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One of the limiting beliefs that affects a lot of people is the belief or world-view that wealth is a zero-sum game. What does this mean? The myth that wealth is a zero-sum game is based on the idea that somehow the amount of wealth in the world is limited. For example, if I have $10, and you charge me $10 for something I am now poorer by $10 and you are now richer by $10.

In mathematical terms this would be expressed as $10 - $10 = $0 for me, and $0 + $10 = $10 for you. In financial accounting this is also expressed in balance sheets which always have to add up to zero.

This kind of thinking is exactly what keeps people broke and poor their entire lives. Why? Because most of us have been raised to be decent people who just want their “fair share” of the goodies in life and we don’t want to be “greedy rich people”. If we are infected with this kind of limited thinking, when opportunities to build wealth present themselves we subconsciously sabotage ourselves because deep down we don’t want to be taking more than our “fair share”.

The guilt associated with taking money from someone else who might need it more than we do is what keeps most of us just above the poverty line which we can easily justify in our minds. For some people, if they were to drive a $100,000 BMW down the street and see a mom in a broken down station wagon with her four kids, the guilt of driving around in luxury while someone else drives a broken down car would be too much for us. All of these feelings of guilt are rooted in the false theory that wealth is a zero-sum game.

Let’s explore this in a bit more detail. Let’s say we have two people, Adam and Bob. Adam, a professional dog trainer with 20 years of experience, writes an eBook on dog training which he offers for sale to Bob for $10. Bob is in need of such an eBook because his dog is misbehaving and tearing up the house, so Bob purchases the eBook from Adam for $10. In the zero-sum game theory, it would be stated that Adam now has $10 which used to belong to Bob therefore Adam is now richer than Bob by $10. If Adam went around and sold millions of copies of his eBook to people, he would accumulate tens of millions of dollars, by “siphoning” that money from millions of people. By doing this, Adam would acquire more than his “fair share” of money and would become an “evil rich person”. This is what the zero-sum theory wants us to believe.

Let’s see what is really happening here though. When Adam offers the eBook to Bob at a price of $10, Bob has full decision making power to either purchase the eBook or not, right? He thinks about the problems his dog is creating around the house and decides that he will pay $10 to solve this problem, so he purchases the eBook from Adam. When Adam receives the $10 from Bob, Bob also receives the eBook from Adam. An equal exchange of value has taken place and NO VALUE was lost. Meaning, even though Bob now has $10 less in his bank account, he also has an eBook that’s worth at least $10 to him in his possession and the training tips in the eBook could actually prove to be worth a lot more than $10 to him.

Let’s assume for a minute that the eBook proves to be of amazing quality and Bob uses the training tips to properly train his dog and prevents his dog from tearing up the furniture in the house. The eBook proves to be worth hundreds of dollars to Bob even though he only paid Adam $10 for it. So, during the transaction process of one person helping another, hundreds of dollars of “new wealth” have been created even if that “new wealth” is not yet represented in dollars and cents.

To Adam, it doesn’t cost anything extra to produce multiple copies of his eBook so he is perfectly happy only taking $10 from Bob, even though he knows that the eBook will bring hundreds of dollars more in “use value” than Bob paid for.

So, in this quick example we can clearly see that when people participate in consumer transactions, wealth can actually be expanded as one person shares something with the other. Let’s follow this a little bit further. Adam can then take his $10 and purchase an eBook from Sally who writes about house decorating, and Sally takes her $10 and purchases an eBook from Bob on photography. The $10 that Bob started with has wound up back in his pocket, but all three of them now have hundreds of dollars worth of extra value in their lives by sharing the information they each learned from each-other. Bob now knows how to train his dog, Adam now knows how to decorate his house and Sally is now an expert in photography. More wealth has been created.

I know this is a simplistic view of the process, but I’m trying to keep things simple to illustrate my point. The reason that a lot of people get stuck in zero-sum wealth limited thinking is that they ignore all types of value in the world except for cash. In the above example, a financial accountant would simply report that Bob has his $10 back and Adam and Sally are back at $0, therefore no exchange of value has happened. This is very far from the truth, however because value has exchanged hands and due to the sharing process, value has expanded.

The wisdom that was sitting in Adam’s head has now been copied/transferred to Bob’s head and learning from Adam’s experience has helped Bob to train his dog properly. Even if you were to ignore all types of value out there except cash, the zero-sum theory still doesn’t hold up because governments print new money all the time. Now you might say that when a government prints more money, it devalues the currency compared to another currency so no new value is created, but that’s not true either. What if all the governments simultaneously doubled the amount of cash they printed? The exchange rates between all the currencies would stay the same, but there would be more money out there.

At the end of the day, if you choose to believe that wealth is a zero-sum game, there is nothing I can do to logically convince you that it isn’t, but since neither theory can really truly be proven right or wrong, I choose to believe in the more empowering belief which is to believe that wealth is NOT a zero-sum game, and that by building wealth we are actually increasing the amount of wealth in the world, not taking away from it.

To really get into building wealth and to start making money by doing what you love, I strongly suggest you dig deep inside to see if perhaps you’re holding onto this limiting zero-sum belief without even realizing it. We all grew up with phrases like “your fair share” and “there’s only so much to go around” being thrown around. Explore your limiting beliefs and see if that one might be lurking beneath the surface somewhere. If it is, squash it or you’ll be limiting yourself to living a timid life, reluctant to pursue your greatest dreams in fear and guilt that you might somehow end up with more than your “fair share” of the pie.

“Your wealth is addition for you, but subtraction for no one.” - Dan Kennedy