term public therapy for a depressed and hurt people. These leaders won the battle, but never won any wars worth celebrating. There was no achievement for those represented beyond a “feel-good” acknowledgement of their pain.

My modern approach to solving our problems builds on the moral authority of Dr. King, the diplomacy of Andrew Young, a spirited dash of Malcolm X (“You've been took. You've been hoodwinked. Bamboozled…”), the gumption of Dr. Dorothy Height (“John, I like you because you are a dreamer with a shovel in your hands”), the broad-based engagement of President Abraham Lincoln, the sophistication of Frederick Douglass, and the disruptive innovation of Steve Jobs.

And here it is, in the words of Dr. Cecil “Chip” Murray: “Talk without being offensive. Listen without being defensive. And always, always leave even your adversary with their dignity. Because if you don’t, they will spend the rest of their life working to make you miserable. It becomes personal.”

When you can leave your adversaries with their dignity—which is possible only when you possess spiritual wealth (i.e., you know who you are, are reasonably comfortable in your own skin, and are acting out of hope and faith in your future)—the very next movement is simple achievement for the individual or group in question. Achievement.

Gaining spiritual wealth—and, therefore, true wealth—is about leveling the playing field and then sharing the field of advancement, not blowing up the field. But none of this is even remotely possible if you are angry or if payback or settling scores is the object of the game.

No one can afford today to be “angry for a living,” least of all us members of the Invisible Class.

Real winners learn to step over mess, never in it. Real winners don’t rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic of their lives.

“The ship is sinking, and we are busy picking drapes!” cannot be our rallying cry.

True wealth is about taking your life back. Owning yourself from here on out.

Getting Out of Your Own Way

My friend Quincy Jones says that we are all “terminals for a higher power.”

In fact, the entire purpose of life just might be about becoming transparent to God’s will, about learning to get out of your own way. Truth be told, I spend my entire day trying to get out of my own way.

So, what is the problem? Ourselves. Me. You. Us.

I remember asking my friend the world-renowned philosopher Dr. Pekka Himanen, a cofounder of Global Dignity, what matters most in life. He gave me a different answer. He told me that the thing that matters most is what we are most afraid of: ourselves.

We are afraid of our true selves.

There are the public parts of us that we hold up to the world to view, for example, our Facebook profile pages and our Instagram feeds.

And then there are the private parts that we are on some level ashamed of or afraid to show the world for fear of being judged.

The first narrative—the public part of ourselves—is broadcast and shared with the world through something we call our personality. The word personality comes from the Latin root word persona or “to perform.”

Our personality is the performance we put on for the world. It is not necessarily fraudulent or dishonest, but it might just be a vehicle to keep everyone at a distance from our true, private selves. Call it self-preservation.

In the case of some, the public persona is a full-on replacement of the true self, because we believe it looks better. Sadly, this is the beginning of all bad things in our lives.

With our public self, we get to be perfect only twice: when we are born and when we meet someone for the first time. And so, we often “subcontract” our true selves to caricatures that we believe are more interesting than our realities. Touched-up social media photos all too often show a better side of us than what actually exists, and so we claim the better look as our own.

This is just about the opposite of being reasonably comfortable in our own skin.

Spiritual Poverty and Addiction

When we don’t show up whole, comfortable, and present in our own lives, a bunch of behaviors begin to take up residence in our lives: drinking, drug taking, smoking, complaining, over-indulgence in sex, excessive shopping, oversleeping, uncontrolled social media posting, and a long list of other addictions. But none of this is really sustainable. None of this represents spiritual wealth.

Addictions are reactions to emotions we cannot handle. When we have not healed from the real pain in our lives and we have these addictions disguised as “happy time” busily taking up occupancy in our emotional lives, things start to get worse—fast.

When there is a hole in the bottom of the emotional cup of our lives, it does not matter how much you pour into it. The cup still has a hole. Every day, it takes more and more of the same thing to give us the same release. This is how people die: more and more of the wrong thing poured into their emotional cups. And long before the body dies, the spirit goes first.

Increasingly, what we are experiencing here in the United States and internationally is a crisis of spiritual poverty. A world that is full of fear and fading hope. A world of people—good people, God’s children—who simply do not feel seen.

Hope is the antidote to fear. Regaining your sense of self is the antidote to spiritual poverty.

The first step is finding your Identity Project. I am convinced that the way to save the Invisible Class and all our young people who are at high risk of losing hope is to help them figure out their Identity Projects.

Once you know who you are, you start to believe in yourself and your future. You begin building spiritual capital. You refocus your attention on positivity and finding your way out of the lonely wilderness of depression and fear.

From your Identity Project—which you can think of as the beginning of a genuine embrace of your true inner self—you can then begin to figure out your purpose. What are you here to do, and how are you going to start doing it?

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “If you don’t know what you are willing to die for, then you are not fit to live.”

Without hope, without purpose, there is no spiritual wealth. There is no true wealth.

Quieting the Mind Lets the Spirit Flow

Now that we have tapped into the real power within us—our spiritual power—let’s deal with that mind of ours.

Most of us have given our mind way too much credit. Way too much power. We have promoted the mind beyond its pay grade. We have placed the mind in charge of our lives, and then we wonder why we feel like we are going crazy on a daily basis.

Why are we going crazy? Because the mind was never meant to be placed in charge of our lives. Remember, we are spiritual beings having a human experience, not the other way around.

My chief of staff, Rachael Doff, once asked a loved one, “Can you please give that other person inside of you—the one telling you all of this destructive, crazy, negative stuff—can you please give this other person inside of you a name and then tell them to go kiss-off?”

The spirit and the soul are the command centers for your life. Not your mind. You need to quiet your mind and then focus it.

But before you can quiet and focus your mind, you have to better understand the two sides of the mind. The left brain is the analytical side. This is where we do computation, research, and processing of data and facts. Hold on to this factoid for a moment while I speak about the right side of the brain. The right side of the brain is where creativity lives. It is where aspiration, hope, dreams, and all our wild ideas live.

Now here is something to think about: if your spirit is distressed, and your hope is under house arrest, then what is there for the right side of the brain to get excited about and to dream about?

Where is the positive energy mind food that triggers the firing of endorphins on the right side of the brain? Where are the endorphins that cause dream making and aspiration to fire in the mind? Where is the right-brain activity that then triggers the left side of your brain to work on a detailed and rational plan to execute your dreams?

Said a different way, if you are depressed and hopeless, you probably won’t be making much positive use of your left brain, the analytical mind. And, worse, because of the emotional darkness taking up residence within, your decisions are likely to be emotional reactions rather than rational responses. Emotional, angry, maybe even dark.

The enemy of your progress has now got you right where they wanted you all along: off your game.

When you are depressed, you get something called “cognitive narrowing.” In other words, when you are depressed, your IQ drops temporarily. (My exploration of the links between the cognitive sciences and modern poverty, spiritual wealth, hope, and finally behavioral economics—which are used by companies and organizations, both honorable and not so honorable, to target all of us for offerings we might be susceptive to more often than not—was inspired by the work of author and thinker Milhaly Csikszentmihalyi in his book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience.)

When the neurons are sparking in your brain and spirit, you enter into a state of “aspirational mind,” where you gain “cognitive expansion,” particularly on the right side of your brain where hope, aspiration, and dreams live. Through cognitive expansion you temporarily achieve an IQ increase.

In short, the spiritual wealth I speak about here will make you smarter, and over time more successful. Likewise, the increasing, persistent stranglehold of spiritual poverty, or a poverty mind-set, will decrease your mental energy, which will decrease your capacity for individual economic energy. And individual economic energy is the origin of what the world calls GDP.

Said plainly, a poverty state of mind, an increasing hopelessness and faithlessness, dooms you to a future of increasing economic despair.

It becomes a cycle like any other cycle feeding on itself, adding fuel to an already strained existence.

Picture this: A single head of household, working and commuting fourteen hours a day, with bad role models in a bad environment, a beaten-down sense of self-esteem, low confidence in himself and his skills, dashed dreams, and too much month at the end of his money.

Without the right mind-set and spirit, darkness will surely come.

Now add financial illiteracy to this toxic mix of generational economic lack, lower levels of education, a general sense of hopelessness, depression, and no self-confidence, and you have the perfect cocktail for the targeted, systematic societal abuse that is evident in almost every 500-credit-score neighborhood across America. Be the inhabitants black or white, urban or rural, the crisis is essentially the same.

And this is precisely why I believe that the mostly untold story of the Freedman’s Bank carries so much historical significance.

The Freedman’s Savings Bank was created to teach former slaves about money and the free-enterprise system back in 1865. Today, there are a few billion people or more throughout the world who need to get the same Memo.

The top 10 percent of adults in the world hold 85 percent of the total wealth in the world, while the bottom 90 percent hold the remaining 15 percent of the world’s total wealth. Now certainly, this first group got the Memo on money. But what about the rest of us?

That said, this is much more than a story about money. Money has a communicated energy of its own, and that energy—how and where it flows, where it sits and settles, who has it and who loses it—is also an understanding we must master. There is a whole new language that we must learn: the language of money.

Ultimately, this is a story about us surviving or thriving. About whether we just barely make it and accept that as enough for us, for our children, and for our community, or whether we work together for a shared aspiration: a better life for us all.

While it is true that we are all God’s children, and thus all of our challenges and opportunities and potential are essentially the same, some of us (i.e., those in the Invisible Class) start from different places. This unlevel playing field must be called out and made plain. It must be acknowledged. It is an obvious, and in some cases, historic disadvantage for some. But it can also be a hidden strength.

You see, rainbows only follow storms. You cannot have a rainbow without a storm first. And loss creates leaders, as I detailed in my book Love Leadership: The New Way to Lead in a Fear-Based World.

I grew up in South Central Los Angeles and Compton, California, and this made me hustle more. I was not born into a family of higher education degree holders, and I got a GED degree out of high school. That said, I am a lifelong learner. My home office and my corporate office are both filled with books. My home office is, literally, a book library.

I was homeless for six months of my life at eighteen years of age. This no doubt made me stronger. Once I emerged on the other side from this humiliating experience, I was not only more resilient, I was more confident in myself. I was less concerned about what someone else thought about me, less concerned about my short-term image, hoisted and promoted by others, and much more concerned about my long-term, internal growth, chartered and navigated by me. I was curating a new me for the twenty-first century.

I realized that nothing much could kill the very thing I needed the most: my undying spirit.

This newfound understanding allowed me to redefine “success” in my life as “going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.”

It has allowed me to take “no” for vitamins to this very day. Every day.

I don’t get worked up when a crisis comes. I tend to manage my emotions. I get calmer. More settled. I find my internal light in the midst of each and every crisis, and I sit down in it. In so doing, I become “enlightened.” And this is where I find most of the answers to my problems. I never make a decision with my mind. My decisions are 100 percent intuitive, which requires a quieting, a sitting down, being present.

And this is why we must talk without being offensive, listen without being defensive, and leave even our adversaries with their dignity. Or else we will never get out of the mess we collectively find ourselves in.

Spiritual power does not need to exact revenge. It does not need to bludgeon an offender just because we can. Spiritual power is also about forgiveness—not because the other person deserves it, because often they do not. But because we do. We deserve to—and often need to—let it go.

Hating someone else hurts and destroys only the person doing the hating. There is no peace or quiet with hate. And it takes valuable time and energy away from your true pursuit: being present in your own curated and created life.

Creating Your Own Spiritual Wealth

There are three ways to live: coping (i.e., dealing with it), suicide (i.e., giving up), and healing (i.e., moving on). Most people are just coping. Suicide is not really an option. Healing is the only way forward. Gaining spiritual wealth is part of the healing process of this life.

Spiritual wealth is about becoming perfect in our imperfections. It is about finding that little light deep inside of yourself and sitting down there. Just sitting there and being enlightened. Embracing yourself. Being present in your own life.

To quote Eckhart Tolle from The Power of Now: “Yesterday is a memory, and does not exist. Tomorrow is the future, and has not happened. Neither exist. Neither are real, but most of us have one foot in yesterday, and one foot in tomorrow. Which is why we’re not present in our own lives.”

Most of us are obsessed and distracted by our unhealed past, or worse, we live in the future, thinking that when we move to a new city, get a new job, or marry a new beloved, all our problems will be solved.

Not only do these false narratives rob you of the only thing that is—this present moment—but they are also robbing you of precious time and valuable resources. Time that could be focused on and directed toward the only thing that should matter: Taking Your Life Back.

The moment when we realize this little jewel is the moment we begin to accumulate true spiritual wealth.

“Life is difficult.”

This is the first line in Dr. Scott Peck’s bestselling book The Road Less Traveled. If you can’t get with this statement, then don’t bother reading the rest of this groundbreaking book on becoming your true self.

What you see depends on where you sit. No one promises you a rose garden, and it is up to you whether you think that the rose bush has a few thorns or the thorn bush also includes a rose. It is your choice.

What are you choosing in your life?

What are you telling yourself?

Do you realize that “thoughts are things,” to again quote my friend Rod McGrew?

Do you realize that you are changing the chemical makeup of your brain, and the energy in your body, based on how you see, feel, and interact with the world?

Are you ready to become the Knight of the Round Table in your life? The lead protector for your family? The leader for your community?

Are you ready to take your life back?

These are the questions you must be prepared to answer before you can claim spiritual wealth.

It is the first step in introducing your own greatness, which will then allow you to pursue your dreams of economic liberation, whether they are owning a home, starting a small business, or becoming an entrepreneur.

Consider that nearly half of all employers require a credit check before they will hire you. When you get the Memo, you have the tools to raise your credit score to 700 (Operation HOPE can help, too), and in the process reclaim you. When your aspirations rise and your credit score rises, so does your well-being. So does your self-esteem. Your confidence. Your options in life.

At Operation HOPE, we teach you that if you can’t get a job, you can create one. You can become your own self-employment project. But all of this takes spiritual fortitude. Spiritual wealth is the foundation.