If I Was A Rich Man
If I had all the money in the world, would I be wealthy?
LinkedIn recently turned fifteen. To celebrate this, they invite you to share the life you envisioned for yourself when you were fifteen years old:
Celebrate LinkedIn's 15th birthday by sharing what you wanted to be #WhenIWas15.
That's a nice marketing campaign, don't you think. It did trigger me and made me go back to the time when I was fifteen. What did I want to be, and who did I want to become? And how does that compare to where I am now, ten years later?
Like any fifteen-year-old, I probably wanted to become rich, so that I could do anything I wanted without worrying about how much it cost. But then another thought hit me. A deeper one, if you will. So in response to LinkedIn's invitation, I shared the following:
#WhenIWas15, I wanted to be rich.
Now I’m 25, and I still want to be rich. But different.
Get it? Let me tell you the story of Victor.
"Now I am rich"
The Dutch TV-program The Reunion reunites people from high school and features some of their lives. Last month, one of the reunited people was Victor. When Victor was around fifteen years old, he was interested in a lot of things, but school was not one of them. He skipped lessons as much as possible, for example by enrolling into some kind of technical committee of students that exempted him from some classes. He did anything to have freedom, and to do what he wanted to do himself.
Did this "bad behavior" in school mean that Victor sucked in his professional life? On the contrary: he managed to get himself into the IT world at the right time, allowing him to earn enough money so that he could retire at the age of 53.
A workaholic to the max is what you could call him. With working hard every day, Victor earned himself the money he always dreamed of. Because money allows you to do the impossible, to do what you did not do before. To travel and see the world. The possibilities are endless.
But with all the money Victor now had, did he feel rich? When he was asked why he stopped working (apart from having saved enough money to do so), he said:
Enough is enough, now I want to return something to the world.
And he did.
While he was on a trip to Uganda, Victor visited the high-security Kigo Prison. When he entered for the first time, he couldn't believe what he saw. He was shocked by the conditions in which the inmates had to live. He couldn't just stand by and do nothing, so he decided to make it his life's work to improve the horrific circumstances.
Among other things, he set-up a program that lets inmates follow all kinds of education. The beauty of the system he designed is that the inmates are both students and teachers at the same time. By prisoners, for prisoners, you could say.
Thanks to Victor's efforts, Kigo Prison is now the place where every convicted man in Uganda wants to serve his sentence. They want to be with the man they call Musana: the Bringer of Light.
And Victor? He couldn't be happier. During all those years in which he cared so much for the prison and its inmates, he had discovered a new meaning. To quote him:
Until I was 53, my life was about making money.
Only now I am rich.
The New Rich
It's a big question: when do you say that you're rich? Is it when you have enough money to be able to call yourself financially independent? Or is it when you are in the process of fulfilling your life's destiny, your why?
My feelings say that it's the latter. It also resonates with what Tim Ferriss calls The New Rich in his book The 4-Hour Work Week. Quoted from his website:
The New Rich are those who abandon the deferred-life plan and create luxury lifestyles in the present using the currency of the New Rich: time and mobility.
Being rich not determined by money, but by having created the time and mobility to be able to work from wherever you are and whenever you want. Inspired by Victor's story, I would like to add another property to this definition: fulfillment.
Sure, it's important to earn at least enough money with the work that you do to be able to not think about it. But even if you don't have a stable income, it's way more important to be rich because you are living by your why than being rich because your bank account shows six or more digits. Because that feeling of fulfillment is what will determine the greatness of your life. Only that, and nothing else.
Thanks for reading this story. If you want, please enter the conversation. What does being rich mean to you? Are you rich when you have a lot of money or are there other ways (like Victor's) that make you feel rich? I very much like to hear your thoughts on the topic!
