Five Loaves, Two Fishes, and a Cup of Lousy Coffee

As I write this, I have just located an item I have been searching for for years - a Golden Thread Newsletter article that made a deeply profound point that I have never forgotten. I searched through piles of printouts and googled to no avail, and am ashamed to say it only ten minutes ago occurred to me to search the folder in my older email account where I used to keep such things. I typed the phrase "crappy coffee" in the "search your email" bar and it turned up immediately. So here it is:

"Forget the Latte Factor

You need to know right now that you can't get rich by
simply saving money, pinching pennies by denying
yourself your daily latte, for example, and depending on
compound interest to make your money.

Unless, of course, you can wait 40 years to get rich. I
don't know that I'll be around in 40 years...especially
if I have to drink crappy coffee the whole time. I like
my lattes."

I italicized that part about drinking crappy coffee the whole time because face it, it's great.

Remember the Bible story about how Jesus fed the five thousand with two fishes and five loaves of bread?

The disciples went around picking up crumbs and dropped bits of the food, and from that materialized the abundance to feed five thousand hungry followers of Jesus.

The point of that story was that it was a miracle. It was something that could never have happened in a million years without supernatural help. It was not a matter of a surprising amount of food being gleaned from meticulous economizing. It was not a lesson on how ordinary human beings can meet a great need just by diligently gathering the crumbs of their resources. It was a MIRACLE.

Yet too often people proceed as though this story was not a miraculous account of the impossible, but a Biblical lesson on finance.

Too many people spend too much time with their noses in the grass gathering crumbs and expecting all their needs to be met by it.

Economizing does have its place of course, and resourcefulness itself can be a valuable resource.

But the most valuable resources given us are our time and our talent, and time spent gathering crumbs after a point is time wasted. And time wasted in that way is time in which rich talent doesn't get used.

Crumb-gathering in moderation is a respectable supplement to money earned by using your ability. But it is no replacement for it.

The next time you set yourself to a crumb-gathering, penny-pinching task, note the time it takes, and try to estimate how much money it is saving or earning. Is it anywhere near the minimum wage earned by a hired worker where you live? Is there something else you could do with those minutes, something with lasting value that may or may not have anything to do with money?

Everything in life is an investment. Time is valuable. A mean pittance gained from excessive economizing is a crappy return on the investment of valuable time.

I leave you with the moral of the Parable of the Crappy Coffee.

"....the way to get rich sooner
rather than later is to earn much more than you spend.
Simple, right? Make more so you can save more (and
spend some, too). Enjoy life while you're at it.
There's no reason to deny yourself the insignificant but
thoroughly enjoyable things in life...once you can
afford them.

If you want to keep drinking your latte, just make sure
you make an extra $4 a day."


© 2009

Excerpts taken from the introduction to the 10/06/05 issue of the Golden Thread Newsletter, written by David Morgan, an AWAI Freelance Copywriter.