Is Money Losing Its Currency?

The cliche’ “Money isn’t everything” has never held as much truth as it does now.

You see, it used to be that we bartered and traded goods and services for other goods and services. Badly put, I’ll give you ten chickens if you build part of my house.

But when this great invention – money – arrived in the world, it became a neutral mediator, a medium for facilitated trade.

Money allowed us to assign specific values to items and services we wanted to either buy or sell. Hence, this shirt is eight hundred pesos. An iPhone is a few hundred dollars. I will work my ass off for you for X amount per month.

But it is no longer that simple. The assignment of value on purely monetary terms is rapidly eroding. The ability of money to be solely the medium of exchange — to live up to its definition as currency — is fading.

Now don’t get me wrong. I don’t think cold hard cash is on its way out. I don’t think it ever will be. But i really believe that an intangible layer is coalescing on top of it. A layer wherein people are assigning value on top of the price tag.

After all, the anecdotal truth is that people are trading goods and services on the basis of more than just money.

Imagine the wide expanse of programmers and resources at Microsoft, spending more than $1b to develop Windows 7.

Then think of the small army of programmers around the world working for free on Linux. For these devoted troops, it’s obviously not about the money.

Think of a celebrity actor who would normally charge millions for a film, but will do it for a pittance if he loves and believes in the movie.

Now this is great news for innovators and entrepreneurs : you can harness resources, goods, and services even if you don’t have cash.

Closer to home — Hapinoy, Rags2Riches, Inovent, and WhyNot?Forum have been able to gain so much momentum with relatively little resources. But all of them were still able to mobilize a lot.

Again, i’m not saying that money was never part of the equation — after all, cash is still the lifeblood of any enterprise.

But it’s not enough to just have a healthy cashflow. Every business nowadays must have a soul.

Call it goodwill. Label it rallying people behind a cause. Or building a movement.

But it’s a clear recognition that people are beginning to devote themselves more and more to things that go beyond the moolah.

You can pay somebody to do a job ahd he will perform it, mechanically. Or you can get somebody on board as a believer, married to a vision, working day in and out incessantly for the dream.

Welcome to a world where the new currency is of values and ideals