What’s Your Return on Energy?
We guard our money and ask what the return will be, then hand our energy to anyone who asks, even though every unit you give away is one denied to your family, your work and the things you love.
Dandapani uses a workshop exercise about writing a 25,000 euro check to show how carefully people protect finite money and how carelessly they give away finite energy. He asks people to demand a return on energy before giving it, and closes with his guru's teaching that all suffering and happiness in your life is your own creation.
What this talk covers
- When he asks a room of a hundred entrepreneurs to write him a check for 25,000 euros, nobody raises a hand, because they want to know the plan and their return on investment.
- We are that protective of our finite money, but we give our energy away without asking a single question.
- The question to ask is what your return on energy is, and what the business plan for your energy actually is.
- Whatever energy you give one person is energy you have denied someone or something else, including your family and your business, and if he took 25,000 euros of yours and burned it in front of you, you would be furious, so wasted energy should bother you the same way.
- His guru put 100 percent of the responsibility back on him, that all suffering and happiness in his life is his own creation, and taking that ownership is what makes change possible.
When I give you my energy, I have denied someone or something else my energy in my life.Dandapani
Questions
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It is asking of your energy what you would automatically ask of your money. Before you give someone your energy, Dandapani wants to know what they will do with it and what the return will be, because that energy came out of a finite supply.
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Because we can see money is finite. Nobody hands over 25,000 euros without a proposal, yet people give their energy away all day without asking a single question about how it will be spent.
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His guru put 100 percent of the responsibility on him: all suffering and happiness in his life is his own creation. He rejects saying the universe will guide you, and says only full ownership lets you start making changes.
Transcript
662 words · 3:22
You don't have infinite amount of energy. Here's another example. You know, I speak to entrepreneurs all the time and I used this example. I'm in a workshop with them and I say to them, I'm creating a startup.
If everybody in this room, all a hundred of you wrote me a check for 25,000 euros each. I would have enough money to get my startup going. How many of you would write me a check for 25,000 euros? Nobody puts their hand up.
And I say, why not? And they go like, well, I don't know what you're using your money for. My money for. What's my return on investment?
What's your project? Do you have a plan? Do you have a proposal? So we are so protective of our finite amount of money that we have.
We don't have infinite amount of money. I asked you for 25,000 Euro and you're like, oh, I'm going to give you my money. But our energy, we're not protected. We just give our energy away.
We don't ask questions. What are you going to do with it? How are you going to spend it? What's my ROE, my return on energy?
Nothing. What's your business plan for my energy? Because if you spend gaff me X amount of your energy, that's the same X amount you could have given your family.
You could have given your business to people and things you love. So if you gave it to me and I just wasted, wouldn't you be upset? Imagine you gave me 25,000 euros and I took up my lighter and I just bent it in front of you.
You'd be really upset. You'd be pissed at me. Because at money you could have put somewhere else to do some other thing. Energy is no different.
I look at energy the same way I look at money. You want my energy? I want to know what you're going to do with it. Because I am trading my energy with you.
When I give you my energy, I have denied someone or something else my energy in my life. My daughter, my wife, my business. You tell me, give me a reason. Instead of giving my energy to them, I should give it to you.
Convince me you deserve it. And then I'll give it to you. Okay, but which means that we have to come out of the victim mode, that we really accept that we can decide where we want to invest our energy.
Because some people always tend to say like, because I have to do this, I have to meet this person, I'm attached to this and this and this. So actually, first step is to realize that we are in charge, right, to make these choices. When I lived with my guru in the monastery, he put 100% of responsibility back on me.
He said, all suffering and happiness in my life is a result of my own creation. Take responsibility. And nowadays you hear spiritual people say like, oh, the universe will guide me and the universe will do this and bullshit.
Take responsibility for your life. Own up, own all the shortcomings in your life, own all the positive things in your life. Take responsibility. And as soon as you take 100% ownership, you can start to make changes.
And as soon as you say this victim wrote it like live, you don't understand, it's more complicated. It's this, it's that. Yeah, of course it is.
That's why you never make progress. You have to own it. I look at myself and I go like, yeah, Donta Pani has a lot of problems and also a lot of good things.
It's okay. I can own all of it and I can start to work on those things and make changes slow. But I don't blame anybody for all my shortcomings, all my negativity. I own it 100%.