Purpose of Wealth (1): Freedom

Wealth Can Give You Something as Important as Freedom. Read on to Find Out More About This Type of Freedom.

Hello Aluxers and welcome back to a Sunday motivational special, where over the course of the next 5 weeks we will discuss the topic of wealth in the depth that it requires.

Because there are great differences between the terms wealth, money and your position in the social hierarchy.

Out of all 3 of them wealth is the one you should go after.

The fundamental reason why most people want to build wealth in life is freedom, but even freedom takes multiple forms.

Today we will discuss the idea of wealth as a facilitator of different kinds of freedom.

Money and Wealth are very different.

Money is what you earn in exchange for your time and work, while wealth is the fortune that grows outside of your direct input.

Wealth is making money while you sleep. Wealth continues to grow even if you decide to take a sick day which can not be said by money.

Even if you earn a lot of money, one can still have money problems.

As always, here is the video version of this article:

The most direct type of freedom wealth solves is:

Freedom From Money Problems

The debate on wheather or not money can make you happy is still going, but one thing’s for certain: Lack of money will make you unhappy!

Much of our unhappiness comes from our inability to go through life comfortably and unstressed.

Most people will never be financially free, they will never escape money problems.

Most people will work several jobs for 40 to 50 years and at the end hope that what they’ve been able to acquire through all these years is enough to keep them going until the day they eventually die.

Many people struggle financially until the very end, with the debt being passed down to their children.

Wealth solves that problem as long as you don’t screw around with it.

The house in which you live is not wealthy, because it requires you to go out into the marketplace and trade your time in order to pay the mortgage or utilities. The moment you distance yourself from it and rent it out to someone else, that’s when a house goes from liability to an asset and wealth is made out of value generating assets.

The notion of escaping money problems through money generating assets is nothing new, but every generation has their own version of a wealth building protocol.

If back in the day a cow was the go-to asset.. it’s because it gave milk and milk could be sold if you chose to. The wealth of an individual was determined by how many cows, sheep and chickens he had.

The fundamental money problems are: food & shelter.

A person finally becomes free once their income from wealth crosses the threshold of food and shelter.

Then you have to expand it so that the wealth can take care of the entire family and make tomorrow predictable from a money problems perspective.

A person can not afford the luxury to work on their mental state if their children have nothing to eat.

The purpose of wealth is to free the individual from money problems. Food taken care off, bills taken care off, the future is predictable enough to feel safe going into tomorrow because you have enough wealth to give yourself a fighting chance.

Which takes us to the next type of freedom wealth facilitates:

Freedom to Try and Fail

Wealth is determined by how many times you can afford to fail and still be fine.

It’s a luxury combined from timing, money and mental fortitude.

If you’re 23 years old, no family & minimal overall expenses, you can start and fail multiple times.

But what if you’re 40 years old, with a family of 2 children where the family needs your salary to survive. Can you afford to quit your job and work for the next 5 years on your start-up without pay? Probably not.

This is one of those incredible advantages people born into wealthy families have and although everybody dislikes the kids of the rich – because they didn’t do anything to deserve the privileged situation they find themselves in -, deep down we are all hypocrites, because we all wish our children had access to the best possible tools to maximize their potential.

Wealth allows you the privilege of being able to fail no matter who you are.

Maybe you spent the first decade of your life working hard to build a company and through it your wealth, but one of your passions has always been painting or movie making.

Because you were able to build wealth first you can afford to pursue painting or making movies for the next 10 years because even if it doesn’t work out you’re still gonna be fine.

This is the main reason why you have to solve the wealth problem first.

There’s a very smart saying from – we believe – Nassim Talleb who says:

If you want to be a philosopher king, first become a kind and then a philosopher, not the other way around!

The purpose of wealth is for you to have that safety net that allows you to try the things that you find interesting, because we are very complex creatures that are forced by the environment into tiny boxes, all in the hopes of efficiency and increased productivity.

Which once again, brings us to the next type of freedom wealth allows you to go after:

Freedom to Explore

We are multi-variant individuals, yet society is forcing you to pick what you want to be in life from a very early age.. How many of you remember being children and all the adults asking you “what you want to be when you grow up?!” – many of them, living lives they haven’t selected for themselves.

Most people do not know who they are because they can not afford the luxury of finding out. We don’t know how to be happy because we never take the time to find what makes us happy – or fulfilled for that matter.

In order to find “your thing” you have to be able to first try many things and select the one that interests you the most; and it doesn’t stop there, for what interests you in one period of your life might not maintain said interest later – this should come natural as you evolve and develop an appetite for growth.

One of the most important purposes of wealth is allowing you the luxury to explore and better understand yourself and the world which you are shaping.

The more you learn about it the more you become a part of it.

There are things out there that would fascinate you for the next decade that you don’t know about because you didn’t get the opportunity to explore the unknown deep enough to find it, yet most of us know that there is this thing out there.. Because we can feel it.

We are curious beings by nature and we are curious to learn what makes us feel things.. Mix the freedom to explore with the idea that tomorrow is taken care of and you and up with a special type of freedom:

Freedom to Pursue Passions

This type of freedom is an extremely interesting one, because it’s not done for monetary gain. You don’t go fishing to make money, you don’t play video games, build ships in a bottle or spend time with your pet for profit.. You do it because it makes you feel good inside.

Passions require time and we know time is valuable.

Passions require money and money requires time to make money.

This is the true underlying purpose of wealth, that of creating time for the things you WANT TO DO and not HAVE TO DO.

True wealth is being able to choose where your time goes!

Life should be lived passionately, yet most people forgo their passions away because they do not fit with the demands of a busy society, but without passions one can never be happy.

Although passions are not a necessity for survival, they are a necessity for a life well lived – which is why most fall short.

Every time you trade a piece of yourself, there’s less of you left. Trade enough of who you are and you won’t be left with anything.

The purpose of wealth is to allow your passions to craft an enjoyable existence for you.. Actually, it’s beyond that… the purpose of wealth is to allow you the freedom to be who you want to be and not what they expect you to be.

If you want to start over and live the life that you want, not what others expect from you, check out 15 Steps to Reinvent Yourself and Start Over.

This is the final freedom we will discuss about today:

Freedom From Self & Society

What do we mean when we say freedom from Self? There’s a little voice inside your head that you probably know very well, that keeps trying to push you in one direction. Although it’s coming from within you, it’s not your words the voice is speaking, but the words of everyone you’ve met, it’s the voice of society.

The voice wants you to get a safe job, to settle down, to fit. It says so even those you have yet to shape yourself properly. The way society makes people fit is by crushing them into the empty hole it finds in the immediate vicinity of the individual.

This is why most people’s entire lives are wrapped up in the immediate environment. You’ve met your partner on a 30 minute radius from where you live. You found your job in the same area and you now own a suboptimal apartment there, but it’s all rather convenient for your current lifestyle.

There are 2 selves within us:

There is the true self – the one where if every door was open for us we would eventually become and there’s another identity dictated by what we think society wants us to be.

Wealth allows you to put distance between your reality and that pestering voice. True wealth is making peace with your mind, being free of that voice, of the worries it brings with everything else.

It allows you to not feel the need to impress people, to not play pretend just for status.

Wealth allows you to be happy with who you are and change if that is what one desires.

Who and what we are should be in constant change. We are not puzzle pieces meant to be inserted in specific gaps to fill in someone else’s picture.. we are more like colors that can go on a canvas.

The purpose of wealth is to allow you to become the painter with said colors, whatever you want, without feeling the need to get the approval of others just for the pleasure of painting.

But wealth has other purposes than just freedom, and next Sunday we will take a look at the Security wealth brings but this is only if you, the Aluxers found this valuable.