What follows is the first of a series of excerpts from my new book Super Rich: A Guide to Having it All, which will be released on January 4th. To read excerpt 3, click here.
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EXCERPT 4: The Work That Prays
While it’s generally accepted that spiritual practices like yoga, meditation, and prayer can help speed up our evolution, too often we forgot about another tool, one that we already employ every day, which is equally effective at accelerating our journey toward enlightenment:
Hard work.
On the surface, simply doing your job to the best of your ability might seem like it has very little to do with the practices I just mentioned. The truth, however, is that when you put your head down and work your hardest at any task, it’s actually a very powerful form of moving prayer.
A teacher who is totally committed to educating the children in her classroom, a janitor who keeps his building looking immaculate, or a baker who makes perfect loaf after perfect loaf are all praying just as hard through their efforts as the yogi who spends his days chanting God’s name.
Yet while almost everyone performs some sort of work each day, most people are not conscious of this connection between their work and their proximity to God. This is because they are too often preoccupied with the results of their work. Their focus is on how much money their work generates rather than the actual work itself. They fail to realize that when you view your work with both eyes only on the result, that work will never prove truly rewarding, either financially or spiritually. Never lose sight of the fact that the actual work that you do in life—the moment in which a teacher is engaged in drawing up a lesson plan, the janitor is moping the floors, or the baker is making his bread—is the source from which true happiness will stem.
