A few years ago, I had the great pleasure of sitting down with one of the best employees that ever worked for me. This engineer had worked for the same company for over 25 years and was the inventor of dozens of medical devices that were responsible for saving the lives of thousands of people. He had worked tirelessly for our company for many years, rarely missing a day and never rocking the boat. Technically, I was performing his exit interview as he was retiring, but in reality, it was an opportunity for a young, novice manager to ask a successful, tenured engineer to share his best advice. I wish now I had recorded the entire interview because of the sincere, invaluable information he shared with me. When asked, the typically quiet engineer—with very limited English skills—opened up and shared insights that could have been turned into a best-selling self-help book. As I started to write this post, one of his admonitions came back to me. He said—and I’m paraphrasing—“Nephi, no one looks back on their life from their death bed wishing they had spent more time at the office.”
Hold on! If you are about to hit the back button on your browser, wait for just one or two more paragraphs. I know you are thinking that I am like an Eskimo who discovered ice. Everyone reading this post knows life is about more than just money. Considering the tens-of-thousands of movies, books, commercials, articles, blogs, vlogs, self-help platitudes, and everything in-between telling us money can’t buy happiness, the message has definitely been broadly spread to the populace.
And yet, with all of the time spent by our local church leaders, mentors, and Hallmark card designers trying to convince us of that idea, many of us find ourselves—after years of working late nights, weekends, and holidays, and skipping our kids’ plays, ballgames, birthdays, and major life moments—still grinding away trying to accumulate more material possessions, expecting them to fill the void in our lives and give us happiness. More importantly, we haven’t taught our kids anything different.
Let’s go back to the beginning because from the start we are getting the idea of wealth wrong. Per Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary, wealth is: “abundance of valuable material possessions or resources.” Isn’t it interesting we define the word wealth as a wholly money-based idea: to be wealthy, we supposedly have to focus on accumulating an abundance of valuable possessions. But that is not how it has always been. If we go back in our language, we find the Old English basis of the word “wealth” as the words “weal” and “wela,” which meant “well-being, prosperity, or happiness.” For our ancestors, wealth was not an accumulation of money or possessions, but instead a state of well-being and happiness.
So why did it change? If you think about what was happening in that time period, it becomes clear. In those days, the royal families, lords, knights, etc., had all of the money, land, and material possessions. Everyone else just served them in one way or another. The common people were peasants and had no land, very little money, and no way of moving up in life or society. As you can imagine, it was hard to be happy or fulfilled when you and your children were starving, with no hope of ever achieving anything truly better in life. In a very real way, the happiness, prosperity, and well-being of those people were tied directly to how much money or land they had. As a result, the word wealth became more commonly used to describe how much money someone had and not how happy they were.
Unfortunately for our society, as technology, science, and economic advancement have pulled us out of such destitution—even the poorest among us live much better lives than the peasants of old England—our definition of wealth has remained focused on material possessions. Ask any of your kids what it means to be wealthy and they will tell you a lot about material possessions and money.
The next generation has been so inundated with the idea of wealth—in terms of material possessions—that they have started to revolt against the idea of money and riches completely. They aren’t stupid. They watch us, our friends, and their other adult role models embark on the never-ending carousel of chasing more and more money and material possessions, with very little success and a lot of failures and wasted time. As a result, many of them have come to the wrong conclusion that wealth is bad. Even worse, they use this conclusion as an excuse not to do the hard work required to achieve a wealth mentality and true wealth.
If we are going to go on a wealth journey together, we need a better definition of what wealth really is. I choose to use the term wealth mentality, the idea that wealth should be defined as happiness fulfillment and well-being, not the accumulation of material possessions. I like to use the example of a three-legged stool to help my kids visualize that definition.
Imagine an old three-legged stool like the ones used on a farm to milk a cow. The edges are worn and rounded, the legs are just a little rickety, but still strong enough to sit on for a long period of time to milk the cows.
“But I’ve never milked a cow, is this example really for me?” you ask. Yes, just sit on that chair thing in front of your bar and listen.
The stool is perfectly stable with the three legs and is actually a little easier to set on uneven ground than a stool with four legs would be. After describing the image of the stool I then tell my kids each of the legs represents one of the areas of wealth mentality: relationships, personal well-being, and health. They usually ask at this point where money fits into the stool example. That is perfect because I then point to the top of the stool and explain that money and riches are represented by the seat of the stool.
My next question is usually, “Can you use just the legs of the stool, without the seat, to sit on?” The initial response is usually “no,” but if I wait long enough one of them will work up some courage and say that they can sit on the stool without the seat. I have tried this and it really is possible to arrange the three pieces of wood that make the legs under my bottom and sit for a short period of time. Not comfortably, but at least a place to rest if I really needed it. The principle that can then be taught is that it is possible to live a happy and fulfilled life without money, especially in our modern society. In fact, for anyone who has known some of the poorest people in the world—whether far away in a foreign country or right in your own city—you have probably found those with the least material possessions can be the happiest.
My first experience living among very poor people was in Brazil when I was 19 years old. Many of these people had almost nothing in terms of material goods—a family of five or six people would live in 10’X20’ shacks made of plywood and cardboard—and yet they were some of the happiest people I’ve ever met. Their family relationships were strong, their health was relatively good, and they had personal satisfaction in what they were doing; they found fulfillment in those areas and were happy and content. However, they still faced huge physical challenges due to their destitute conditions. Their lives were focused on putting food on the table for themselves and their children every day, and they had very little time to do anything else. That is why a wealth mentality still needs to include the seat of the stool, “money.”
When we take off on our wealth journey, we should focus on strengthening the legs of the stool first, and then find ways to add the seat. In this way we can create a perfectly balanced and comfortable stool. If we focus only on the money (the seat), the stool is not really a stool and we end up on the floor. Similarly, if we don’t have the seat, we can be uncomfortable and our long-term happiness is more difficult to achieve due to the constant stresses of living with money worries. In our pursuit of wealth, we need to find the balance, and it can only come when we focus on the legs first and then the seat last.
The pursuit of happiness and fulfillment that has money at the center will generally result in a loss of one of the legs, followed by total imbalance in the life of the individual. Even if we have two of the legs in place—let’s say our relationships and personal well-being are great, but our health is lousy—the stool is unbalanced and we will eventually tip over.
The simple example of the stool helps to establish a new definition for the term wealth. When we teach about a wealth mentality, we are not just teaching how to create income and riches in our lives. Instead, we are teaching that we need to have abundance in all areas of our life. If we will focus on creating abundance in our relationships, health, and personal well-being first, we will be in a position to create an abundance of money and enjoy it in the right way.
Wealth really is about more than money, and that is the wealth mentality way