If You Were Told “Money Does Not Grow on Trees” When You Were a Kid, You Were Brainwashed Into Living in Scarcity

Money, like corn, can be cultivated

When I was a kid I was obsessed with hot dog trees.

So besotted was I with the idea of trees festooned with sausages that I made my mother read the Raggedy Ann and Andy books out loud to me over and over. I even had dolls of the characters — they had red yarn hair, triangle noses, and black button eyes. When I had kids of my own I bought the book and promptly nominated my mom for sainthood, because it was nauseatingly saccharine.

Money trees however, were another story.

“Money doesn’t grow on trees” is a common childhood phrase, trotted out by well-meaning adults to get their kids to stop pestering them for things. It’s a phrase we’ve heard so often we don’t think twice about its underlying message: money is scarce, finite, non-generative and mysterious.

If we believe we can’t “grow” money, we won’t.

We’ll keep believing that there’s only so much money to go around, and it’s hard to get. That if you get some, there’s less for me, because money doesn’t grow, it just gets shuffled around. That money can’t be cultivated, stewarded, or coaxed into producing offspring.

That is false, but this thought cripples us with fear and helplessness.

Yet we understand how corn grows, even if we don’t own a corn field. Money is the same. We know more than we think, and we can build our wealth by investing in hard assets like real estate, stocks or a business, and in intangible assets, like our brains.

Money trees are far more real than hot dog trees.

Photo credit: “Money tree” by Berries.com is marked with CC BY 2.0.