I am the first prominent Jew to give public money advice. My book is The Seven Laws of Money. What is the connection? (The original edition is the only unabridged version)
After eight years of community organizing including creating a graduate student organization at the U. of California Berkeley, a friend, Salli Rasberry, asked for advice on raising money for her first hippie homeschooling organization. That is the origin of the book The Seven Laws of Money.
The book came from a spontaneous conversation in my living room in 1970. The original transcript was a 12-page typed version that my secretary reprinted in a few dozen copies.
One day, months later, I saw her putting ten copies in a big envelope which she took from a large box of a few hundred copies. I knew at that moment to expect a phone call from a major publisher. The first call was Penguin, the second was Knopf and the third was Random House.
After writing the book, with Rasberry, I formed a publishing company and contracted Random House to do the distribution. The first edition sold 75,000 copies. From there on, many editions were published, most were abridged, including a few classic editions from Shambhala Press. Every hippie I met, from 1974 on beamed with joy to tell me that they had a copy.
The influence of the book is hard to measure. If you have ever heard the phrase ‘Do what you love and the money will come,’ ‘ Live your passion,’ ‘Your work should be your passion,’ or any variation of this. It comes from the 1st Law of Money: Do it! Money will come when you are doing the right thing.
Not only has the insight by me become a mantra-meme for the entire human world, but you won’t find anything close to it before 1974. Also note the global ad version from Nike: “Do it.”
Moreover, the idea of seven laws seems to also have become a mantra-meme. The number of book titles that are a variation of this are in the thousands. Only one earlier book title exists (from 1906 about rabbits.) The original idea of seven laws came from Charles Roll, the poet in the book calling himself Jug and Candle who claimed he knew of the model from Chinese literature.
My original views on money were widely accepted by the world of hippies. The hippies were a large multi-million person revolutionary group whose ideas were spread to every corner of the planet.
The Jewish connection is discussed in the previous blog. Being a Jew and finding a large community (hippies) with similar values was the synthesis that generated my unique money advice.