A Calm Mind, a Fit Body, a House Full of Love

The last tweet on the topic of working for the long term is that when you're finally wealthy, you'll realize that it wasn't what you were seeking in the first place. But that's for another day; that's a multi-hour topic in and of itself.

First of all, I thought it was a really clever way to end the whole thing because it disarms a whole set of people who'd say, "Well, yeah, what's the point of getting rich?" There are a lot of people who just like the status signal, virtue signal against the idea of wealth creation or making money. So it was just a good way to disarm all of them. But it's also true in that the things that you really want in life, yes, money will solve all your money problems, but it doesn't get you everywhere.

The first thing you'll realize when you've made a bunch of money is that you're still the same person. If you're happy, you're happy; if you're unhappy, you're unhappy. If you're calm and fulfilled and peaceful, you're still that same person. I know lots of very rich people who are extremely out of shape. I know lots of rich people who have really bad family lives. I know lots of rich people who are internally a mess.

So, I would lean on another tweet that I put out, which is actually, when I think back on it, I think it's my favorite tweet of mine. It's not initially the most insightful; it's not nearly the most helpful; it's not even the one I think about the most. But I just went to look at it, and there's just such a certain truth in there that it just resonates.

And that is that a calm mind, a fit body, and a house full of love, these things cannot be bought; they must be earned. Even if you have all the money in the world, you can't have those three things. Jeff Bezos still has to work out. He still has to work on his marriage or whatever his next relationship is. And his internal mental state is still gonna be very much not controlled by external events; it's gonna be based on how calm and peaceful he is inside.

So, I think those three things—your health, your mental health, and your close relationships—are things that you have to cultivate. They can probably bring you a lot more peace and happiness than any amount of money ever will. So that's what I meant.

Now, how to get there is actually a tweet storm that I still need to put out. I've been working on it; I have probably a hundred tweets on it. It's just very hard to say anything on the topic without getting attacked from 50 different directions, especially these days on Twitter. So I've been hesitant to do it because I want to target it for a very specific kind of person.

There are a bunch of people who believe that working on your internal state is useful; they're focused on the external, and that's fine. There's nothing wrong with that; they should do that, and that's who my "how to get rich" tweet storm is for. There are a bunch of people who believe that the only thing worth working on is complete liberation, like you become the Buddha, and they'll attack anything in the middle as being useless. That's fine too, but most people aren't there.

So what I want to do is to create a tweet storm that is just very practical advice for everyday people who want to have a calmer internal state. Just a set of understandings, realizations, and truths; truths that if you were to imbibe them properly, and again these are just pointers to ideas and experiences that you already have, that if you keep these top of mind, slowly but steadily, it will help you with certain realizations that will lead you to a calm internal state. That's what I want to work on.

Fitness is another big one. I'm just not the expert there. There are plenty of good people on Twitter who are better at fitness than me, and I think loving households and relationships actually automatically fall out of the other things. If you have a calm mind, and if you've already made money, you should have good relationships; there's no reason why you shouldn't.

A lot of divorces actually happen over money; unfortunately, that's just the reality of it. So having money removes that part of it. A lot of external battles happen because your internal state is not good. When you're naturally internally peaceful, you're gonna pick fewer fights. You're gonna be more loving without expecting anything in return, and that will take care of things on the external relationship front.

So, money solves your money problems. Money buys you freedom in the material world. I think that was a tweet from your cutting room floor. Money lets you not do the things that you don't want to do. Yeah, to me, the ultimate purpose of money is so that you do not have to be in a specific place at a specific time doing anything you don't want to do.