The Secret of the Gift Card

Somebody gives you a gift card: one you can use anywhere. So you go to a store and buy a DVD for $12, and when you ask at the register how much money’s left on the card, there’s a problem.

The card’s balance doesn’t show up.

So you go back to the person who gave you the card: “How much money’s on this card?”

“Forty dollars,” the person says.

“Oh,” you say, figuring that with $28 left, you’ve got enough for, like, a nice shirt, and that’s it. “You know what?” you say, “I’m gonna stretch this card out and use it as a coffee card. That’s like, 10 coffees, depending on what I get.”

“Sounds good,” the gift giver says.

So you use the gift card to buy coffee, and because the balance still doesn’t show up at the register, you have to keep mental track of how many more coffees you can buy. At a certain point, you figure you’ve got 37 cents left on the card. You put the card in your wallet and forget about it.

Months later, it occurs to you that maybe you could put money on the card, to keep using it as your coffee card. So you call the number on the back of the card and speak to a customer service rep, telling her you’d like to add $30 to the card.

“Why would you want to do that?” the rep asks. “This gift card has a balance of one million dollars.”

What? Yes, she tells you: one million dollars. Oh, and 37 cents. The starting card balance was $1,000,0040.

There is no mistake.

You sit a while, letting your heartbeat resume its normal rate, then go back to the person who gave you the card.

“Um…you told me there was forty dollars on this card. You lied to me.”

The gift giver says: “I didn’t lie. There was forty dollars on the card … plus a million dollars.”

“Why didn’t you tell me that!!”

The gift card represents all your time, energy, gifts, skills, and passion. The gift card is all the intellectual and spiritual capital you need in order to achieve what you want to achieve, to have the kinds of relationships you want to have, and to make a difference in your own life and other people’s lives.

The amount on the card is limited (like life itself), but you could invest that million and make another million, and another, and another.

And somebody told you that the card had only $40 on it.

Why?

This can be a hard nut to crack, especially if the gift card giver says they care about you, even love you: a teacher, a friend, a boss, or one of your parents.

Maybe the gift card giver didn’t want you to lose the money. A sure way never to lose money is never to spend it. So instead of doing something with the money, you just dream of all the things you could do. You even learn to enjoy feeling sorry for yourself, thinking about all you might have done.

Maybe the gift card giver thought that if you knew how rich you really are, you’d get a swelled head. Or you’d never work hard. Or you’d fail, and the card giver didn’t want you to see you fail.

Maybe all that’s true, but there’s a more common explanation.

The person who gave you the card had a gift card of their own, but they never did much with it. They were too afraid, too unsure of themselves, too risk-averse to do anything. Deep down, they didn’t feel they deserved all that money, and anyway, they told themselves, they didn’t want to deal with the responsibility of one million dollars.

(Maybe even someone told them that they had only $40 on their card.)

The person who gave you the card may indeed love you, but their issues got in the way: issues that make it intolerable for them to see anyone — even you — have more than what they have and do more than what they did.

And the real secret? That person didn’t give you your gift card. You inherited your gift card the day you were born. No one can “give” you your million dollars: it’s yours.

Are you living life like you have only 40 dollars to spend?

What if you knew, accepted, and embraced the knowledge that you’re a millionaire?

Think of the million-dollar gift card when someone says you “can’t” achieve something because of, well, some kind of excuse.

Think of the million-dollar gift card when someone encourages you to “be realistic” or tells you that it’s selfish to want “too much” in life.

Think of the million-dollar gift card when someone interferes with your having the kind of loving relationship that they never had.

Think of the million-dollar gift card when someone tells you it’s OK to lower your expectations on account of “the way you are” or “your condition” or because “that’s the way the world works” or “good things don’t happen to people like us.”

And when you find people who truly want to help you take your million dollars and spend it and invest it so that it can do as much good as possible for you and the world?

Hold on to those people, and don’t let go.