Most of what you’re taught in business is how to drive “top line” growth.
How to make more sales. How to create more revenue.
Less talked about, but probably more important, is your take-home pay.
How much is left in your pocket after your expenses are paid? That is your “bottom line”, as most of us know.
(Who cares if you made a million dollars if you had to pay out $999,999 in expenses, right?)
And you know what matters — in my opinion — even more than the bottom line?
It’s what I’m calling the bottom-bottom line. (Sorry, I couldn’t think of anything more elegant to call it, but it just came out of me in conversation with friends.)
That’s what’s left with you when it’s ALL said and done. What you get to “take home” at the end of the day — but this time, we’re talking about your spiritual home.
(Because none of us is making it out of this world alive. None of us is going to be able to take a single penny with us.)
Your bottom-bottom line is the state of your wellness/intactness as a soul.
Why do we all want more money? So that we can live better, have more freedom, options and safety, be able to enjoy ourselves more, and help others, right?
And the reason we want those things in the first place is because we believing those things will make us well.
Focusing singularly on making more money, and determining whether your business is a success or failure based on “top line” — or even “bottom line” —
… is like pouring all our energy into the middle man instead of the goal. The tool, rather than the project.
Human wellness existed long before the system of money was invented.
And it still exists in spades in parts of the world that are severely monetarily deprived. I would argue, it exists more in many of those places because people there have been less corrupted by individualistic capitalism.
They still maintain a connection to their ancestral spirituality, a coherent sense of their orientation and belonging in the visible-invisible material-spiritual web of life.
(To be sure, I don’t mean to romanticize or gloss over the real struggles faced by impoverished people across the world. There is nothing noble or romantic about poverty in itself; but I do observe with immense humility and admiration how so many of these people manage to lead lives that are way richer in joy, connection and spiritual wholeness than most rich Westerners can even imagine — in spite of it all.)
Let me be very clear. I’m not saying that money doesn’t matter. I’m not naive or delusional.
Money is a vital tool in the “consensus reality” world (of 2025, anyway) with which lives can be saved and human potential expressed.
The simple fact is that money can stitch wounds, feed children and provide paper and paintbrushes for the artist. All these things matter.
But in order for us to create a new, better world that serves the deep health of all living beings (as opposed to more wealth in the hands of the top 0.1%), we have articulate and anchor to a different paradigm than the one we’ve been handed by default.
And we have to do it on purpose, again and again and again.
And that paradigm is one that prioritizes the bottom-bottom line.
Determining business success NOT by how much money you’re bringing in, but by what the journey is doing to/for our souls, our sense of connectedness to each other and all that is alive and true in this Universe.
I have some questions for you.
What is it like when you are well?
How do you know when you feel that sense of deep wholeness and connectedness, regardless of what’s going on in life?
(I have had the experience of being on the floor sobbing, devastated from a personal loss, unsure of myself and grieving — and still feeling more WHOLE and INTACT than ever before. Have you ever had a similar experience?)
How do you recognize those moments of deep wholeness/wellness/connectedness? What do they feel like?