Cultivating a rich life
Q: How do you define wealth?
Kinnari’s Dialogue
“Money’s greatest intrinsic value—and this can’t be overstated—is its ability to give you control over your time.” - Morgan Housel, The Psychology of Money
I've thought more about financial wealth building in the past couple years than I ever have in my entire life. Few things have led to this - baby # 2 (raising kids is expensive!), stock market ups and downs (to see your security blanket snatched away so suddenly is scary!) and having my two closest friends and brother semi-retire early (when will I have all the free time in the world!).
I spent my twenties and early thirties not paying much attention to money. This led to some lucky mistakes - holding on to company stock that I didn't know I had for years until it had appreciated a lot, but also some terrible ones that I prefer not to dwell on. While renting apartments in San Francisco, my father advised me to invest in buying a house. I didn't listen. I assumed I couldn't afford it without spending any time looking into the numbers. Didn’t I need a partner to pitch into buying a house? Years later when I finally made my first down payment I realized how wrong I was.
Over the last five years I've felt conflicted with my time - Should I go all in and build more financial wealth over the next five years or take a small break to design what I want the next phase of my life to be about? I've realized that true wealth, besides having a healthy body, a peaceful mind and love in your life, includes having complete control over your time. The question that I've pondered over is - how much is enough? Would it be okay to give up certain luxuries I enjoy for having the freedom of time? Here are some words from my journal that show me grappling with this very issue --
To lie in bed on a Monday morning
after the kids have gone to school
and the house is empty
To read to my heart's content
Close my eyes and turn towards that inner silence
Such luxury
How shall I liberate myself?
Are the shackles I fret about even real?
On mornings like these, absolutely not
On other days, within the external structures, very much so
Is it the world of Business & Commerce
I must give into? Or can I choose instead
to live amongst words and feelings
emotions and art and beauty?
This business of money making
How much longer must I dwell in here?
—
Recently, Mitali sent me the article she references below about Sahil Bloom’s book - The 5 Types of Wealth. In doing research for this post, I ended up watching his talk at Google. After a conversation with a friend about how Sahil was probably only going to see his parents 15 more times (given that he lived on the opposite coast and that his parents were in their 60s), Sahil ended up having a discussion with his wife about what they wanted to build their life around. He then quit his job, they sold their house in California and moved back to the east coast to be closer to his family changing the "15 times" to several hundred times by living closer to their parents. This journey led him down the path to identifying the different types of wealth, to understand what mattered to him, to step off the path and focus on the bigger picture. To redefine his scoreboard so he was not just focused on the one thing at the expense of everything else. Here's some added definition to the 5 types of wealth:
Time wealth - freedom to choose how you spend your time, who you spend it with, where you spend it when you trade it for other things. It's about an awareness of time as your most precious asset.
Social wealth - your relationships, the few close deep bonds and also your connection to the larger circles that extend beyond yourself
Mental wealth - purpose, growth, creating the space necessary in life to wrestle with some of the bigger picture questions. This can include spirituality, meditation, solitude etc.
Physical wealth - health and vitality. Taking controllable actions on a daily basis to fight the natural decay that your body is going to go through as you age
Financial wealth - Money but with the specific nuance of what it means for you to have enough, to build your life of enough.
“Expectations are your single greatest financial liability. If you allow your expectations to grow faster than your assets you will never feel wealthy.”
- Sahil Bloom
In the talk, the host asked Sahil for his favorite type of wealth during this season of his life. Sahil’s response - which I realized mirrored mine as I heard it being articulated - "It is very hard to enjoy any of the other types of wealth if you don't have the texture that relationships provide. No one dreams of being on a yacht or a private jet by themselves. Social wealth is what provides the depth and meaning for you to enjoy the other types of wealth." It is through relationships with my family and my friends that I experience true richness. Every day but especially this last weekend when we celebrated Mother's Day, I was struck by how blessed I am. I got to be on the receiving end of immense love exhibited through hand-drawn cards with misspelled words and tight cuddles and giggles from my daughters and thoughtful gifts from my husband including the gift of time away from the family to recharge.
So what does this all mean? Pursuing financial wealth was hard enough now we have to pursue all of these? The host asked Sahil another good question by surfacing the quote "jack of all trades, master of none" - do we risk the same by trying to pursue all these types of wealth? No, of course not. It doesn't work like that - you and I both know that. We don't need Sahil Bloom to tell us that. I have been working on all of these other types of wealth throughout my life and feel wealthy enough. But I'll give you his response anyway because the guy once again articulated it better than I could.
“The reality is that the mindset you need to have is not that you are going to have a perfect balance across all of them but that you are not going to turn off any of them. If you turn off health as an example through your thirties and forties then it's very hard to catch up in your fifties and sixties. Or if you don't show up for your friends when they need you, they may not be around for you later in life. Through various stages you'll lean into some over others but just don't turn off.. keep it on the down low. What does down low mean? Invest some tiny thing to continue to move the ball forward in that area with the recognition that anything above zero compounds. Do the tiny thing on a daily basis. It avoids the atrophy, and avoids shutting that area off.”
Mitali’s Dialogue
Last month as I was catching up with an old friend after a long time, our conversation veered towards the choices and levels of satisfaction we have with the lives we lead today. She said - “I would love to lead the life you have today.” She was referring to the freedom that she noticed I had built into different dimensions of my life. The conversation caught me off guard as I had been feeling unmotivated and disillusioned about my current situation for a couple of months. Her comment forced me to question the discontent I was feeling. What if I evaluated my life based on the freedom that different types of wealth have brought into my life over the past decade?
In today's society “wealth” is often measured by the money in our bank account or financial assets that we have built up over the years. Things we have that make us feel rich like our net worth. But in truth money isn't the only type of wealth we have. We do ourselves a disservice when we view it as a measure of success or happiness in our life.
“...I’ve met some billionaires that I would have no trouble describing as poor—not just because they had an endless desire for more (which was Seneca’s definition), but because their lives were a mess, because they were preposterously insecure, because they were estranged from their families, because they had few friends, because they didn’t take care of themselves.” — Ryan Holiday
In a post I recently read, the author, Ryan Holiday talks about feeling “poor” in certain aspects of his life despite being financially well-off. This was prompted by a conversation he had with Sahil Bloom who recently published the book “The 5 Types of Wealth: A Transformative Guide to Design Your Dream Life”. I haven't read the book but found the premise interesting - that we can look at wealth through five dimensions -
Financial
Time
Physical
Mental
Social
So in April I decided to use the following two frameworks to try and get a more holistic view of my life. These only provide a snapshot in time but it allows for some much needed perspective.
You can do an assessment of “wealth” in your life based on the book by Sahil Bloom mentioned above. I encourage you to pause and try it out - it only takes 10 minutes. The results might surprise you - maybe you are not as poor as you thought you were or maybe you need to make different choices to build up the wealth that you want.
The Wheel of Life exercise is another framework that you can use to assess your level of satisfaction with different aspects of your life. I have shared this in the past but doing it again pleasantly surprised me. My life wasn't as lopsided as I had imagined it to be. Ah if only I could hold onto this insight when the doubt arises!
Contentment - a way to assess true wealth
In January I wrote that one of my words for this year is “contentment” (with the other being “consistency”). It is a practice that I struggle with - being ok with what is. This is how I described the practice that I am attempting this year -
…Being satisfied with my existing practices. Finding fulfillment in the way my life is playing out. Being at peace with what is. Accepting the moment, not resisting or wanting things to be different.
Through various conversations with friends over the past month, I realized that my brain's negativity bias often had me focusing on one or two specific areas that I label as bad or lacking. There is a desire for things to change and dissatisfaction with the way things are. It is a constant practice to be satisfied with where I am.
What I gain from practicing contentment
The process of pausing to assess my present moment is quite therapeutic. I can short circuit the negativity bias of my brain when I take the time to honestly reflect on each of these aspects of wealth - financial, time, physical, mental and social. Maybe things are not so bad. When I ask myself - Can I frame this differently? - the story of my life changes. Everyone's life has its share of ups and downs, but if I widen my aperture to account for the different types of wealth in my life, I see that I have much to be grateful for.
This is not to say that we should paint an unrealistic rosy picture of our lives. But maybe we can challenge the old narrative that we have been telling ourselves about what we are facing in life. Life is a constant struggle, between reminding myself that life is good and not sinking into the depths of despair when things seem hard like dealing with the roller coaster of emotions from my special needs kid or my own depression episodes. When I act from a place of doubt, scarcity or disillusionment, I forget the types of wealth I have invested my time and energy in. With a balanced and robust view of my “wealth portfolio” I am able to acknowledge the choices I have made and celebrate the freedom they have afforded me. And then I find myself relaxing into the sensation that life is good.
