Business Transformation
There is a beast inside. It awaits a human soul to tame it.
Start with meditation and prayer, because that beast inside needs to experience something beyond itself.
But in prayer and meditation you have not yet met that beast on its own ground.
So next, eat your breakfast like a human being is meant to eat—a step higher than the food you consume, raising it up rather than letting it pull you down.
Then, yes, you have met your human beast on its own ground. But not on its own terms. You are still fighting against its desire to be pulled down into its food.
So then go out into the world and provide goods and services of value, and do that with integrity. At this point, the beast says, “You’re on my territory now, and on my terms, Mr. Soul. I’m the one who knows this game.”
Now you can no longer fight against the human beast. You have to work from within it, with all the talents and skills it has. Because if you don’t, you won’t be providing the value for which others are paying. And that is not integrity.
That is why the very first question asked of the soul when it returns from its mission in this world is not “Did you pray?” but “Did you do business with integrity?”
For that is when you truly made your dent in this vicious world.
Padah B’Shalom 5739.
Financial Planning
Here is how to make an honest living, with confidence and minimal worry:
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Determine how much you need to provide for your family’s needs.
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Get into a business that can make that sum of money.
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Put your best foot forward and do whatever needs to be done.
And stop there. Invest yourself, but don’t enslave yourself. Do your job, but don't become your job. No anxiety, no fretting, no sleepless nights. More will get you less.
That’s a job: You put out a bucket just the right size in the rain and trust that heaven will fill it to the brim.
Derech Mitzvosecha, Tiglachat Metzora; Hayom Yom, 16 Adar II and 5 Tammuz.
Worldly Occupation
Why must we have jobs? Why can’t our bread fall from heaven?
It does. Everything you earn is manna from heaven. But you can't eat manna direct from heaven.
Rather, that manna has to be converted, step by difficult step, from its heavenly state into an earthly form.
It's final, most difficult step, to become a part of this physical world. And for that, you need a normal job in this physical world.
Indeed, the job doesn’t create anything. It just provides packaging and delivery.
To actually create the income, you need to work things out with heaven.
Derech Mitzvosecha, Tiglachat Metzora.
Plumbing
Making a living is all about plumbing. You’ve got a reservoir up there, a water tank down here, and you need some way to connect the two.
The reservoir of life up there can’t be changed or moved. As for the water tank down here, that is your career, and it receives only what is decided from Above.
But you also have a second career—your principal career—and that is to bring more good into this world.
In that career, you are a plumber. You can open faucets, widen pipelines, drain all you can from an Infinite Source. It will overflow into the water tanks of your material career. It might even increase their volume.
The flow of life is in your hands.
Likkutei Sichot, vol. 6, p. 193.
Free Buckets
Sometimes, not only the rain, but your buckets as well, are handed to you from above.
Sometimes it’s taken out of your hands to determine where you should go, what you should do and how it should be done. Sometimes you are Joseph, captured and tied to a destiny too great for you to fathom.
Sometimes you need to be quiet and just do what needs to be done. Do the best with whatever you’re given—honestly and earnestly. And put your confidence in your real Employer.
Likutei Sichot volume 18, page 293 ff; Derech Mitzvosecha, Taglachat Mtzora.
In His Presence
What is it that brought thinking men and women to abandon the Master for the servant?
To serve a single star rather than He who sprinkles out galaxies as dust?
To play with spiritual forces and energies rather than connect to the Source of Life?
What brings us even today to chase the ephemeral rather than connect to the One who alone is real and true?
It is because in the worship of these we can delude ourselves that we too are something; if not a power, at least an entity to be reckoned with.
Whereas, in the presence of the Infinite, we are but a flash absorbed within absolute light.
This is the inheritance we have from Abraham, our father: The readiness to surrender our claim to absolute existence so that we may experience our Creator’s embrace.
Maamar Bayom Ashtei Asar, 5731.
Earned Living
All that can be cherished from this world,
All that makes life worth living,
Is that which you have mined from its bowels through your own toil,
Fashioned from its clay by your own craft,
Fired in the kiln of your own heart.
That for which you bruised your hands and wearied your limbs,
For which you beat back the beast inside you,
For which you defied a mocking world.
Oh, how precious, how resplendent a feast,
a life forged by the hands of its own master!
Two Channels
There are two channels on life’s TV. On one plays a fantasy; the other is real life.
The fantasy is a world that imagines itself to be its own truth, where nothing is of intrinsic value and everything functions by the rules of chance and necessity.
In this world, you are nothing more than another background or shadow, an extra in a plotless movie, a disposable prop for a five-second set.
In this world, life may be prosperous. Or disastrous. Whatever the scene demands, so you shall be given. Until it is time for the next scene to begin.
The real life is a world in which you stand face to face before the Director of this grand drama. But your story is not this drama. It is this intimate relationship of yours with the Director.
All things may change—the props, the backgrounds, the actors, even the play itself—but this is forever. It is truth.
Simple Advice
Ask advice from those with experience. They will provide you freely that which they acquired with great expense.
The Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, in a letter.
Wall Street Idols
The ancients looked up at the heavens and gazed at the stars in their constellations. They honored them as stewards of divine energy and life, as the embodiment of all forces of nature and the origin of human passions.
They were wise, but they were fools—they abandoned the Master for the servant. For in truth there is only One and all else is but a tool in His hand.
Modern man looks up to the headlines of the finance page and sees there all the forces that will make or break his career, his retirement plans, his success as a human being.
He too is a fool, for in truth there is only One and all else is but a tool in His hand.
Torat Menachem 5742, vol. 1, pg. 339. Maamar Bayom Ashtei Asar.
Trust Dividends
Stop worrying about business. Trust in G-d.
The more you trust, the more He provides.
-appended by the Rebbe's hand to a letter to a businessperson.
Wealth
Wealth is heaven for one person and hell for
another.
-Baal Shem Tov
It is heaven when you use it to help others.
It is hell when you spend it only on yourself.
-The Alter Rebbe
Keter Shem Tov, Hosafot, 228
Bonding With Confidence
From a letter to one who had fallen into extreme debt, could find no way out, and had become depressed (paraphrased for clarity):
When spirits are down, your confidence in G‑d is weakened. That’s not good, because everything depends upon that spirit of confidence.
Your confidence when things get rough is the measure of how tightly you have tied your material world in with your Creator.
Tighten that rope, ramp your confidence in G‑d up to its fullest, and you will not lack anything—because your world will be synchronized with a higher world where nothing could possibly be lacking.
How do you tighten it? Only by working on yourself when challenges such as these come along.
Real confidence means that even when all natural means have been exhausted, you are perfectly confident, beyond any doubt, that everything is going to be 100% good, visibly and obvious to all—a good livelihood, good health, everything. For G‑d, the natural order poses no obstacle.
As soon as you will raise yourself just a little higher than the earth—as soon as you will get yourself to be a believing Jew, absolutely confident that you have no master over you other than G‑d—then you will be able to make His reality your reality as well.
For you, here in this world, nothing within the natural order will be able to affect you in any way other than for the good.
