PURPOSE of WEALTH (Pt1): FREEDOM

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. 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, and debt is 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 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 their 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, both of these could be consumed and could be 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 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 5 years on your startup without pay? Probably not.

This is one of those incredible advantages that people born into wealthy families have. And although everybody dislikes the kids of the rich because they didn't do anything to deserve that privilege 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. As far as we know, there's only one app specifically designed to increase the quality of your life in what we call the five pillars of a good life: money, health, intellect, emotions, and relationships.

We know about it because we've been building it for the past 2 years. Okay, over 200,000 people have downloaded our app so far, and they're blown away because they've never experienced something like the Alux app before. So go to alux.com/slapp right now. It's like a cheat code to life.

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 and movie-making. Because you were able to build wealth first, well, 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 going to be fine.

There's a very smart saying from— we believe it was Nim TB— 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're 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're 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 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; for 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. We'll see you back here next time. Aluxir, take care.