secrets

One of the important financial and spiritual books I read last year is Bo Sanchez's 8 Secrets of the Truly Rich: How You Can Create Material Wealth and Gain Spiritual Abundance at the Same Time (Shepherd's Voice Publications, 2007). I first heard about Sanchez in Christ's Youth in Action (CYA) while in undergrad, but this is the first publication of his that I read.

A blogger has compared the principles in the book to those in The Secret, but it also has echoes of Napoleon Hill, Robert Kiyosaki, Jack Canfield and Larry Gamboa. The 8 secrets that Sanchez explains in the 60 Didache-type chapters of his book are:

1. Be Totally Responsible for Your Success
2. Enlarge Your Psychological Wallet
3. Get Rid of Crazy Religious Beliefs
4. Be Totally Committed to Your Dreams
5. Raise Your Financial IQ
6. Ride Something to Wealth
7. Have a Bias for Action
8. Win in All Areas.

What makes Sanchez's book unique is its reassessment of common assumptions on money and business that many Filipino Catholics hold. Some of them may sound familiar. Money is evil. Businessmen are greedy. The rich won't enter heaven. Sanchez says,

Your religious beliefs determine your wealth more than you think...
One of the biggest monsters that keep us poor is that we don't want to be rich. And we don't want to be rich because we've got crazy, insane religious beliefs about money.
Religious beliefs are so deep, so wedged to your core identity, you follow them even if you're not aware that you're following them.

Even the beliefs of certain progressive, socialist groups seem to be underpinned by these deep-seated cultural assumptions- they are simply expressed in secular, rather than religious, terms.

German sociologist Max Weber wrote that Protestant peoples have performed better economically than Catholic ones because the former have traditionally regarded self-assurance due to material wealth as a sign of God's grace, in contrast to the latter who have emphasized the redemptive value of poverty (this is changing in predominantly Catholic Ireland, as well as Portugal and Spain, however- read this). If some of our religious beliefs have indeed created friction on the road to development, then Sanchez is making an important contribution to cultural and religious transformation and national progress.

Read the foreword of Sanchez's book here.