Lessons from the Ultra-Wealthy
"Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me." F. Scott Fitzgerald
I remember the first time I entered the inner sanctum of real wealth. It was a job interview in an apartment some sixty floors above the city. Central Park looked like a patch of grass framed by neat rows of Lego-like buildings. The city appeared like the model train sets I had played with as a boy.
This place was worth tens of millions of dollars and left my head spinning. I stopped thinking about the pros and cons of working for dynastic wealth. The scent of money overwhelmed my mind.
This was the first lesson I learned working for the ultra-wealthy. Money emits a force, like gravity. The more money, the stronger the effect. Few people can step into a fortune’s force field and not be affected by it. The rich know this. Some use it.
“You can tell what’s informing a society by what the tallest building is,” Joseph Campbell once said. I was surrounded by the spires of Manhattan. What informed America was money and these were its temples.
After finishing college in Germany, I moved to New York, married my sweetheart, and joined a bank as an analyst. Two years later, I just wanted out.
I’d never been excited about climbing the corporate ladder and felt drained from the late nights buried in Excel. Banking was supposed to be just a stepping stone. Through a chance encounter, I met a wealthy self-made investor who was looking to hire for his family office. I’d gone into finance to get rich doing something interesting. On a couch sixty floors above the city, I figured I’d found the perfect shortcut.
Everything about the apartment, its elevation, its ambiance, and the expensive art it housed, signaled the owner’s rise to the top of the pyramid. It hovered above the city like a silent helicopter, straining against its roots of steel and concrete. And yet I felt disconnected and isolated, a voyeur staring down at the busy streets. Once I started listening to my new mentor and learned about his very human concerns, I realized that this palace of money was no nirvana. The top of the pyramid offered no escape from the wheel of life.
That was lesson number two: money solves a lot of problems. What remains — like how to live a meaningful life, the conundrums of family and relationships, suffering, death — is the essence of life. By implication, to the extent these can be mastered or made peace with, it can be done independently of succeeding with money.
Also, if you ever get rich, get a townhouse, not a penthouse. Choose cozy over cold and impressive. Then again, the apartment had worked its magic on me. I accepted the job and spent the next six years working for two of New York’s ultra-wealthy families. The following are some lessons that stayed with me. If I had to summarize it: master your relationship to money or watch it master you.
The rich “are different from you and me,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote. “Yes, they have more money,” Ernest Hemingway supposedly answered. His apocryphal quip captures a deeper truth about the nature of money. The rich are indeed different: they are exposed to a lot more of its energy. They live a more extreme version of the relationship we are all exposed to. Some master their relationship to money and live the life they want; others serve their money’s demands, unconsciously, and have their lives shaped for them.
The mind does not retire. Self-made wealth is a creative act and requires determination, ingenuity, and focus. Once developed, this willpower doesn’t disappear. The well-trained mind craves to remain engaged. They may have made billions, but their minds remain hungry for challenge, risk, and growth.
I believe this is one of the reasons why the self-made rarely retire unless forced to: their minds won’t shut off. And because mastering the money game typically comes at the expense of other interests and relationships, there are no other games to fall back on.
I’ve seen this energy redirected to other endeavors, like devising tax schemes. Is that how one wants to spend their wealthy old age? Wrong question. It’s what the mind wants to do. Master your mind lest it master you.
No magic numbers. You can be too rich for your own good and still hunger to be richer. You either arrive at the peace of having enough from within or not at all. It will not appear from the outside in the form of an amount of money.
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