Category: Wealth

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Contentment & Letting Go

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For me to find true wealth I needed to give up some things:

  • I gave up a very secure job with great pay.
  • I gave up excess clothing.
  • I gave up saying yes to everything my parents or friends were getting rid of and offered to me.
  • I gave up my entire 2000 + CD collection, once my pride and joy.

Now I am giving up most of my musical instruments and recording equipment which has been sitting around collecting dust, taking up room, and hardly ever used.  In a sense I am giving up a dream as well.

However, I am of the firm belief that dreams can be reborn if they are meant to be.  Sometimes we have to clear away our past attempts to force our dreams to happen, and start back again with the simple dream. This is part of the path to contentment.

Contentment is partly about being able to let go of everything and partly finding joy in what you have. Holding everything you have loosely, but not carelessly, and letting go of what does not add joy.

If we hold on too tightly we risk loosing ourselves in the thing we are holding onto whether it be a house, a car, or a relationship. We also run the risk of losing the very thing we are trying so hard to hold onto, or losing everything else in our obsession with this one thing.

In relationships we run the risk of driving the other person away.

If we hold things carelessly, we do not assign proper value to them.  In this case we run the risk of losing them to neglect, or being weighed down by what we cannot get rid of because its value to anyone else has decreased due to our neglect.  In the case of a house, boat or car, we purchase it at a certain value, don’t take proper care of it, its value drops and we find ourselves stuck with an eyesore that now we owe more on than people are willing to pay.

If we hold relationships carelessly they will disappear, leaving holes in our lives that we try to fill with other relationships and other things. Continuing in this pattern we spiral downward into a state of despair.

But it doesn’t have to be that way, and there are ways to recover our sense of contentment, through setting boundaries in relationships, decluttering or tidying our homes, turning off the incessant voices that tell us what we need, need, need in order to be something better, and carving out time for stillness and silence every day.

Sometimes I find contentment in simply being alive.

“Be content with what you have;
rejoice in the way things are.
When you realize there is nothing lacking,
the whole world belongs to you.”
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How Do YOU Define Wealth?

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As we have seen over the past few months, wealth can be defined in many ways.  Unfortunately, if we are not consciously grappling with what wealth means for ourselves, most of us take the path of least resistance and define wealth on the basis of how much money someone has.

  • A billionaire is wealthy.
  • A trust fund kid’s parents are wealthy.
  • Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are wealthy.
  • Our neighbor with the shiny new BMW must be wealthy.

And we are generally correct from the standpoint of money or assets. Except when we are fooled by appearances.

People can look wealthy and actually be quite poor (the BMW is leased and the payments are so high that he or she is living in an apartment with no furniture and eating rice and beans or tuna from a can), while others may appear to be poor or just average, and actually be quite wealthy (your neighbor who owns a landscape company and always buys used cars and lives in a modest but nice home might be sitting on a nest egg that would blow your mind).

Most of us want to be wealthy, which is not a bad thing to want, but we tend to focus only on the financial aspect, so much so that we often try to “fake it ’til we make it,” or sacrifice other areas of wealth in the pursuit of this one.

How else can we define wealth?

Would you consider the Dali Lama to be wealthy? In a spiritual sense I would think him extraordinarily wealthy. He is also much happier than many who are financially wealthy.  Our spiritual wealth is just as important as our financial wealth.

What about relationships? Strong bonds between friends and partners are worth more than gold, and as Proverbs says, the right spouse or partner is more valuable than rubies.  Like financial wealth, relationships take work and are built over time.  They can also be lost in an instant when we make poor choices.  Sadly we tend to discount the true wealth of our relationships as we pursue the incomplete image we have of wealth.

Are you taking care of yourself, your body?  Are you making healthy choices for yourself regardless of your actual state of health?  Someone fighting to survive a long term health issue might see someone who is poor but in great health, as wealthy, or they might actually consider themselves more wealthy because of the challenges they have had to overcome.  It may come down to a matter of perspective – what is yours?

Discover your Definition of Wealth

What is your definition of wealth for your life?  Is it out of balance? Are you pursuing financial wealth at the cost of your relationships, spirituality, or health?  How do you know?

The first thing to do is to face it head on and ask yourself what wealth means to you.  What wealth looks like in your mind, what wealth feels like in your heart.

You can do this on your own, but if you have a spouse or partner, I highly recommend you also do it together – you might be surprised how different your ideas of wealth are.  The trick is then to define what wealth means to you as a couple or partnership.

It is also helpful to have someone prompting you with questions and providing feedback to really get at the heart of your definition.  A coach perhaps.  Contact me below if you are interested in discovering your definition of wealth.

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How We Prosper and Thrive

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“We” do not exist as isolated individuals. We, as individuals, are inhabitants of networks; we are relationships. That is how we prosper and thrive.

-David Byrne, Eliminating the Human

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Wealth & Technology

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Technology has played a crucial role in the growth of the world economy as well as individual wealth.  But it wasn’t always pretty.

The Good

Technology has enabled the amassing of unprecedented wealth as well as access to information. It advances so rapidly due to the accessibility of information and shared knowledge with more and more people across the globe. This means more minds are working on today’s problems than ever before and thus increase the speed at which they are solved.

As technology advances, so too does the world economy. As the world economy grows, more countries and peoples are able to benefit from it. At least that is the theory.

In part this theory is holding true, although not always via altruistic means.

At home, technology has helped us manage our funds better, providing numerous tools to budget and track our spending, like online bank accounts, and tools like Mint.com.

It is also easier to apply for and receive credit, whether for credit cards, car loans, and even mortgages. You don’t even have to meet with a live person anymore!

That brings us to the bad part of technology and wealth.

The Bad

Technology has not only brought wealth, it has robbed us of wealth in many of the following ways as well:

  • We don’t feel our purchases as much because we hardly ever use cash
  • We are forgetting how things are made or grown because we can have it delivered as a finished product nearly instantly
  • We have forgotten how long it takes to make something of quality by hand
  • We have made almost everything disposable and we are subsequently turning a significant part of our land into landfills for the disposed items
  • We are forgetting how to interact as human beings:
    • We socialize via social apps like Facebook and Snapchat
    • We date in a virtual dating room online, only occasionally meeting face to face
    • Some have noted the decline in sexual intimacy due to the availability of pornography or the fantasy of virtual relationships
    • Marriages are falling apart due to lack of communication – helped in part by the distractions of technology
  • We constantly fuel our fears and anxieties by watching the non-stop stream of negatively that is considered news today
    • We are panicked by predictions of economic meltdowns every 3 months
    • We are terrified of our neighbors who are potential terrorists or child molesters
    • We rely on small bits of unsubstantiated news to shape our worldview instead of taking the time to think and analyze for ourselves

David Byrne stated this beautifully in a recent article called Eliminating the Human, in the MIT Technology Review journal (thanks to Tim Ferriss for sharing this in his #5BulletFriday email):

“I’m not saying that many of these tools, apps, and other technologies are not hugely convenient. But in a sense, they run counter to who we are as human beings.”

The Ugly

And then there is the downright ugliness of technology and its negative impact on our ability to achieve and realize wealth.

Technology has given humanity the means with which to destroy itself.  Weapons of mass destruction, the ecological impact of rampant hybridization of plants and irresponsible research on medications and disease.  Not that it is all irresponsible, but when the bottom line dictates when it is ready, shortcuts are bound to be taken and mistakes made.

While technology has given us the tools to help humanity and our planet, it has also long been the cause of massive pollution, exploitation of natural resources, as well as many of the new strains of disease which we are now battling.

We can’t go back and change these things or undo them, but we can reflect on them long enough to understand there is a better way, a more human way.

Conclusion

The good news is it is not the end of the world just yet.

If our perspective remains as one focused on the well being of others, the way we use and interact with technology will be for all our benefit, and the wealth we build will not only serve us but the rest of the world as well.