Humanity needs a new yardstick to measure achievement—today, we quantify it with money and material gain, the worst possible way to evaluate true success in life.
Money serves as an inadequate way to measure life’s achievements. How can a solely materialistic tool pass judgment and render a verdict on our life’s attainments?
We need to replace money as a measure of success with a more spiritual or humane one. However, that would necessarily involve a revolution in our current system of values in fighting the cancer of materialism that has eaten into every fabric of our lives and endangered the future of humankind and the planet.
One of the most significant driving forces globally is and has traditionally been the desire for money. So many wars have been fought for it, and millions of lives have been lost for it. No aspect of modern life seems immune from its spell.
Accordingly, we must look for a better place to invest our God-given gift of life with all its talents and abilities. This gift of life—meant to be spent on acquiring spiritual qualities, knowledge, and the sciences and arts—does not focus on transitory achievements and material goods. Life serves a higher cause than money.
So the time has come to try to create and define a new and comprehensive yardstick that covers all areas of our lives, reflecting our spiritual and human achievements alongside the material ones. This new yardstick will help us understand and work on all aspects of our lives—not just material prosperity. Then we can rationally decide the importance of money or lack of money in our lives and to what extent we have to invest our energies in it.
The Baha’i teachings say there is nothing wrong with money as a tool as long as we know its use and its danger to our life goals. It can be given value for measurement, then, as long as it serves its purpose:
“Wealth is praiseworthy in the highest degree, if it is acquired by an individual’s own efforts and the grace of God, in commerce, agriculture, art and industry, and if it be expended for philanthropic purposes. Above all, if a judicious and resourceful individual should initiate measures which would universally enrich the masses of the people, there could be no undertaking greater than this, and it would rank in the sight of God as the supreme achievement, for such a benefactor would supply the needs and insure the comfort and well-being of a great multitude. Wealth is most commendable, provided the entire population is wealthy.” – Abdu’l-Baha
If we move our measurement of achievement away from money, what should our yardstick measure? We might want to change our focus to spiritual qualities or virtues such as trustworthiness, truthfulness, tolerance, generosity, compassion, love, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , t, and unity among others.
Suppose we adopted trustworthiness and truthfulness as moral measuring tools to reflect more on our spiritual progress than money. In that case, that new yardstick could become a source of encouragement for many people who think they have failed in life. This would create a new way of getting rich in a real sense and leaving the rat race of material acquisition—a step in the right direction that would lead towards transformation into a new race of more spiritual human beings.
Badi Shams is a Baha’i and a mystic at heart. His field of interest is economics; he has published "Economics of the Future" and "Economics of the Future Begins Today" and recently written the books "Random Thoughts of a Mystic Economist" and "Towards a New Spiritual Economic System." You can find Badi's website at called "Baha'i Inspired Economics" He is retired from the education system.
