The New Currency?

Money plays a primary role at work. Whether in dram, dollars, yen or euros, cash is the unit in which profits are measured, and how employees are compensated.

It’s also significant in our career counseling practice. We persistently encourage individual clients to link their achievements to the bottom line of the organizations where they work. This way they fortify their resumes, or LinkedIn profiles, or their vocabulary when describing themselves in an interview.

This may change.

Star of the TV show Roseanne’s Nuts, Roseanne Barr is prompting us to reconsider our understanding of money as currency. Having initially endeared herself to us in this scene from Roseanne

(Roseanne and Dan [John Goodman] are in the kitchen, with a man lying motionless on the floor. Roseanne checks his pulse.)

Roseanne:  He’s dead.

Dan:  Are you sure? Check again.

Roseanne:  I can count to zero!

–we were enamored again, in a recent interview with the Village Voice‘s Michael Musto, wherein Barr pontificated on the economics of living. She says:

It keeps you smart to remember that things don’t come from money, they come from seeds.

It’s interesting to think about, no? At an essential level, so much of what sustains our daily life comes not from money, but first from seeds:  fruit, vegetables, wood, medicine, grains, to name a few.  Seeds are so crucial to life on earth that the Svalbard Global Seed Vault has been created near the North Pole. It’s a bank with 2.25 billion assets under management. Should any doomsday scenarios hit, nations may be able to make withdrawals — of seeds, not cash. Seeds may indeed be the new currency; we can’t eat cash!

So as we examine the essence of what’s within us in order to reveal and engage our whole selves at work, perhaps it’s time we start looking at what’s essential around us, too.

How connected to seeds is your work?

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