#11 Would you kill someone if you were offered 100 million dollars to do it?

- Jeanne, would you kill someone if I offered you 100 million dollars to do it?

This is a real question I’ve been asked the other day.
Don’t worry! This request didn’t come from a client.
I am certainly a “cleaner”, but not this kind.

So the other night, I was at a friend’s place for dinner. Very early in the evening, still on our first beer, he suddenly brought up this question out of nowhere.
Even I, self-proclaimed queen of reading people, didn’t see it coming!
He is one of the most benevolent and caring people I know. But here it is; I also love this friend because he and I always have great conversations and debates since he is a brilliant mind who enjoys philosophical/conceptual/ethical dilemmas.

So here we are.

Now that this disturbing question has infiltrated your mind too, play it out with me for the sake of the soul-searching it offers. 
Ask yourself the same question, and see (the more spontaneously, the better) what your answer is.
- Take a quick note of your answer,
- Then look at the reasons why you answered this way,
- What does it reveal about yourself?

As far as I’m concerned, I was struck by a new awareness: how much I have evolved over the last 10 years.
This question reveals a lot about our perspectives, values, life-ethic, needs, fears, projections, abilities, imagination, beliefs, time… etc.
To some extent, it shows the way we are currently wired. Yes, “currently,” as it may evolve, like my personal example demonstrates.

Let’s explore, then, what this question invited me to realize that I wouldn’t have been able to envision some years ago.

My spontaneous answer was a plain and simple “No”. Period.
I haven’t seen the statistics, but first I would have ventured to say my answer was not atypical… until my sweet friend admitted that his answer was “Yes”.
But you know what?
Whether your response is a resounding NO, or YES, or some roundabout way of combining the two, they are not the most important part of the answer. Indeed, it is what triggered your answer that is worth exploring.

Then, my friend asked me to illuminate the reasons why I would refuse such a proposition, and he asked me a couple of questions that brought up the following extracts of my internal reasoning:

1. I don’t feel constrained by strong moral or religious principles because I’ve not been raised in such an educational environment. Nevertheless, I know that my instinctive answer was partially due to a strong belief I have, that I could phrase this way: “No amount of money could bring me to kill anyone”.
   (Here of course my friend tested me to know my “price” by raising the reward incrementally until we reached 1 billion dollars. And I still declined. He then tried again by specifying that the victim was elderly, and then that he was an elderly ex-Nazi… And so on.)
   
   
2. Nor did I refuse this offer for “fear of being caught, losing the trial, and ending up in jail”. (Yes, this was literally his question!)
   “Uh…No.” I responded.
   Suffice it to say that if I were tempted to accept this proposition, being caught would be the least of my worries. In this scenario I would challenge myself with rigorous preparation, by creating a master-list of ways to get away with murder that we all have accumulated from binging crime shows and procedurals. I digress…but still, “No.”
   
   
3. Surprisingly, my initial trigger was indeed financial!
   In the end, I definitely became aware that I refused it because my very-first-thought was:
   
   “Well, If I want to get 100 million dollars, I can earn them.”
   
   Wow, one second.
   Who have I become?!
   Up until my 30^th birthday I never considered I could become rich during this lifetime, and I was completely at peace with that.
   Then, while doing some internal work on personal growth I navigated certain detrimental beliefs, where I found some sneaky ones related to money that I wasn’t even aware of.
   Now, since this conversation, I can state that they are definitely past tense.

Where were you 10 years ago in your relationship to wealth? Where are you now? How are you working on it?

The truth is, I don’t know if I can really earn those hundreds of millions all by myself.
But this is secondary.
What I know for sure, now, is that I no longer believe that it is out of reach.
And that, alone, is key.