Continuing on with the topic of money… I find it a bit of a challenge, but not too difficult to help others see how more of a financial abundance will make their lives more comfortable. One of the questions that often comes up in conversations about money and my goals regarding money, is “how much is enough?”. While I have set amounts for certain stages of my life, ultimately my answer is ‘the more, the merrier’. Now I’ll be honest here – I do not win people over to my side with that comment. You may be put off by that comment as well, so in this post I want to briefly explain the logic behind my reasoning.
Many of you realize that it takes money to do stuff – well, most stuff. I want to make it clear that I do not want to have a whole bunch of cash just for the sake of having it. I do want to have a whole bunch of cash in order to do things with it. Sure, having nice things and doing fun things, like travel, are part of the deal and will benefit mainly me and those who I travel with, as well as the people and businesses who will be on the receiving end of the transaction. However there are a lot of ideas and causes that I would like to support and be involved in, and it takes money to do that.
We can be frustrated with how the major automakers are ignoring the electric technology until the cows come home. But a few ambitious people took matters into their own hands, pulled some cash together, and started Tesla Motors. These are the types of things I am planning to be involved in. Will they make more money than they invested? I sure hope and expect that they will! Why shouldn’t they? They are providing an excellent product that benefits the world! Sounds to me like they HAVE to be compensated for their efforts. I also plan to do things like Doug Tompkins who is one of the founders of The North Face and ESPRIT. He took his fortune and bought acres upon acres of forest in Chile and with the vision of donating it back to the people as a protected national park.
So the more capital I have at my disposal, the more great things I will be a part of. And I think that is a worthy goal.
Another thing to consider are the answer to the questions, “how much love is enough?”, or “how much knowledge is enough?”, or “how much peace is enough?”. With all of these we do not put some arbitrary cap on it, so why do so with money?
I encourage you to think about the things that you would do with more capital and then start thinking in the direction of creating more of that capital!
Until next time,
V