If You Have Money, You Can Make Progress in the Right Direction. Find Out What Progress in the Right Direction Actually Is.
Hello Aluxers, we hope you’re as excited as we are for this 4th installment of the Purpose of Wealth series, especially today when we’re talking about PROGRESS.
What is progress if not the optimization of life!
The constant improvement or replacement of that which underperforms.
Progress has been baked into our DNA since our inception. Those who are able to adapt, evolve, make progress in any form… eventually survived to write the future.
This desire to make life better, easier and live more fulfilled and happy lives has been at the core of who we are as a society.
The true purpose of wealth is to do just that, as money and wealth are the latest iteration in the game of progress.
Here’s the catch, it all starts with YOU.
As usual, here is the video version of this article:
With that done, let’s get straight into the article.
Personal Progress
A person’s second life begins after they realize that what’s ahead of them is under their control. Unlike the past, the future is yours to create it.
Your life will change once you realize that as individuals we have the power to decide who we want to be and what we want to do.
The foundation of this idea is the concept of self-improvement. Do anything for long enough and you become good at it… study how the best do it for long enough and by emulating them we can get good at it.
One can alter their own future by changing the present!
The purpose of wealth is to provide you with the tools you need to alter this future to the best of your desire.
It’s you… it’s always you that has to choose, for you are living for yourself and you’re your greatest resource.
That’s why they always say, Investing in yourself pays the best dividends!
Personal progress means spending time, effort and money so that your ability to navigate the world improves and, as a consequence, your reality follows.
One can’t fix the world before they fix themselves!
So fix yourself. Fix everything about you. Fix your health, fix your relationships, fix the money and then use all of that to change your life.
The most valuable secret one should know is to:
Seek progress, not perfection!
As long as today you are better than you were yesterday, you’re doing alright in life. As long as you live, please remember this!
Once you get yourself to a point where you are comfortable in your life, then you can use the wealth you have at your disposal – and we’re talking financial wealth and wealth in terms of knowledge – to improve the reality of those around you!
If you want to fix yourself and start over, check out 15 Steps to Reinvent Yourself and Start Over.
Inner Circle Progress
The last thing you want in life is to reach the other side of the river and know that everyone you care about is still stuck back there.
In time we’ve learned to measure wealth and success differently than through just money.
Measure wealth not by how much of it you possess, but by the abundance of wealth around you!
What’s the point of having the blessings of the world if you can’t share them with anyone.
It is your duty and your responsibility to use your wealth to improve the lives of those you care about, in the same way you wish someone did for you when you were starting out.
You can be the tide that raises all boats.
In your growth journey at some point you’ll hit a crossroads:
One option is to keep going ahead the same way you used to and get the same type of rewards you deserve, make the same kind of impact and who knows, maybe you’ll slowly and gradually improve
The other comes with an interesting proposition: to Go bigger
To go after goals you can go after on your own. These are larger impact goals, they require more moving pieces than you can manage.
Making $100 million dollars will require a different type of approach than the one that got you to $1 million.
It’s the same with happiness and even health.
If you got yours, we feel that it’s time to mobilize the troops and see what can be done for the wellbeing of the inner circle.
If it’s not money, then it’s your knowledge and insight that will provide quite valuable for these people, use it to improve your inner circle’s ability to navigate the world.
What better way to use your wealth than this?
You start with yourself, move onto your inner circle and only then, you can expand to your local community.
Community Progress
This is where you become an actual force!
The purpose of wealth is to allow you to facilitate real change in your community.
What is holding back people just like you? What tools would have served you well growing up? What steep hill were you forced to climb that you didn’t have to?!
There’s an old saying that says:
It takes a village to raise a child!
But who takes care of the village? If each of its members takes from the village enough for them to get away from it… what happens to the village long term?
We are all brought up by communities and it is our duty to aid in the process of development of these communities, so that they can keep doing what they’re doing.
What communities need above everything isn’t money – although money helps – it’s tools and instructions on how to use the tools.
Don’t give them fish, teach them how to make their own fishing rods, how to catch the fish, how to make sure they fish in a sustainable way.. And then check up on their progress.
It’s up to you to change the game. You didn’t like what school taught you? Help them teach better.
Your community didn’t support you? Don’t perpetuate that practice and be what the community should’ve been to you when you were starting out.
The community only changes if those who changed already stay and help the community do the same!
If you’re able to help your community thrive, guess what.. Your solution works with other communities.
Progress Through Distribution
Progress is the result of multiple iterations with new and improved tools and insights.
If you were able to fix yourself, your inner circle and above everything else, your community, then it’s super likely that your solutions can be deployed en masse to alleviate the pain of others.
That’s effectively how and why the world keeps getting better and better every year. There are people out there who figure out smart solutions and then distribute them globally, and because of everyone’s small contribution the world is less shittier than it used to be.
Everything around you is the solution someone found to a problem that was so good it was mass-distributed.
We live in the age of comfort, that of connectivity and information abundance.
It’s never been cheaper to produce anything than it is today and at the scale we can do it now.
Use the leverage of scale to help those you can help.
You’re under no obligation to do so… but after you solve wealth, you’ll begin to realize that what you’re actually craving is impact through utility. We all die and want something to live beyond us.
Which takes us to the last type of progress:
Future Progress
This is Progress through innovation.
You are effectively financing the future.
How amazing is it that you could have that kind of impact? That your ideas matched with your wealth and other people’s efforts could actually create a new future for everyone.
People think the world will get better on its own, but that’s not the truth. Things get better when time, effort, creativity and money come together to make it better.
They say
The only way to predict the future is to create it!
And time and time again we’ve seen people do just that. That’s why the world is looking at Elon Musk the way it does.
People want progress and society is ready to back, support and help in any way they can, those who bring us pro gress.
Without this kind of individuals willing to tackle the future and bend it to their will, we would all be stuck in a slowly improving present.
As long as you live, remember that
The lightbulb didn’t come from the continuous iteration of the candle!
If one finds themselves in the fortunate position to have amassed wealth, what higher purpose could that wealth serve than pushing humanity as we know it forward.
We have yet to explore the universe, we have yet to understand ourselves… and as Frieza put it, this isn’t even our final form.
It all starts with you, the individual and slowly expanding outwards in terms of impact.
Look at wealth as fuel for progress and deploy yours towards whichever progress phase you find yourself in.
