“Anyone can count the seeds in an apple, but only God can count the number of apples in a seed.” — Robert H. Schuller
In 2010, a virus spread across the globe, infecting an estimated 60 million computers. Governments scrambled. Corporations panicked. Everyday people were watching their computers slow to a crawl, pop-ups multiplying like digital cockroaches. Who was behind it? The antivirus company itself.
McAfee — the brand synonymous with protection — was accused of engineering the very threats it claimed to solve. Infect the world, then sell the cure. It sounds monstrous. But nature got there first. Some species of ants farm aphids (those small sap-sucking insects that look like leaves). Ants farm them the way we farm cattle. They tend to them, herd them, guard them from predators — in exchange for honeydew (the sweet secretion aphids produce, which would be like our milk from cows). It sounds symbiotic, except these ants bite the aphids’ wings off to keep them grounded and dependent. They engineer the conditions to supply the solution.
There are really only two mindsets in business: creating pain or correcting pain. That’s it. And sometimes people create the pain just so they can correct it. Many industries operate this way — especially medicine. If you heal, you don’t need me. I need you to suffer so I can stay in use. Too often the solutions don’t create more health — they create more side effects, which require more treatments, which require more appointments, which require more prescriptions. The business model depends on your problem never fully going away.
There’s a fish that runs the same scam. The cleaner wrasse (Labroides dimidiatus). A small neon colored fish that’s shaped like an unassuming bullet. It sets up “cleaning stations” on coral reefs where larger fish come to have parasites removed. A good deal — until researchers discovered they cheat. They prefer to bite into their client’s healthy tissue and nutritious mucus rather than just eating the parasites. This creates small wounds, irritation, and greater susceptibility to infection, which means the client fish needs… more cleaning visits. They generate repeat customers by making the problem worse while appearing to solve it. They even behave more honestly when being watched. When they have a captive audience of one, they cheat more freely.
Those who spout “money is the root of all evil” miss something more fundamental. More ancient. More human. Parasitic vs. symbiotic. That’s the real axis. Money is just the bargaining chips. I can cheat you out of a million dollars or a million acorns — I’m a cheat either way. And if I’m creative enough to exploit you, that same creativity could be redirected to heal you. The tools are identical. The orientation is everything. It’s a consciousness problem.
The parasite asks: How do I keep them needing me?
The symbiote asks: How do I keep them growing?
Scarcity thinking treats business like a pie. The more I eat, the less you get. I have to sneak and cheat. But pies don’t grow on trees. A pie doesn’t sustain man. Nature — God — doesn’t make pies. It makes orchards. As Myron Golden puts it in From The Trash Man To The Cash Man: “if I grab an apple and eat it, people with a lack mentality say there are fewer apples now. But five seeds come out. From those five seeds, five apple trees sprout, each producing 300 or more apples a year — all of which contain seeds.” This seems mind-boggling only because we’re talking about exponential growth, and human minds aren’t built to think exponentially.
The famous wheat and chessboard problem makes this visceral: place one grain on the first square of a chessboard, then double it on each of the 64 squares. By the final square, you’ve accumulated 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 grains — roughly 384 billion tons. That exceeds current global wheat production. A pile that tall would dwarf Mount Everest.
All from one grain that kept doubling.
When you solve one problem honestly, you don’t lose a customer — you create abundance. And here’s why that’s more sustainable: the parasitic model has a ceiling. When you keep people indebted, sick, or dependent, you’re feeding off a host that’s getting weaker. Every extraction diminishes the thing you depend on. You need your customers broken enough to need you, but functional enough to pay you. That’s a razor-thin margin, and it will eventually collapses. Addiction burns out. Debt defaults. Resentment builds. The host dies or leaves — and the parasite dies with it.
Abundance works the opposite way. Growth brings new challenges, and new vistas bring new opportunities to serve. If I show you how to make money, I can show you how to manage it. How to invest it. How to protect it. How to multiply it. And because I helped you before — because you experienced our unity of benefit firsthand — you trust that I have your best interest in mind. There’s no ceiling. Each solution opens the next door. The client who heals comes back stronger, with bigger challenges worth solving — and more resources to solve them. It compounds exponentially. Meanwhile, every service you’ve already built still stands, still bearing fruit, still being recommended by the people it worked for. Money may not grow on trees — but your services grow in an orchard when they bring life.
Leave a Reply