PURPOSE of WEALTH
There are some pretty big differences between the terms wealth, money, and your position in the social hierarchy. Out of all three 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're going to discuss the idea of wealth as a facilitator of different kinds of freedom.
Life [Music] 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 cannot really be said with money. Even if you earn a lot of money, one can still have money problems. The most direct type of freedom that wealth solves is freedom from money problems. The debate on whether or not money can make you happy is still ongoing, but one thing is for certain: lack of money will definitely make you unhappy.
Much of our unhappiness comes from our inability to go through life comfortably and unstressed. 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 of these years is enough to keep them going until the day they eventually die. But many people struggle financially until the very end, with 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 is when that house goes from a liability to an asset, and wealth is made of value-generating assets. The notion of escaping money problems through money-generating assets is nothing new. Okay, but every generation has its own version of a wealth-building protocol.
If back in the day a cow was the go-to asset because it gave milk and meat, and both of these could be consumed and sold, the wealth of an individual was determined by how many cows, sheep, and chickens they had. The fundamental money problems are food and 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 cannot afford the luxury of working on their own mental state if their kids have nothing to eat. The purpose of wealth is to free the individual from money problems. Food is taken care of, bills are taken care of, and the future is predictable enough to feel safe going into tomorrow because you've got enough wealth to give yourself a fighting chance.
Which takes us to the next type of freedom that 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 with timing, money, and mental fortitude. If you're 23 years old with no family and minimal overall expenses, you could start and fail multiple times. But what if you're 40 years old with a family of two children, where the family needs your salary to survive? Can you afford to quit your job and work for the next five years on your startup without pay? Probably not.
This is one of those incredible advantages that people born into wealthy families have. Although everybody dislikes the kids of the rich because they didn't do anything to deserve that privileged situation they find themselves in, deep down, we are all hypocrites because we all wish that 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've 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 and movie-making. Because you were able to build wealth first, you can afford to pursue painting or making movies for the next ten years because even if it doesn't work out, you're still going to be fine.
There is a very smart saying from—we believe it was Nassim Taleb—who said, "If you want to be a philosopher king, first become the king, and then the philosopher, not the other way around." The purpose of wealth is for you to have that safety net that allows you to try things that you find interesting. Because we are very complex creatures that are forced by the environment into tiny little boxes, all in the hopes of efficiency and increased productivity, which, once again, brings us to the next type of freedom that wealth allows you to go after, and that is the freedom to explore.
We are all multifaceted 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, "Now, what do you want to be when you grow up?" Many of them are living lives they have not selected for themselves. Most people do not know what they are because they can't 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; what interests you in one period of your life might not maintain that same interest later on, and that should come naturally 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 that you're 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.
So now we move on to the freedom to pursue passions. This type of freedom is an extremely interesting one because it's not done for monetary gain at all. Most people 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 money, and money requires time to make money. This is the true underlying purpose of wealth: that of creating time for things that you want to do, not that you have to do.
True wealth is being able to choose where your time goes. Although passions are not a necessity for survival, they are a necessity for a life well lived, which is why so many people fall short. Now we're moving on to the freedom from self and society because there's a little voice inside your head that you probably know very well that keeps trying to push you in one direction or another. Although it's coming from within you, it's not your words the voice is speaking; it's 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 in. It says to do all of those things even though you haven't even shaped yourself properly yet. 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 so many people's entire lives are wrapped up in their immediate environment. You've met your partner within a 30-minute radius from where you live. You found your job in the same area, and now you own a mediocre apartment there. But it's all rather convenient for your current lifestyle.
There's the true self, the one where if every door was open for us, we would eventually become them, and there's another identity created 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 and 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 whatever you're not happy with.
Who and what we are should be in constant flux. We are not puzzle pieces meant to be inserted into specific gaps to fill someone else's picture forever. We're more like colors filling a canvas. The purpose of wealth is to allow you to become a painter with those 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 in our next part, we'll take a look at the security that wealth brings.
In the first part, we discussed wealth as a facilitator of freedom. Now we're going to discuss wealth in a different light, one of protection, safety nets, and more. Now, since our early days as humanity, the ones who survived the storm carried their genes forward and in time we understood just how important shelter and survival are. So let's discuss the role of wealth in this process of survival and protection.
The first one we'll cover is also the most obvious one: physical security. Because through wealth, one can directly protect the health of those sitting under the wealth umbrella. This is why wealth gives the bearer a great unfair advantage. It gives you that slight edge that might allow you to escape death's grip where others wouldn't be able to. The most direct example is medical costs where you don't have to start a GoFundMe hoping it'll go viral to take care of your child's surgery. You just pay for the best medical treatment that your wealth can buy because money buys you a fighting chance.
And this is why rich people buy expensive SUVs. Your chances of survival are better than if you were driving a less secure car. Rich people understand this and leverage their fortunate position to protect themselves and those they love. In terms of physical security, you can even look beyond that, where wealthy individuals can move their family out of less safe environments, while the average person is stuck in the environment they're born in.
The rich, through the power of wealth, simply pick up their loved ones and move everyone across the world to get their family out of harm's way. As an individual, you're responsible for your own physical security and that of your inner circle. No matter the dimension of your wealth, you should carefully consider how to deploy a good portion of it to provide this type of security.
Now, immediately after the one where you actually could die is the next type of security that wealth can facilitate: security from poverty and all that comes with it. All the pain and sometimes misery. We are hierarchical creatures, and although money doesn't buy you happiness, it sure as hell can get rid of a lot of sources of unhappiness. Wealth is meant to solve this for you. It's there to make sure that you and those you care about will never return to a state where you have to worry about keeping the lights on, or heating your home, or putting food on the table.
This is the fundamental reason why you should focus on building wealth. Apart from building lifestyle, greater wealth will carry a greater lifestyle, but a lifestyle that outweighs the wealth will make everything crumble. What would happen if you became incapacitated and unable to work for the next 12 months? Would your family be okay? How much of your lifestyle would be impacted? Maybe poverty isn't an immediate worry for the majority of you, but what about debt?
Today's society runs on debt. Almost everyone out there has this gloomy dark cloud of debt following them everywhere they go. Can you imagine having this burden off your shoulders, to know that you are free? A common mistake that people make is believing a well-paying job is the same as security from poverty, but they're mistaken. Nobody gets rich working for someone else, and those who have invested in themselves and gotten the axe—well, they know this well.
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All right, back to the topic at hand: after security from poverty, the next type of security that wealth provides is security through diversification. For as long as you can remember, wealthy individuals in history were pictured as having incredible amounts of gold. That's why treasure chests were always filled with gold coins. The true purpose of wealth is to completely remove the financial burden from the individual. The only way to truly achieve this is by having multiple sources of income independent from you.
If there's one thing you remember from this entire series on wealth, where doing it's this: as long as you live, if you manage to create multiple sources of income that do not rely on your input to generate income, then you'll be free, rich, and never have to worry about money. Diversification means that your wealth bubble can sustain multiple cracks without breaking so you can afford to take hits. Because even if you fail a little bit, you're still at the top of the mountain.
In essence, diversification is not about avoiding failure altogether, as no investment is entirely risk-free. Instead, its purpose is to minimize the potential harm to one's overall financial well-being by spreading resources across multiple income streams. You create a safety net that ensures your wealth system can endure and thrive, no matter if something breaks.
And this type of diversification of income protects you from the next type of event: security from Black Swan events. Now a Black Swan event refers to something that is statistically unlikely to happen but does happen every once in a while. The pandemic was a Black Swan event, for example. The poor were the hardest hit. We've all heard Ellen complain about how terrible quarantine was from her $27 million compound, plus access to high-quality medication 24/7.
Wealth gives you an unfair advantage to be okay when everyone else would be in complete panic mode. But the benefits of wealth extend well beyond mere protection. In many cases, the wealthy stand to gain from Black Swan events. While the pandemic wreaked havoc on global markets, causing widespread turmoil and financial losses for many, others seized the unique opportunities that emerged amidst the chaos. Wealth not only insulates you from the worst effects of Black Swan events but it also gives you the opportunity to acquire undervalued assets.
And lastly, social security. And no, we're not talking about your social security number here. Discrimination is playing an incredibly nefarious role in our society, and to some degree, wealth can shelter you from it. Success, fame, and wealth serve the same purpose: security through elevation. Wealth goes beyond your skin tone, your accent, or your birthplace. It levels the playing field amongst participants, and it's hard to look down on someone who's wealthier than you.
The purpose of wealth is to protect you against any type of hard mental, physical, emotional, or spiritual problem. If you want your kids to be safe, become wealthy. Which is why we're now passing this question on to you: what is one time in your life where wealth could have brought you security but you didn't have it? What if you could flip a switch and starting tomorrow you could be someone else in a new country, with a new name, a new identity, and the world is your oyster? Wealth allows you to do just that.
It can open up doors, get you citizenships, and make new homes for you if that's what you decide to deploy it toward. Because wealth is always welcomed wherever it goes, and because you have it, you'll be welcomed too.
As much as people would like to brush it off as unimportant, comfort is actually the third reason why people crave wealth, and one that is justifiable in its pursuit. Because what is comfort if not the minimization of pain and misery? Comfort is what allows the individual to go through life and focus on pleasure and well-being. Now, the first big part of comfort is not external; it has to do with what's inside the body.
Comfort through food. Everything we put into our body and environment alters the way we experience life. One of the greatest benefits of wealth is that it'll allow you to improve these based on your personal needs and long-term benefits. For the average person, healthy food has become a luxury and an inconvenience. It's easier to grab some takeaway than to fix yourself a salad, and oftentimes it's even cheaper. People eat unhealthy food because of convenience and on a second layer, because of financial reasons. Wealth serves as a facilitator for quality intake of energy and resources.
When you eat well, you feel great, and feeling great is just a form of comfort. Your body doesn't hurt, your muscles are strong, and your brain functions at a higher capacity. You feel amazing, and for our earliest ancestors, food was quite literally wealth. Those who had access to food sources were deemed the wealthiest because they didn't have to struggle or fight for survival. That's just how big of an impact food has on our comfort levels.
And if you look for a layer on top, you'll find comfort through shelter. Shelter is the combined outcome of freedom and security. It's your own corner of the universe that you've designed to fit with who you are to the best of your ability. You've made this little empire, and you are the emperor. Your home is where you'll spend, on average, two-thirds of your entire life—one-third you'll be in your bed sleeping.
The purpose of wealth is to facilitate for you as much comfort throughout your life as possible. And nowhere is there more of a clear application than in your own home. Today, the average person cannot afford true comfort. As a society, we've chosen to prioritize economic development over the quality of life. People are now living in suboptimal conditions, in what is closer to self-pick cages than anything else. How can one be happy when you're living here? This is why you work hard; this is why you build wealth, so that nobody you care about will ever go back to these kinds of living conditions.
Which takes us to the third and what is possibly the most important type of comfort: child development in a comfortable environment. The good thing about growing up poor as a kid is you don't know you're poor, but inevitably you figure it out, and by that point, it's usually too late. The scars of growing up in poverty have already altered who you are as an individual, and these events now serve as your core decision-making factors. In a very small portion of these individuals, a fire starts burning up inside of them that allows them to escape poverty.
Even for them, this hunger never stops, while for the rest, they just settle for what's ironically comfortable to them: mediocrity. Mediocrity means putting up with what you wouldn't have to just because that's how things are. Discomfort, abuse, and discrimination are just a few pieces of what this lifestyle endures. Through wealth, one can shield the next generation from these scars. We all want our children to grow up healthy, to thrive, to be strong and vulnerable members of our society.
With wealth, one has the power to change the landscape, to give those who have the potential a fighting chance to follow what they truly feel like, not to do what they must do in the hopes of survival. And there are many types of comfort out there, but few seem more valuable than knowing your child is safe. Which takes us to the next type of comfort: comfort through privacy. Privacy means the world is leaving you alone to be yourself, to be peaceful, and comfortably away from other societal problems.
The more the world evolves, the more we begin to see privacy as one of the most essential elements of a comfortable and free life, especially with the way technology is evolving. In our opinion, privacy is a fundamental right of every individual. And it's not just us; they figured this one out in 1948 under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 12, which states: "No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with their privacy, family, home, or correspondence, nor to a tax upon their honor or reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks." 150 countries agreed to abide by this.
So what about social media actively using your data to make money? What about facial recognition software installed on CCTV cameras across the world? Nobody can live a truly comfortable life knowing that everything they do is being monitored and used against them, because that's not what freedom is fundamentally. Wealth gives you the power to go full incognito. It introduces a new word to your vocabulary: private.
You never realize just how much different elements affect your comfort, which takes us to the last comfort on this list: fun as emotional comfort. The purpose of wealth is to facilitate your well-being in all shapes and forms. Fun is an integral part of feeling alive. We all have a variety of desires, and a good portion of these can easily be fulfilled with capital, so why not use your wealth for fun? Almost every type of fun can be acquired through money, from adventures to travel to toys.
There's a certain feeling you get when that dose of dopamine hits you, and you receive a gift in whichever form it is. We are social creatures, and fun is a sharable concept. You can have fun with other people and share the dopamine-inducing source with others. What's the point of going through life without having fun? You know, that's where we think most people on Wall Street get the building wealth aspect wrong. Money and wealth are supposed to be facilitators of living, not the other way around. Some people live to work, while others work so they can live.
As long as you live, never forget this: make your money hit your goals, but remember to use it so that your life isn't just a financial high score. The concept of fun encompasses everything that makes your existence feel like it was worthwhile. Think about it: the most valuable things you have from your past are the fun memories you were able to collect. Nobody remembers their sixth paycheck, but we all remember hanging out late at night with our friends. Fun is emotional comfort.
Well, for some, fun comes from material toys; others find fun in connecting to the universe in an emotional sense. When you look at wealth as a source of comfort, you realize the holistic approach one must follow, from feeding your body, to protecting your body, to protecting your mind, and looking out for the future in the context of taking care of your soul. Wealth can do all of this for you if you know how to use it.
And for those of you still around, of course, we've got a bonus: comfort in a predictable future leads to happiness. We feel stressed because we're struggling to choose between what we want to do and what we have to do. If you take an iron bar and use force in two different points, it creates tension between them. That's why you're feeling stressed. We're unsure about the future. We're unsure everything is going to be fine because today is fine, yesterday was fine, and so was the day before.
There's tremendous value in having a predictable future that's aligned with your expectations on a deep level. Happiness is the highest form of comfort. Think about it: we're happy when our reality matches up with our expectations of what reality should be. These are the types of questions we need to ask ourselves in order to figure out where to focus our efforts. And by being here and consuming this type of content, you're pushing yourself toward personal progress.
And that's exactly what we'll discuss in part four of this series: progress in all of its wonderful forms. And 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, and make progress in any form eventually survive 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, and the true purpose of wealth is to do just that. Because money and wealth are the latest iteration in the game of progress. But here's the catch: it all starts with you—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. 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, you 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 are 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, axer, 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 anyone should know is to seek progress, not perfection.
As long as you live, please remember this. And 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. But it's kind of hard to track your progress if you're not measuring anything. And with the Alux app, you can do exactly that.
We created the Alux app to be your own executive coaching tool right in your pocket. Together, we work to understand your emotional wellness, financial wellness, physical health, relationship health, and your intellect, and we work hand in hand to enhance them all with customized learning paths designed for you and your journey. Scan the QR code on screen right now to get yourself a yearly subscription for 25% off.
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 on the riverbank. Over time, we've learned to measure wealth and success differently than just through 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 all the blessings in 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 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, making 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 the 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 will require a different type of approach than the one that got you to the first $1 million. It's the same with happiness and even with health. If you got yours, we feel it's time to mobilize the troops and see what can be done for the well-being of your inner circle.
If it's not the money, then it's your knowledge and insight that will prove 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 off with yourself, move on to your inner circle, and only then can you expand to your local 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. So 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 just didn't have to? There's an old saying that goes, it takes a village to raise a child. But who takes care of the village? If each of the village members takes from the village enough for them to get away with it, well, what happens to the village in the long term?
We’re all brought up by communities, and it's 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 else isn't money, although money does help; it’s tools and instructions on how to use those 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 is up to you to change the game. You didn't like what school taught you? Well help them to teach better. Your community didn't support you? Well don't perpetuate that practice. No, instead, be what the community should have been to you when you were starting out. The community only changes if those who changed already stay and help the community to do the same.
If you're able to help your community thrive, well guess what? Your solution works with other communities too. 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 shitty 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 that 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 eventually die, and we 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 this 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. As long as you live, remember that the light bulb 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?
Look at wealth as fuel for progress and deploy yours toward whichever progress phase you find yourself in. Beyond progress is truth. We're all hungry for truth; we always have been. All the progress we do in all of its shapes and forms gets us closer to that truth. What that truth is, well, nobody knows, but as time progresses, so does our understanding of it. We don't like illnesses, so we want to cure them. We don't like when others treat us poorly, so we try to cure our social issues.
All of this progress just so we can afford to shine a bigger, brighter light so that more of that truth is revealed to us. We are tiny beings stuck on this floating rock that's been revolving around a giant flaming ball of gas for 4.2 billion years—or at least that's the best estimate of our truth. The more you think about it, it all falls away when you zoom out on the picture and realize all of the progress humanity has made until this point is so it allows us to find more of the truth and, through it, progress even more.
But before we conquer the unknowns of the universe, we need to find the truth within ourselves and expand from there. The more we do, the more society rewards us because of it. So what is there for those who've already won the wealth game? Well, there’s only one thing left for society to give them: something far more valuable than money itself, and that thing is legacy.
We all want our lives to have meaning, right? To leave behind more than we took and to know that because of us, even in the slightest, the world is better than we found it. The final purpose of wealth is to facilitate your legacy. So what is legacy if not eternal impact? Legacy is when you're silent, but your presence is felt. It comes from the highest form of impact one could ever have.
The thing is, though, you don't set out to build a legacy; it happens as a result of your pursuit of adding value. The more you think about it, the more you realize it’s the same with success and even with money. All of them come after you do good work. People take notice, and this is the first type of legacy: legacy through example. You are writing your legacy every single day, so be aware of what you're writing.
How can an individual be themselves if all they do is be like everyone else? You see, there are two ways to go through life: one by getting on the train of life and riding it in your cabin until the day you die, and two by walking, swimming, and riding your way to the final destination that we call death. We all get to that same destination, but the value lies in the journey. The second option is always more interesting than living your life on autopilot.
That's how new roads come to be: someone like you decides to create a new path for themselves and the world is paying attention. If you do it successfully, soon after, others will decide to walk the same path. But there needs to be a trailblazer, the risk-taker, the one who enters the tall grass not knowing what awaits. You can't build legacies by being like everyone else or doing what everyone else is doing.
As the people early in the comments know, there's only one reward for being first; everyone else is a follower. The world remembers those who are first—those who are first to do it right, those who are first to take everyone else somewhere they've never been. The purpose of wealth is to make sure the legacy you're writing is worth reading. And by doing this, your legacy is worth saving.
For the next type of legacy, that has to do with saving everything of value: legacy through preservation. What is the purpose of life if not spending it on that which will outlast you? The more you look back, the more you realize that the only things we're seeing are what others have left behind for us that we're able to withstand the test of time. Preservation of value is key. There's value in knowledge preserved in books.
There's value in art and the way it makes us feel. There’s value in architecture and the way we build the future based on it. There's value in diversity—diversity of humans, of animals, of plant life. Save it all before we're unable to save anything. The purpose of wealth is to give us all a fighting chance to save everything, including ourselves. Allow all of it to thrive, and we will thrive because of it. We draw value from it all.
And if one is paying attention, in the last century, we've been sacrificing the long game for short-term rewards. If you want to build a legacy, keep in mind to save what needs saving and rid ourselves of that which doesn't serve society. Which takes us to the third form of legacy: social legacy. Legacy is not what you're doing for yourself but for everyone coming up next. The world rewards those who are brave enough to correct it.
In a world augmented by creative ideas, there's no need for hierarchies. We don't need a caste system; we don't need race, sex, religion, height, eye color, or political affiliation to stop us from progress. It doesn't matter if we are or are not created equal, for what the world needs is equality of opportunity. Anyone from anywhere in the world could build the future through the value of their ideas.
There's a big difference between equality of outcome and equality of opportunity. One leads to society collapsing, and one to society thriving. It's those who are fighting for the latter who are building a social legacy for themselves. Social legacy comes from the sacrifice of the self for the benefit of everyone else, and that's exactly what we see in the people who've managed to garner social legacy.
The purpose of wealth is not to turn you into a freedom fighter but to give aid to those whose mission is the minimization of suffering in all its forms. The world is changing fast, so you're either going to ride the wave of change or you might drown with it. And the best way to secure your legacy is through being the one who brings the new wave.
Legacy through innovation: first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. Every innovator is in one of those four brackets. Are they fighting you? Laughing at you? Are they ignoring you? Or did you win? If not, keep playing that game until you do. Legacy is when you need no introduction. People know you because you've touched their lives in a positive way, and because of it, your reputation precedes you.
The world remembers the innovators. If you want to be wealthy and leave behind a legacy, well, be contrarian and be right. Who cares what they think if you can prove it? So prove it. Prove them wrong. If it doesn't exist yet, then build it. Put your mind where your mouth is, and the world will thank you and tip its hat toward you. A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they know they will never sit.
Your innovations might be the stepping stone for future generations. We need innovators; we need game changers. We need people to throw out the status quo and bring us into the future. Which brings us to the last on this list: legacy by domino. If innovation relies on figuring out a new solution to an old problem, this cannot happen without discovery. Discovery is the first domino piece in a chain that takes us to places we didn't even know we wanted to go.
The personal computer was an incredible innovation, but it was only after we connected to the internet that we realized just how big of an impact it can have. But without the computer, we wouldn't have been able to build the internet. Without the internet, we wouldn't have built blockchain. Legacy comes from this layer or domino style of thinking. Everyone who gets rich and makes fortunes relies on one of these new layers to begin their legacy: IBM with the computer, Bill Gates with software, Steve Jobs with the iPhone, Sergey with Google, Vitalik with Ethereum, and now people are building on top of that.
That's where the saying, "We are standing on the shoulders of giants" comes from, and we've all got plenty of giants that did the heavy lifting for us. If you don't have wealth, use the most recent layer to build your fortune, and then use said wealth to open up the future for what's coming next. We might end up living in virtual worlds, exploring space and bending time. We might live happily ever after once we transcend to gods and live eternally as code. And today is just a part of that journey.
You are part of that journey. So ask yourself, Alexer, what is your legacy? What will the world remember you by? How can you help to build a better tomorrow? Hopefully, this video has served its purpose as a domino piece in your journey, and we can't wait to hear where it takes you. And as for those of you still watching, of course, we've got a bonus for you.
And that bonus is knowing that everything is a choice. For as long as you live, remember that everything we do is a choice. Everything we do will be the result of a choice that we make toward having it. We become what we choose to become. Every single action we take is a choice. We like to think that we've got no choice, but you chose to watch this video, didn't you? You chose to open up the internet today. You chose to get out of bed this morning.
When thinking about wealth and the purposes which it serves—freedom, security, comfort, progress, and legacy—most people think of it in terms of a desire: something we wish we could have, instead of thinking of it as a choice. In a world where everything is at your disposal, your reality is a choice as well. Now, what we're about to say will sound pretty controversial, but the more deeply you think about it, the more you realize it's true.
In our world of free information, staying ignorant is a choice. In our world of unlimited teachers, staying unskilled is a choice. In our world of abundance, staying poor is a choice. In a world where there is still suffering, not doing anything about it is also a choice. Practice what you learn. Start small, follow the progress model, and see where it takes you. We will always be here for you, the true Alexer, to guide you along your journey.
Because doing this cements our own legacy. Through some serendipitous turn of events, we found each other, and we couldn't be more proud to share this leg of the journey with you. No matter how far you've come, the rest of your journey starts right now. If you feel ready to build your future, write the word now in the comments. Let's see how big the Alux family really is.