Very often you meet someone who is always chasing a moving life goal. An SUV after having bought a sedan. A house with an additional room. Or a higher retirement corpus after having accumulated one large enough. In this interesting essay, Kevin Kelly a founding editor of Wired and the writer of books like “1,000 True Fans” and “68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice”, runs a thought experiment and explores what happens when one has enough. Interestingly, having more money might NOT help you in any way.
He plays the wizard. “Imagine I am a wizard with a magic wand. I wave it over you and now you have a billion dollars. What would you do with your life? The price of things is no longer material.” The first answers are always the same – a house, a car, some travel, a gift for a friend. But there is a catch: “after all that you will still have a billion dollars. You’ve only spent millions… And you still have the problem of what you are going to do with your precious time.” Push past the shopping and the real answers arrive. Start a business, open a bakery, go pro with the band, serve the poor. Interestingly, “none of this requires anything close to a billion dollars.”
That is the whole point. “The bottleneck for most dreams is not financial. It’s a lack of confidence, willingness to take a risk, and face failure, or a lack of imagination of what is possible with current resources. If you want to write a novel you don’t need capital – you need discipline and 1,000 words a day. If you want to start a consultancy you need expertise and a first client, not a war chest.” Money, he writes, is “the fuel you need for a trip – but it is not the goal of the trip.” What you need instead is “time, skill, relationships, courage, and perseverance.”
There is a line here that any student of competitive advantage will want to underline. If cash could guarantee invention, Kelly points out, “all the new inventions would only happen in big corporations. They don’t, because you can’t buy breakthroughs. Startups have no money to buy a solution, so they are forced to be ingenious, clever, thrifty and bold to invent one.” The best moats, in other words, are built by the resource-constrained rather than bought by the cash-rich. Relationships do more heavy lifting than capital, too: “Investing into relationships is a better deal than investing into crypto,” and the things worth wanting are “actually things that no amount of money – especially a billion dollars – can buy.” Or, as Kelly likes to quote Brian Eno, “If all I’d ever wanted to do was make money, I’d probably be really poor by now.”
His most disarming evidence comes from the very top. Having “had the privilege of hanging around a dozen actual billionaires,” Kelly reports they are not unhappy – but “they are still trying to figure out what they want to do next, and who they want to become. And their billions of dollars don’t help them in that. In fact, their billions of dollars are almost a prison.” Their hurdles are “exactly the same as yours: the need for will power, perseverance, ingenuity and imagination. None of these cost a billion dollars; all of them are available to anyone anywhere.”
He ends where the essay has been heading all along. “The goal is not to acquire, but to become. At your funeral people will remember what kind of person you were, not what kind of stuff you had.” The wand, it turns out, is a trick. “You already have everything the wand would have given you – everything except the billion dollars – which, it turns out, you didn’t need.”
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