You cannot hate power and empower

You cannot hate power and empower. You cannot hate profit and end poverty. 

I’m sitting here staring at those statements wondering how it can be so clear to me and how on Earth I’m going to unpack why I'm writing that today. The last trip I took to Sierra Leone calls me forward across unknown and perilous seas into the deep waters of our western, collective psyche in an attempt to craft, with my amateur hands, words that invite us to a better world.

I spent a week with our business there, Water4Ever,  and dove into their work, company culture, business model, and customer satisfaction. The technology and quality is spectacular there, with 200,000 ongoing clients, the look/feel/taste of our NUMA franchise approach is being carried out with excellence. But I was there to find out what the culture of a company moving as fast as theirs felt like, and to see beyond the numbers on weekly pay sheets to what 200 jobs look like at the individual, family, and community levels. What’s $12 a day translate for a Numa Vendor in Waterloo in terms of the roof over their heads, school for their children, and the nuances of hopeful expectations of the future?

So I spent two hours talking to and interviewing the staff, from trench diggers to managers in an open forum, I interviewed the 8 key managers of departments, I talked to 12 NUMA vendors who sell water each day and I spent the night in the home and with the family of a technician who started as a well driller with the company 8 years ago. 

I found people empowered and employed, not “powerless” and “poor.”

We have this strange belief that’s developed in the West: a cultural disdain towards wealth and power while simultaneously having the most wealth and power. We have more individual wealth, information, opportunity and liberty than could have ever been fathomed by our grandparents in their youth, by any individual in human history, yet we disdain it all. 

I think we can all agree that it is ludicrous to try to solve the problem of poverty, a lack of wealth and power, from a perspective that having wealth and power is a vice. 

And as a reminder, charity comes from profit, and profit is a tool for virtue.

We despise wealth because we don’t understand where it comes from or how to use it and therefore experience little virtue through it. 

We only know how to spend it. Therefore we have high incomes but little wealth. 

Research has consistently shown that people's perception of their own wellbeing and happiness depends much more on their estimates of wealth relative to other people than on absolute wealth. 

We start doing this as kids, basing our happiness on the other neighborhood kids’ toys rather than on our own. We love our blue bike, it’s amazing. Until Tommy gets an orange one with racing stripes. Then when we don’t get a new one, we decide it’s not fair. Tommy must be spoiled and his dad “rich” and on and on we tell ourselves stories to make ourselves unhappy rather than enjoying our formerly perceived “beautiful” blue bike, contemplating whether we really even want an orange one, and then making and acting upon a plan to get what we thoughtfully decide we want. The bikes work the same, you can ride both of them, but there's a different paint job, and an issue of perception and situation becomes mistaken for one of justice. 

So now as adults we turn to the government, our idealized daddy, who will make sure everything is finally fair. Maybe he can stop Tommy from getting a new bicycle, even if it costs me all my allowance to do so…

There’s no holding someone underwater without staying under yourself. You can’t hold others back without holding yourself back too. We must release and blossom rather than restrict. 

People in developing contexts, however, see the virtue of wealth and are constantly thinking of how to create it. The scarcity of resources creates clarity around action when money is available. Money is leveraged to create more money and when possible, accumulate income into the physical stock we call wealth. 

A person living in a village may not have $200 in a bank, but they likely have a farm they’ve informally “staked” that generates $1000 annually, several goats worth $20, chickens worth $5 each, a pig worth $50 and maybe even a cow worth $400. They might have family property in “town” with one bedroom they lease for $25 a month, a motorcycle their nephew drives as a taxi to generate $50 a month, and their own labor they use for hire to generate income seasonally. 

They buy and sell commodities and foods in local markets as cash is available and look for an opportunity to turn $1 into $2, literally at that economic level.  

They are focused on feeding their family efficiently. Covering school fees effectively. And having enough to give back to their community in times of need and honor their dead with gratitude in times of funeral and festival. 

They don’t have baggage with money. The lack of wealth shows its virtue as its transformed into productive, practical, and life giving prosperity. 

Our ignorance of its abundance is what makes it a vice. 

We hoard rather than transform so it goes to waste. We smell it rotting as we use it foolishly and loathe wealth rather than our foolishness.

Ask someone in poverty what they want, they’ll answer with money. Why? Because wealth used properly equals time, opportunity, and liberty. With money, you can make choices around your health, your kids' education, your future. Income equals options and options are used to create potential income. It’s a virtuous cycle. 

And as we run towards anti-capitalistic paradigms, remember that more people have been lifted out of poverty in the last 15 years through wealth-creating-approaches than in the entire history of humanity.

You can’t empower if you don’t see the virtuous potential of your own power. You can’t end poverty if you don’t understand prosperity. Knowledge requires experience so get started—Don’t love money but use money productively and catalytically for truly positive change for your life and the lives of others—Don’t love power but use power to create, to EMpower, to embolden, energize, and excite life.

Pictured, Anita, a butt-kicking sales and marketing manager in Water4’s business in Ghana, 4Ward Development. She has led her team to increase sales 60% in an area by listening to clients, selling solutions to their problems via safe water.