Safety or Meaning. Never Both.
The below is an excerpt from my upcoming book: The 9 Steps to Build a Life of Meaning.
My toughest negotiations always involve long-term investments. I am always negotiating the purchase or the sale of a real estate or private equity investment.
Investing is not an act of taking but of giving. Your money is given to an entrepreneur to take a risk on his success. So, wealth building is not an act of greed but of trust. But how does the wealthy man avoid becoming greedy? How does the successful man refrain from building his ego?
The solution for both the rich and the poor — in nonprofit work and investing — is precisely the same: generosity.
The rich man’s generosity, when he gives anonymously, destroys his own greed by proving to himself that he neither needs the safety of that money nor does the money control him. But his gift also does something else: it serves as a salve to cure the plight of the needy. And perhaps the same selfless act serves both master and servant. Rich and poor.
Those who heal others may hope to be healed themselves.
"Those who heal others may hope to be healed themselves."
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To invest and to give away become the same thing if your heart is right. But you must be competent in your dealings — never lazy but wise.
Because if you are wise, you will begin to notice that the handful of people who left the world a significantly better place sowed not only their money but their very lives, into an effort more relevant than their selfish desires. And their chosen relevant work produced a harvest greater than those investing sowers could have ever imagined. George Washington has never been wealthier in relevance than he is now — 250 years after his death. He traded the planting of apple seeds at Mount Vernon, for the planting of his life to sprout America. His blood is the seed of our freedom.
You reap what you sow. Your seed, the sweat of your brow, must be planted if you ever hope to have a harvest, or a tree to shade you. The investment funds must be handed over if you ever want a return, or even to keep up with inflation.
Uninvested talent, seeds, genius, capital, and fathers all become nothing.
"The work you don’t do evaporates your future."
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The work you don’t do evaporates your future.
Rick
