Why money grows on trees

by | 9 Jun 2020

What is the greatest story of all? If by ‘greatest’ we mean the one that is currently believed by the most people, then could it be the story of Christianity? Of the roughly seven-and-a-half billion people in the world, around 2.3 billion of them believe in the messages of Jesus Christ as told in the Bible. Or could it be the story of Facebook? There are 2.4 billion people in the world who subscribe to the religion of Mark Zuckerberg. Maybe it’s the story of Communism. If you count the populations of the world’s five communist countries, that would add up to almost three-and-a-half billion believers.

The answer is none of these. The greatest story ever told is money, because it’s the only story that everyone believes. Whether you’re a Christian, a Communist, or a Facebook user, you believe in the almighty dollar, which is to believe that certain pieces of metal and paper have value, and can be exchanged for goods and services. The story of money is so successful that it allows people from all over the world with different backgrounds, cultures and beliefs to cooperate together for mutual benefit.

Good boy makes a good buy

Another story we are often told is that money doesn’t grow on trees; when we want a coffee, we can’t just pluck a five pound note from a branch and spend it in Starbucks, can we? Well it turns out maybe we can. Or more precisely, a dog can.

Maybe you’ve already heard this story. There was a dog who lived on the campus of a Columbian university. Every day he watched students at a coffee stand exchanging pieces of paper for food and drink, and one day decided to do the same. The dog picked up a leaf from the ground and gave it to the woman at the coffee stand, and – what do you know? – it worked.

The cashier was so impressed that she took the leaf and gave the dog a cookie in return, and that was all the proof the dog needed to know that money did indeed grow on trees. He carried on picking up leaves and exchanging them for cookies; in fact he did it so often that the coffee stand workers had to limit him to one cookie a day.

Different strokes for different folks

It’s a nice story isn’t it? But what would happen if one of the students tried to do the same? Of course they’d have been told that leaves aren’t really legal tender. And if a second dog tried to do the same, would she get a cookie? Possibly, but a successful business can’t give away too much for free.

Because the dog had showed he could learn from humans, and because he was a cute-looking dog, the cashier was impressed enough to imagine that maybe a leaf has the same worth as a dollar bill. So there are two stories at work here: ‘money doesn’t grow on trees’, and, ‘money doesn’t grow on trees unless you are the one dog enterprising enough to say it does’.

The right tales for the right sales

What can businesses and organisations learn from this? That they should give cookies to dogs if they pay with leaves? The lesson here is that if your story is powerful enough, and you can get people to believe it, it can bring results. Businesses need people to buy their goods and services; charities need people to donate their money or time to their cause; without a truly persuasive story, they will struggle to achieve these aims. We all need to be as cute and clever as the dog.