Augie always insists that the characteristics you need to succeed in business are the same as the characteristics you need to succeed in the spiritual quest. You need to be willing to take risks, think outside the box, and see the world from someone else’s perspective. You need to defer gratification. You need to follow an ethical code. You need to be willing to deliberately put yourself in high-pressure situations. Most important of all, you need to be willing to persist, day after day, failure after failure, when most people would give up.

When you make your living in sales or business, you put yourself in a position where those skills are essential to your day-to-day survival. This “crucible” forces you to develop those skills, and those are the exact skills you need to tackle the biggest, hardest, most abstract, most important questions of all.

Another interesting overview of the Pope here: http://www.chick.com/reading/books/153/153_10.asp, where they state “”The Catholic church is the biggest financial power, wealth accumulator and property owner in existence. She is a greater possessor of material riches than any other single institution, corporation, bank, giant trust, government or state of the whole globe. The pope, as the visible ruler of this immense amassment of wealth, is consequently the richest individual of the twentieth century. No one can realistically assess how much he is worth in terms of billions of dollars.”