Ryan Daniel Moran argues that making money through entrepreneurship is the most effective way to create lasting social and environmental change. He uses Elon Musk's climate work and a conversation with an ayahuasca shaman to show how profit enables solutions to scale and reach beyond your immediate circle.
There's a lot of good heart centered people who want to create change in the world or do good by the people around them. And as a result of that desire to do good, reject the idea of making a lot of money, seeing capitalism as dog eat dog, or us versus them, me versus you. I had a professor in college, his name was Dr. Tom Lehman and he was an economics professor. And I went to a Christian university. So a lot of the things that we talked about were in the context of Christianity. But Dr. Tom said something really interesting during one of our classes. He said, so many of you are wondering what God's will is for your life, what God wants you to do with your life, or put in a general context what your life purpose is, how you can have a meaningful, fulfilling life. And he said, well, you know what? God gave you this really cool tool, it's called the marketplace. He said, if you look at the market, the things that have the highest prices are where there's a highest demand, prices go up. Because people are demanding there to be more solutions. They're demanding and desiring there to be change, for there to be more options, for there to be more service in that. I think of a guy like Elon Musk. Elon Musk sees a challenge in the world and knows that the purpose of his life or his business is to create a new solution, is to create something that changes that industry. So many people who are good, heart centered, loving people want to solve climate change by reducing their waste or by demanding government policy. And maybe there's an argument to and a benefit to those things. But you know what dramatically changes that and solves it permanently? When you have better solutions that eliminate waste and eliminate pollution, which is something that somebody like Elon has dedicated his entire life to. This lonely kid from South Africa who fled the country to escape mandatory military service, goes on to be a science nerd who is probably going to solve climate change as a result of capitalism. And being an entrepreneur, he knows that the only way that you can create change is when you do it sustainably. And that means profitably. And entrepreneurship and capitalism is the way that you create that change rather than trying to be poor so that other people don't have to be poor. The people who say that it's wrong to have money or it is wrong to have means are kind of like saying, it's wrong for me to be healthy because it prevents somebody else from being healthy. Money is abundant, money is energy, money flows to where there is change in good ideas. And so if we prioritize the meaning and the good ideas and the collaboration and the service to one another. Money flows as a byproduct. One of my favorite conversations about this was with someone I know who is a shaman, specifically an ayahuasca shaman. Yes, I'm into that kind of stuff. And we were having a conversation about how in the spiritual world there is this tension between wanting to serve the community while also charging a price for it. And so there's almost this rejection of the idea that someone who is in a spiritual mindset should have means or should turn a profit. And the conversation that we had about this was, the purpose of money is to sustain good work outside of the tribe. As human beings, we are naturally wired to serve one another and take care of one another. It's why you go out of your way to take care of your family or to serve the people that you love the most. But when you don't have that direct relationship with someone, we are not incentivized. We are not naturally wired to just do good by them. The purpose of money is to sustain the good work that we would do for those that we care about and take it outside of the tribe. So I told this friend of mine that it was a sign of him doing really good work in the world to have demand from people outside of his circle that would force him to raise his prices, that thus making it sustainable for him to continue doing the good work that he's doing now. Industries always change when there's innovation and more capitalism. Prices end up falling when there is a normalization of that product or service. And that's why innovation and new change follows money. When there is a bigger problem, there are bigger profits, because money is simply the energy that fuels good work and creates change. So if you want to change the world, the way that you do that is not by holding yourself back and not by diminishing the amount of impact that you can have. It's by creating something that has the potential to create a lot of wealth, not for your own purposes, but as the byproduct of creating something that ends up ushering in new change.
