Chapter 15: Putting it all Together
“To teach is to learn again.” – H.J. Brown
It’s at this point when you’ve found your vision of the future.
You’ve defined your emotional framework in a way that it keeps out the bad, keeps in the good, and always keeps you on your path. You’ve built Time Wealth through the creation of work projects that gives you the independence you’ve always wanted, and through a balanced life that extracts the most value from your time. You’ve gained Location Wealth through a focused intention on building your Emotional Wealth and Time Wealth in such a way that it allows you the type of location independence you want.
But what now?
What’s interesting is that through this entire process of becoming truly Wealthy, there’s always been a necessary step that follows the step you’re on. There’s always something to improve, something to work on, and something to accomplish.
As you get Wealthier and Wealthier, however, the following steps begin to get murkier. You’re fulfilling more and more of your needs and desires, and the aspects of your life that should be worked on become less and less apparent.
If your Emotional Wealth is strong, you have friends and family, you have a strong emotional framework, and you have a strong sense of self-worth. All you need to do is maintain and upkeep those feelings.
If your Time Wealth is strong, you have the freedom of time to pursue the things in life that give you most value. You have a balanced life of motivation and leisure, and a collection of work projects that give you flexibility. All you need to do is maintain your balance.
If your Location Wealth is strong, you’ve created an emotional framework and built your Time Wealth in such a way that you have the ability to live wherever you want. You’ve translated your Emotional Wealth and Time Wealth into freedom of mind and freedom of location dependence.
At this point, you’re only limited by your imagination as to how you should live your life.
But we know there’s more too it than that, right?
We, as humans, derive our self worth - and therefore the value of our life - directly from the pursuit of a higher goal, and one that creates a sense of community.
In the beginning of your journey to true Wealth, the higher goals are defined: build an emotional framework, gain the freedom of your time, explore the world, and have meaningful experiences with meaningful people. Once you’ve done all of that, and are continuing to work and maintain it, there’s only one natural step left: reciprocate.
Community is the ultimate psychological driver of we humans. We’re a social species that loves to share moments with each other. If you think about it, every positive memory you can think of is probably shared with someone else.
So while Emotional Wealth, Time Wealth, and Location Wealth are all important in their own right, the greatest life-value is gained when you take your increasingly complex understanding of the world, and share it with someone else.
You’re able to relive your own joy of learning each Principle of Wealth through the eyes of someone else. You get to make the world just a little bit better by spreading your positive values to someone else, which can compound into the contagious spreading of a positive mindset.
There’s no higher high than knowing that you just changed someone’s life, or even made someone’s day. That’s the feeling we’re after. That’s what life’s all about: sharing positive experiences with people who matter to you.
The next time you leave a conversation feeling really good, almost indescribably so, take note as to what made it so invigorating. That is your purpose. Whatever it was, at its center, that made you feel so good, is what you should pursue. Chances are, it’ll be the positive exchange of ideas that opened the minds of both parties, which created your spark.
Start Small
“Touch makes us one with every human being in the world – and unless we touch others, we’re out of touch with our lives.” – Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
In a roundabout way, even though the ability for you to reciprocate increases through the attainment of the other Principles of Wealth, the Wealth of Reciprocation is one that should be focused on early and often.
Gaining Wealth in the other three Principles definitely helps you reciprocate. Your sphere of influence increases, yes, and you have a greater amount of knowledge and understanding at your disposal. You can help solve increasingly more complex life problems.
But just because you’re searching for your own Wealth doesn’t mean you can’t reciprocate and help others search for theirs.
Spreading positive emotions is the number one way to reciprocate, and costs you nothing. In fact, by spreading positive emotions through the Wealth of Reciprocation, you’ll work toward increasing your own Emotional Wealth.
Aren’t convinced? Take a leaf out of Phillip Kunz’s book. Kunz, a Sociologist at Brigham Young University, decided one winter day in 1974, to test the emotional response of reciprocity. Picking names at random, he sent 600 Christmas cards to people he didn’t know. The cards were heartfelt, handwritten greetings, and Kunz would often include pictures of his family.
The response, although somewhat surprising, shouldn’t be shocking. Over the course of the winter, Kunz received over 200 Christmas cards in response! Many of them, Kunz reported, were also handwritten, and sometimes spanned three to four pages, sending back more positive emotions and thoughts than had been received.
Who would have thought people would respond so positively to a random act of kindness by a complete stranger? The overwhelming amount of letters Kunz received in response to his experiment shows just how far the Wealth of Reciprocation can go.
In this way, it’s more that the Wealth of Reciprocation is a lens through which you should view the other three Principles of Wealth.
Each Principle of Wealth increases your Wealth of Reciprocation, but by focusing on constant reciprocation, from even the poorest of metaphorical places, you’ll naturally increase each Principle of Wealth too.
Adding value is the quickest way to increase your Wealth of Reciprocation, but it’s also the quickest way to attain the other three Principles of Wealth. Remember what Dale Carnegie said:
“You can become more successful in two months by becoming really interested in other people’s success than you can in two years trying to get other people interested in your own success.”
This is true with each Principle of Wealth. Helping others increase their Emotional Wealth will increase your Emotional Wealth and help build your emotional framework. Helping others balance their lives and free up their time will force you to do the same to your life, capturing Time Wealth. Instilling the Principle of Location Wealth in someone else will fuel your desire for location independence.
So, in this way, the Wealth of Reciprocation is the most universal Principle of Wealth. While each Principle of Wealth is connected, it can be said that the Wealth of Reciprocation is the connector.
If you want to become rich, start off small: start by reciprocating.
The Four-Step Plan
In reality, becoming rich is a 4-step movement from a mindset shift to significance through reciprocation, known as the Path to Wealth:
1. Mindset Shift
As you’re focusing on adding value and giving back, you begin to collect ideas and experiences that work toward a broad mindset shift. You begin to believe that you have a unique life-path, different from the normal script.
You realize that you’ve been living life by someone else’s rules, trying to find happiness by following a path you didn’t want. This realization, or mindset shift, is the first step to finding your significance. It’s an understanding that you live a life of your design, and that designing a life of Wealth is up to you alone.
Instead of the belief that money buys happiness, and working 16-hour days to make your hedge fund manager rich is “normal,” you start to believe that there’s more to traditional wealth than that. Living life as a slave to social standards and the almighty dollar doesn’t seem as lucrative as before. Taking control of your life’s experiences, through an ownership of your emotions, time, and location, seems like a pretty rich way to live life.
In essence, your mindset shift is the realization that there’s a seldom-traveled path to happiness, which maximizes the value of your life’s experiences, found through the pursuit of true Wealth.
Through this mindset shift, you understand that the only way you’re going to gain true Wealth is by working toward it yourself. No one’s going to give it to you; you can’t inherit this type of Wealth.
You begin to view your life and your reality as a moldable structure of which you have complete control. This kicks off your journey to Emotional Wealth: the understanding that you can create your emotional framework, which will help you construct a framework that protects your time, which will let you build a framework that protects your location independence.
2. Self Improvement
Your Emotional Wealth, Time Wealth, and Location Wealth, are all increased through actions of self-improvement. Getting better in any part of your life directly increases the quality of your life, and will proportionately increase the value of your Wealth. With that understanding, self-improvement becomes an obsession, and it should. All riches are increased through self-improvement.
This is why reference experiences are so important. Only through actively interacting with the world are we able to improve deficient aspects of our lives. Everything is a learned skill, whether it be social, emotional, physical, or conceptual. Through active, real-world practice, you can improve any area of your life.
With an intentional focus on self-improvement, you strengthen your emotional framework and increase your Emotional Wealth. You naturally extract the most value out of your time through balanced improvements, and increase the skills necessary to build a collection of work projects that will maximize your Time Wealth.
Self-improvement also gives you the necessary skills to embrace your Location Wealth in whatever capacity that means to you. If you like to keep it more traditional, your self-improvement will lead to lucrative work projects that will let you afford your first home. If you’re like me and enjoy things a little less traditional, your self-improvement will give you the necessary capital and social skills needed to travel long-term.
It’s through self-improvement that the four Principles of Wealth are connected. Any part of life can be improved. Health, fitness, friends, literally anything, can be increased in such a way that it gives you the necessary skills to be Wealthy. Eating healthier, for example, will benefit your brain function, which will help you read more, which will give you ideas to test and implement, which will improve your ability to network with people. Everything you do is connected.
In a roundabout way, your journey of self-improvement is the literal gaining of Wealth. Self-improvement, like Wealth, is a collection of unique experiences and real emotions that increase the value of your life.
Also like Wealth, self-improvement never ends, and a life worth living should always be improving.
3. Success
If you ask people what they’re after in life, chances are they’ll tell you that they’re trying to become “successful.” But what is success really? In the context of Wealth, success can be defined as: any function, duty, or endeavor, in which you actively apply your skills to derive happiness.
Stated differently, success equals happiness, and more granular, success equals active happiness.
Therefore, success isn’t a monetary benchmark, but is the practical application of your Wealth in such a way that it results in experiences that further increase your Wealth. Success, happiness, and Wealth are synonymous in that you become successful by becoming Wealthy, and you become increasingly Wealthy by increasing your happiness.
Wealth, and therefore success, is happiness, gained from the act of taking everything you’re learning from your mindset shift and continuous self-improvement, and applying it to the real world. It’s the knowledge that you’ve given yourself the necessary ingredients to live your life in the way you want.
So in order to become successful, which is a function of true Wealth, you have to apply your new outlook and skills in ways that will make you happy.
What if you don’t know what makes you happy? No problem! Remember how the pursuit of your passion sometimes is your passion? Well, more often than not, through the pursuit of Wealth, you’ll discover more and more about what makes you happy, and equally important, what doesn’t
You then strengthen your emotional framework, which acts as the gatekeeper of your life, and lets you have experiences that will make you increasingly happy, while steering you away from experiences that will be increasingly negative.
As you apply your Wealth to become happier and happier, you’re becoming Wealthier and Wealthier. It’s at this point, however, when that next step to Wealth begins to get hazy. Is life really all about the never-ending cycle of increasingly positive emotions and experiences?
There has to be something more than personal success. And if not, we have to trick ourselves into believing there is.
4. Significance
Beyond success, the true value of life is maximized through significance. If successful Wealth is achieved through ultimate happiness, then the natural final step is to reciprocate by spreading that happiness around.
Using your new mindset, your continuous improvements, and the success you’ve gained, significance is attained when you begin to nudge people toward their own Path to Wealth. It’s channeling everything you’ve learned to help someone, help anyone.
With a full toolbox of life skills and positive emotions, you’ll be the most equipped to add value the world. Don’t worry, it’s a lot of pressure, but it’s also the most rewarding thing you can do. You extract the most value out of life when you’re adding the most value.
In this way, it’s not a duty or obligation that Wealthy people have. It isn’t a responsibility to shake other people out of their autopilot mindset, it’s an honor.
You, the reader, are one of the few people who truly understands life and how you can maximize the value you get out of it. You’re one of the select few who can reach the highest level of happiness and satisfaction through significant reciprocation.
For others, it will be a long journey, beginning with a mindset shift. For you, you’ve already embarked on that journey, and have had your eyes opened. Now, the only thing left is to open the eyes of others.
As you’re working on becoming rich and increasing your Wealth, understand that you’re on a path from:
Mindset Shift Self-improvement Success Significance
Depicted by the graph below, your Path to Wealth is a journey from success to significance, gained through the active pursuit of increasingly positive emotions and experiences:
So where are you on your Path to Wealth? How are you positively impacting those around you? The Wealth of Reciprocation is the ultimate Principle of Wealth in that it provides you with the most happiness. As you become more Wealthy and successful, your level of significance increases, and therefore your Wealth of Reciprocation increases.
A fair warning, however: Don’t wait until you’re Wealthy and successful to live a significant life. Start adding value through reciprocation today. The Wealth of Reciprocation works to increase each Principle of Wealth. Even if you’re starting from square one, and have yet to build your emotional framework, your reciprocation can be the catalyst for your Emotional Wealth. It can be a catalyst for your Time Wealth, and it can be a catalyst for your Location Wealth.
Selfless acts of kindness often result in some amazing things.