You Are Richer Than Midas
If you have an iPhone, you are literally richer than 99% of everyone who has ever lived on earth.
With just a touch of your finger, you can summon the world’s treasures to your doorstep. Even King Midas would envy your wealth. And better still, you’re not limited to merely gold:
The Arts
You can listen to millions of hours of songs whenever you want, wherever you want. The Royal Court of Salzburg had Mozart, but you have him too — as well as Bach, Beethoven, The Beatles, Billy Joel…
You can watch millions of hours of theater and film for pennies. Even the House of Medici, patrons of the Italian Renaissance, would be jealous — and they had Michelangelo himself.
You can read millions of pages of literature, from Homer to J.K. Rowling, and choose to increase the font size at your will. The Library of Alexandria was lost to fire, but your library is eternally safe via Cloud technology.
The Sciences
You can learn from Aristotle, Newton, and Rockefeller despite the time and space separating you from them. Alexander the Great conquered the known world before he was 25, but even he couldn’t bring his teacher’s Lyceum with him across Asia Minor.
You can engineer a bridge to hundreds of millions of potential customers. At its peak, the Roman Empire for all of its bridges had but only two million citizens travelling them.
Health & Comforts
You can purchase Egyptian cotton, oriental silks, and French wine without leaving your bed. The Silk Road stretched from the Mediterranean to Persia to China, but it took months to traverse and was infested with robbers.
You can taste hundreds of flavors and medicate yourself for most discomforts and illnesses. Until one-hundred years ago, coffee was a luxury and until 50 years ago, ibuprofen was non-existent.
You can meet millions of (single) like-minded people from any corner of the earth. Moctezuma, an Aztec ruler, had over 4,000 concubines, but he was notorious for frowning in anger (in part because he never actually found that special someone).
The list goes on and on. But the question is this:
What are you doing with all of your wealth?
Are you like Midas, surrounded by all of your riches but starving for fulfillment? Or are you like your iPhone’s creator, investing in yourself through hard work? It’s easier than ever before to reshape the world — and yourself — into gold. We have so many opportunities to update our OS X, to discover new apps that enrich our lives, and recharge our motivation batteries.
Don’t plateau — climb.
Today, it’s been two years since your iPhone’s creator died, but I think it repays to revisit his vision of the world:
Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you, and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.
We have so much capital to work with that at times it may seem invisible, but it’s there. The clearer we see it, the more we can act on it.
I love to read and share what I’ve read. If you’re interested you can read along with me here: www.jonglat.com
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