Decades ago, one of my friends was volunteering with Mother Teresa in Calcutta, and one of these major donors walks into the place, checks everything out, and at the end asks her, “Can I take a photo with you?” Mother Teresa says, “Sure.” Except that the photo wasn't quite perfect. He says, “Can you move over just a little.” Took another photo, and another. At one point, they moved her face to the right and to the back.
Watching, my friend was understandably furious. This is a global icon of service. How can anyone treat her like an object? When they left, she asked Mother Teresa why she didn’t say anything. Mother Teresa responded in one sentence that would change her life: “My dear, there are many forms of poverty.” What Mother Teresa saw in this financially affluent person was a poverty of spirit. And she responded to that with many forms of wealth—the wealth of acceptance, of tolerance, of kindness, of compassion.
In our society we're heavily biased towards financial wealth. But that singular money orientation hasn't worked out too well for us. Money is issued in the world as debt, and to pay off that debt we need constant growth. Over time, that forces us to commoditise goods and services that otherwise would just be shared for the love of it—give somebody a ride, cook a meal for a neighbour, have a friend crash on your couch. Moreover, money orientation breeds a sense of scarcity that isn't good for our minds, hearts or brains.
So how can we build a bigger pie? In other words, what other forms of capital can we can tap into? In 1999, some colleagues and I started an organisation called ServiceSpace. We just wanted to give. We started by building websites for nonprofits, purely as a labor of love. But over time people told us, “Look, if you want to scale this up and continue this over a long period of time, you're going to have to monetise.” Sixteen years later, our work is touching millions of lives and we still haven’t monetised, we don't host any ads, and we're not fundraising. It worked because we tapped into a gold mine of alternative forms of wealth.
The first one is time capital. We all understand this intuitively. We have time. We think of this in terms of jobs usually and we say, “I have time, and this is where I offer my time at my work.” But turns out we're actually really bad at honouring this kind of capital. Recent polls show 71 percent of people feel disengaged at work. It's costing us $350 billion. Not only that, we actually have a lot of time to give—time that could be diverted into so many different directions. We watch 200 billion hours of TV every year, 200 billion. Can we channel it towards constructive social change?
Another type of capital is community. We think of contributors as individuals usually, but actually one plus one ends up being greater than two because that plus sign in between has value. How we relate, how we connect to each other can end up changing the entire outcome. If you look at a piece of graphite and a piece of diamond, they're both made up of the same carbon atoms. The only difference is in how they're connected to each other.
Robert Waldinger, at Harvard, is the director of one of the longest studies on the good life. After 75 years of studies, they issued one major finding: good relationships are the key to better health and to more happiness. We need to create opportunities for people to come together in relationship, and to feel the support of a broader web.
A subtler form of capital is attention capital. We all know this intuitively because the whole advertising industry is geared towards monetising our attention. The more we give our attention to something, the more it expands.
With this capital, goldfish were once at the bottom of the rung—with an attention span of nine seconds. Now it’s humans, whose average attention span has dropped from 12 seconds to eight. Our minds are full. Today's New York Times has more content than one would encounter in an entire lifespan in 17th Century England. What all that content does is over-stimulates our nervous system, leaving us feeling exhausted and dissatisfied. There are many different ways in which we can build our attention capital, mindfulness meditation being one of them.
Time, community and attention each has its own currency. Time is measured in hours and shows up as engagement in society. Community has the currency of relationships, leads to social networks and creates trust in our world. Attention leads to mindfulness and ultimately positive social acts. And there are many other forms of capital, too. Knowledge capital, with the currency of ideas leading to innovation in society. Compassion capital, with the currency of kind acts. If we start to deeply consider this lens and broaden beyond the scope of money, we can really tilt the seesaw in a different direction—perhaps towards greater love.
My friend and an inspiration, Reverend Heng Sure, is a Buddhist monk, who uses music as a tool for transformation. When he came out with a CD, he wondered if he should put a price tag on his CD or explore other forms of wealth. He chose the latter. Here is what he put on his website: "Recipe for downloading the CD— perform a priceless act of kindness, write and submit a reflection of your experience, check your email to download the album.” He got hundreds of submissions. One of them was a woman in Poland who said, “My priceless act of kindness was calling my mum.” It happened to be Christmas eve, lights were out, and Mum was sitting in the dark, crying. “Why in the dark, mum?” the daughter asked. “Well, it's Christmas and I didn't want my neighbours to know that I'm all alone.” Mum and Dad were divorced and the family was with the Dad. So this woman packed up her bags and ended up spending Christmas with her mum.
The question we're left with is this: what forms of capital do we want to amplify? If we broaden that lens, the possibilities are limitless. If we use our hearts to assume value everywhere, if we use our heads to wisely invest in the greatest of our capitals, if we use our hands to courageously design for the full spectrum of this wealth, we will create an entirely new solution set for a thriving humanity.
