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Your Money Story:
How You Juggle “Money + Success =
Happiness”
Joan’s
story is about
a turbulent beginning, a hot burner, a seven-figure net worth, and a deep, unmet
yearning. Joan and I began working together in 1996. At the time she was one of
three principals in a technology firm that had been founded in 1993 and was
growing by leaps and bounds. She worked long hours, often putting in extended
time even on the weekends. She and her husband of ten years juggled a bicoastal
marriage, with her company located on the West Coast and his employment
remaining on the East Coast. Hearing of my work with successful but exhausted
leaders, she arrived at her first appointment with a question:
“If
I have all this money, why aren’t I happy?” Her voice – so clear and
commanding when she had called to make the appointment – now sounded tired and
sad. “I feel as if my hand is on a hot burner and I can’t pull it away, even
though I know I’m being hurt. This isn’t what I imagined success would be
like.”
Somewhere
along the line, many of us who are professionally successful got the message
that our financial security and workplace achievements, in and of themselves,
should add up to happiness.
Certain questions that bedevil my clients
have a simpler answer than how money and success equate with happiness. These
simpler questions can usually be resolved within a limited time frame. The
person reviews the issues, comes to a decision, and moves on with his or her
life. The questions sound like this: “My company just revised the commission
schedule in a way that doesn’t favor me. Should I stay or go?” Or, “I do
the behind-the-scenes organizing work that keeps projects on schedule and
clients happy. How can I get paid better for that, when my company only seems to
reward the big personality people out securing clients in the first place?”
Joan’s question was of a different kind,
deeper and more complex. Hers is not the kind of concern from which one easily
“moves on.” Her question sounds like this: “I’m successful at what I
thought counted the most for making my life happy and meaningful. Along with my
partners, I’ve launched and operated a profitable business that runs according
to the cultural values we’ve instilled. We’ve all made good money at it. I
have a much bigger range of choices in my life now, and I’m only 38. Why do I
feel so terrible?”
Like many successful people, Joan had made
her work the hub, the central organizing factor, in her busy life. Work claimed
the first passionate energy of the morning and often the last gasp of coherence
at the end of the day. Everything else had to fit in around, under, or between.
In many ways, Joan’s situation is
emblematic of a whole cohort of bright, highly educated, talented, and
successful people, who find themselves in a place vastly different from where
they grew up and where they now expected to be. Those differences make the
search for happiness more convoluted than was the case for our parents’
generation, and the generations before.
The
Changes
In today’s economic
environment, a larger share of the population has money than was true thirty
years ago. Every ten years the Census Bureau collects extensive data about the
population of the United States, including financial information. That “every
ten year look” provides an ongoing set of reference points that track our
collective financial progress. Despite stock market ups and downs over the past
thirty years, the most recent U.S. Census Bureau data show that the top 40% of
this country’s income-earning households have made real and substantial
financial gains during that period.
As a child in the early 1950s, I remember my
father bringing home his weekly pay in cash. My mother then distributed the
fives, tens, and twenties among a series of manila budgeting envelopes marked
with the basics: mortgage, gas and electric, food, clothing, telephone. There
was no envelope marked “investments.” We did “Christmas Club” at our
local savings and loan, which was a non-interest-bearing account where we would
save fifty cents or a dollar most weeks in order to accumulate enough money for
holiday gifts. I’m not sure my parents even had a regular savings account
during those years. If so, I imagine they simply saved at low-interest rates,
never scraping together enough to buy even a certificate of deposit.
Joan’s father left home after eighteen
years of marriage to her mother, who made out badly in the divorce. High school
educated, her mother finally was awarded only five years of alimony from her
college-professor husband. The roots of what we think will make our lives happy
and meaningful typically go back a long way. Surely in Joan’s case – and no
doubt in mine – the choice never to be economically vulnerable, especially to
the degree our mothers were, drives at least part of our intensity about money.
With additional money comes choice, and with
choice comes greater complexity. Through hard work, resiliency, and share of
good fortune, both Joan and I have joined the ranks of what author Dinesh
D’Souza calls the first mass affluent class in history. We have, as Joan
pointed out, a much broader range of choices than was the case for our own
parents and for previous generations. With choice comes awareness of limits; we
can garner some good things in our lives, but not all. With choice comes
accountability; some directions we pursue will have a better outcome than
others. With choice comes responsibility; what we do affects not only our own
lives, but the lives of others, the physical space we inhabit, and the hope we
are able to sustain for the future.
My mother is now 87. In what I think of as a
very Irish Catholic way, she relishes going over the minute details of her
funeral plans, writing and rewriting her obituary, even determining where we are
all to go out to eat after the cemetery. About her epitaph she is very clear.
“I want to be known as a person who did the best I could with what I had.”
In all my years of working with clients, I’ve never heard anyone else sum up
the meaning of his or her life quite that simply. For those of us deep in the
throes of “relentless pursuit,” the epitaph is more likely to be “I wanted
to know for sure if I was there yet.”
Not only is there lots of new money around,
but people are gaining access to big money at a much younger age. Knowing what
happiness means requires a certain wisdom reflective of life experience. People
who are relatively young in accumulating that wisdom can be at a marked
disadvantage. Joan and her partners all achieved a seven-figure net worth in
their late 30’s and early 40’s. Lest you think such relatively early
affluence is purely a Silicon Valley, Denver, Boston, or Research Triangle
phenomenon, it isn’t. I can bring you back East to an ordinary mid-sized city,
where the three male partners of a technology firm are also in their 30’s and
early 40’s. This company is at an earlier point in its growth curve than
Joan’s, but the founders’ exit strategy as millionaires is no more than
three or four years away. I can take you to a New England medical practice,
where the founding partner has been extremely innovative about making the
managed care reimbursement system work in his favor, and that of his patients. I
can take you to a Midwestern urban hub, where a young consultant with a
six-figure income, a willingness to travel for new career-building projects, and
frugal habits is well on the way to the coveted “first million.”
As you examine your own situation, you may
well find yourself with substantial income and assets at a relatively young age,
in good health, and with the rest of your life ahead. (“Relatively young
age” is, of course, relative. Actress Tyne Daly and I are about the same age.
I consider myself still on the upswing of middle age. Daly, by contrast, is
reported to see herself as “an apprentice old lady.”) Deciding what
constitutes “happiness,” in my view, takes the perspective of life
experience and a degree of reflective wisdom. Hitting the jackpot on money and
success early in life can create certain dislocations in that process.
One of the dislocations has to do with
speed. I got my first car loan in 1969, when I was 24 and had just returned from
the Peace Corps. I bought a used Nash Rambler with a lot of miles on it. Over
the years I worked my way up through a new Plymouth Duster, a Volkswagen
squareback, a Chevy wagon, a Volvo, a used Lexus with low mileage, and now the
Jaguar. My daughter Sara, at age 25, drives a classy new Saab with tight
handling on curves, a leather interior, and lots of options. My son Matt, 23,
drives a fast new Jetta, with a lighted dashboard panel that looks like a racing
car or hot aircraft. Both bought their cars outright with their earned money,
not by tapping the assets that have been gifted to them. Both were careful in
deciding how much to spend, how much car was enough. Matt bought a Jetta, not
the Passat, because he said that at his age he simply didn’t need the more
upscale model.
I look on with awe as my daughter and son
make big financial decisions, and in a far more sophisticated manner than I did
at their age. I also wonder, having gotten to the “great car” point so fast,
where do they go from here?
Another dislocation – especially in the
early career-building stage – has to do with the value of “doing” over
“being.” Simply being with one’s experience and taking the time to sort
out what it means is the essence of reflective wisdom. At a recent conference I
shared coffee-break conversation with a fellow speaker whose job it is to build
the ecommerce business of a major U.S. automaker. He was clearly younger than I
am, perhaps 35 or so. As he described his relentless schedule of travel,
high-level meetings, and intense turf-war negotiations, I asked when he had time
to reflect on the longer-term strategy that would sustain his business over
time. His response was both incredulous and impatient. “I have no time to
reflect.”
As big money comes at younger ages, profound
life questions that used to arise in midlife come much earlier. A 2001 New York
Times article profiled the difficulties that can now confront people barely out
of college. Questions like “What’s next for me?” and “Is this all there
is?”, long the staples of the mid-50’s life crisis, are now being asked by
seemingly jaded 25-year-olds. With such limited life experience, they have slim
pickings from which to find good answers to such hard questions.
Along with the opportunity to earn big money
comes a reduction in the range of things successful people do. Mostly, they
work. It’s all too easy, then, to arrive at the conclusion that whatever
happiness one might find in life has to have its origins at work. Getting a
work-related email from Joan that was sent at 3 a.m.
is not unusual. When my consulting practice first went national, I relished the
time difference between the East Coast and California. Then I had to remind
myself that the three-hour window didn’t automatically mean extending my
workday from eight hours to eleven hours, just because I could easily reach West
Coast people at 8 p.m. and beyond.
The head of the emergency room medical
practice and his staff physicians all worked twelve-hour shifts three days a
week, for efficiency of scheduling. That, along with adjunct teaching at a
prominent medical school, supervising residents, staying on top of the managed
care bills in the legislature, attending statewide professional meetings, and
completing continuing education requirements, made him an “early to bed”
kind of guy.
The Chicago-based consultant boards a plane
Sunday afternoon or evening to arrive at her project site fresh for work on
Monday. Fourteen-hour days are the norm. Late Thursday night she jets back to
O’Hare, to be available in the home office for staff meetings and project
updates on Friday. Exhausted by Friday night, she crashes early. Her down time
is Saturday morning through Sunday mid-afternoon. She cooks, works out, picks up
her dry cleaning, waters plants, pays bills, and goes grocery shopping. I ask
about friends and other diversions. “Of course, I have lots of friends. We
email each other all the time.”
The findings of Robert D. Putnam’s Bowling
Alone are now widely known: the locally based social and service endeavors that
used to create social capital have seen a steep decline in membership.
Sociologist Alan Wolfe observes similar trends, but comes to a less pessimistic
conclusion. Wolfe believes we’re still building human connections, albeit in
different ways. My own position is closer to Wolfe’s. I think we’re in a
transitional period of understanding what new forms of community are evolving.
Often, those new forms seem to originate at work. People volunteer in the
community as part of company-sponsored teams. We wave to our neighbors, but the
annual picnic is more likely to be a departmental function than a block party.
When we meet up at the end of the day for a bite to eat and a movie, it’s
often with people we’ve already spent much of the day with at work.
When people had a range of important
experiences with different people on a daily basis, they had a number of ways to
feel successful and happy with their accomplishments. Someone with a tedious
supervisory job might achieve considerably more stature and satisfaction being a
local ward captain, a church elder or temple president, or the organizer of a
powerful neighborhood association. Someone with a limited and easily overlooked
work role might be a pivotal and much-loved person in an extended family, the
one to whom everyone looks for guidance, emotional connection, and support.
When people mostly work, feelings of success
and satisfactionare heavily dependent on one’s fortunes in the workplace.
That’s a far more limited field of experience than was available to previous
generations.
Not only do a lot of people have more money
and work more, but the very definition of “happiness” seems to have changed.
For a large segment of the post-Depression and post–World War II working
population, “being happy” meant having good health, stable family
relationships, and enough money to pay the bills and take a short vacation once
a year. In New Jersey, where I grew up in the 1950s, “being happy” meant
being “down the shore,” renting a bungalow at a beachfront community for a
week or two. That the refrigerator was, in fact, an icebox and the toilet was
outside the bungalow made little difference; we got to swim every day. During
alternate summers, we’d drive to Iowa to visit my father’s family on their
farms. My father always drove an Oldsmobile. On those trips, he seemed really
happy and proud to be going back to Iowa in a shiny, new-looking car that
signaled to everyone how well he was doing. As higher education became more
accessible to middle- and working-class families, having the money to send kids
to college became an added expectation. These basic accomplishments have, in our
current culture, been supplanted by the constant “adrenaline high” of the
wired workplace and the demand that we put productivity first. Having time to
mentor a new employee, read a long book, or watch a kid’s entire soccer game
has vanished in favor of multitasking and making every minute count. We sit on
the sidelines of our children’s games, tapping away on our hand-held email
devices or our super-thin laptops, only looking up when the noise level signals
something about to happen. We miss a lot. Clearly, a new element has been added
to the definition of “happiness”: making a big and visible footprint on the
world. My daughter Sara has always had a wandering spirit. Since graduating from
Tufts she has worked in the travel industry. During her first year, she was the
company’s second-highest producer in the whole United States. In 2000, her
goal was not only to be #1, but the biggest #1 the company ever had. She blasted
through the existing bonus structure; they had to create a new one to recognize
her level of production. She and other high producers were sent off to Peru at
company expense to celebrate their accomplishments.
An often-unstated factor in our difficulty
sorting out money, success, and happiness is the loss of moorings that used to
come from organized religious practice. Joan is no longer part of the mainline
Protestant denomination in which she was raised. She’s attracted to the
beliefs and practices of Buddhism, particularly the spiritual principle of
“detachment.” She has a small chant room in her home, large enough for one
person, in which she has meditation tapes, incense, and objects that carry
spiritual meaning for her.
The Jewish physician often hosts a seder in
the springtime for his extended family. In honor of family members’ extensive
intermarriage with Christian spouses – including his own – the traditional
seder plate often includes a brightly colored Easter egg or two. The older
generation, all Conservative or Orthodox Jews for whom seder was a formal
religious ritual, would have been scandalized. No one in the current generation
seems to care.
My sisters and I attended public schools
through high school, then I chose a Catholic women’s college to learn more
about religious beliefs that had grounded the rituals of my childhood. Along the
way, I discovered existentialist philosophy and Harvey Cox’s book The Secular
City, which told me I could go to the big city and be what I wanted, leaving
behind the limitations of what I already knew. I graduated from both college and
the practice of organized religion simultaneously.
In our current work-oriented culture, the
place where people explore life’s deepest meaning or life’s defining purpose
seems to have shifted from faith communities to workplaces. High on the list of
spiritual challenges is the attempt to create business cultures where
profitability, a humane environment, and personal fulfillment can all flourish.
The questions of ultimate meaning and what
tempers a win-at-all-costs mentality have traditionally been the moral and
ethical domains of organized religion. The questions of what product or service,
how to make operational, how profitable, and how accountable have traditionally
been in the domain of workplaces. Workplaces, in my view, have little expertise
in dealing with questions of “should” or “ought,” and as yet do a
relatively poor job of setting boundaries on those kinds of questions. In the
worst case, we find what author Paulina Borsook calls “philosophical
techno-libertarianism,” the belief system of those Silicon Valley high-fliers
who are unable to reconcile the demands of personal satisfaction with the
demands of living in society with other people.
The focus on work and money occurs at the
epicenter of the change in gender roles that has only gained steam over the past
thirty years. If Stanley and Danko’s millionaires next door are predominately
55-year-old white males, it’s also true that women in their 40’s and 50’s
represent the first generations to be widely in the job market, earning
professional salaries and with financial independence in their own right. As
more women jump eagerly into the traditionally male role of “provider,” the
tongue-in-cheek cry of “I need a wife” – someone to organize home,
children, and workplace – becomes an equal opportunity lament.
Most successful people, even those who are
highly sophisticated at investing money, still can’t talk about money’s
powerful symbolic meaning.
Money has a literal meaning: it’s the
currency through which we buy and sell goods and services, pay the bills, and
keep a roof over our heads. Money also has a symbolic meaning. A symbol is an
object or an act that “stands in” for something else. When we use money as a
way of “keeping score,” we’re using money in a symbolic sense. That means
we’re using money as a marker, or as a way of designating our perceived
success relative to others.
When’s the last time you had an honest
conversation about the way you and your peers use money to keep score?
Many otherwise sophisticated and competent
adults have a psychological framework around money that is comprised of a jumble
of early and unexamined messages, metaphors, and partial meanings. To the extent
that our early frameworks remain unspoken and unexplored, we remain ill-equipped
to cope with the complex challenge money always presents.
The
Way We Live Now
My observation of the way we
live now, having been buffeted by these changes to a greater or lesser degree,
could apply to Joan’s company, or to the Eastern software solutions group, or
to the Chicago office of the consulting firm. It could apply to my son’s
dot.com or to my daughter’s travel company.
Quite possibly, elements of the description
apply to you.
What I’ve been calling “professionally
successful people” probably have a family income of $40,000 to $75,000 at the
low end and six figures or more at the high end. We’re savers as well as
spenders, and might well have assets in the $250,000 to $300,000 range or more.
“More” could mean much more, into the millions. We consider ourselves
professionals, although “professional” can mean teacher, cop, and
electrician as well as criminal defense lawyer, brain surgeon, or merger and
acquisition specialist. We’re likely to have a college education, and perhaps
advanced degrees. We’re on-line for a considerable chunk of time each day, and
use technology for more than checking email. We have high aspirations and even
higher expectations of ourselves. We care how others see us. We can be as young
as early 20’s or as old as late 60’s. If we are one of those Renaissance
individuals who has never stopped learning and growing, we could be even older.
Perhaps surprisingly, only a small segment
of us are 20-something technology geeks who spend most of the day in front of a
computer, have already blown $12 million in venture capital, and wonder why
we’re lonely and how we can meet people without shutting off the glowing
screen.
We work hard to keep ourselves at the
cutting edge, yet we know that as fast as we add new skill sets, the performance
bar keeps going up. We speak in jargon, like “brain dump” and “value
add.” Whether or not we have a naturally risk-taking temperament, we act
outwardly as if we crave speed, sudden change, opportunities to show initiative,
and jumping before all the pieces are locked down so we can be sure to be among
the first. We know that “doing something that will get you reasonably close”
is valued over “waiting until you understand the problem in depth and really
have the resources to move.” On rare breaks during the workday, we drink
expensive coffee. We might have come to work in a vehicle that has the power to
trek across Africa and is priced accordingly, yet we wear business casual
instead of Armani. We want to be stars, but not “suits.” We want power and
influence, yet don’t want to be seen as selling out. We want our power to come
from being more brilliant and creative than anyone else, not because of formal
position or title. We want others to follow us willingly because we’re the
best, not because of our authority to demand compliance. We want our power to be
visible and recognized. We want flash. Our benchmarks are Bill Gates on market
dominance and Steve Jobs on creative design, not the patrician David Rockefeller
or legendary 1940s New York power broker Robert Moses. Our benchmarks are Carly
Fiorina on rapid career advancement and Andrea Jung on being a savvy CEO/mom,
not early corporate leader Estee Lauder or Washington political hostess turned
ambassador Pamela Harriman. Perhaps most of all, we like to keep moving. We
fidget. We change jobs. We change cities. We change friends. We see happiness as
elusive, as something always moving away from us that we have to pursue with
great intensity and drive.
Who
Really Lives Like That?
In 1999 I was a speaker at a
Fast Company Real Time Gathering. At that time Fast Company, a hefty monthly
magazine often running to 400 or more pages, was the bible of the new workplace:
fast, edgy, and influential. Filled with stories about success in the new
economy and packed with ads for pricey goods and services, Fast Company clearly
positioned itself to attract readers from the culture of success. Before
arriving at the conference, I expected the majority of attendees to be young,
buffed, affluent, and in the workforce more as free agents than as employees
concerned about loyalty and career paths. When I found was quite different. Most
participants were men and women in their 30’s, 40’s, and 50’s who worked
for more “bricks than clicks” companies like Target and Ford, not the
20-something dot.commers I had expected. Some were athletic and buffed; more had
the body shapes of the fairly sedentary. Most had families and obligations; they
did care about things like loyalty and career paths. Those who revealed income
figures during my presentation were more in the $40,000 to $100,000 range, not
the stunning mid-six and low seven figures of the dot.com winners.
So
who really lives in the culture of success as I have described it? We do.
Do
You Live Like That?
The important thing for
locating your place in the world of successful people is not how literally your
life maps with my description. The important thing is how the image of that
culture of success, whether literally true or not, has influenced your life,
your workplace, the expectations that are placed on you.
Are
you expected to move faster, with fewer resources and less mentoring, than was
the case when you started your career?
Does
your chosen profession – academic, clergyperson, general practitioner, social
worker – carry less status than it used to because what you do isn’t trendy
and doesn’t rate really big money?
Is
your organization quicker to jettison people who can no longer keep up with the
pack, even if they’ve given twenty or more years of loyal and productive
service?
Have
you ever been expected to do anything like travel for thirty hours to a global
marketing meeting in Asia, then be on deck at 8 a.m.
fully alert and ready for an all-day strategy session?
Welcome
to the spillover from the culture of success.
The culture of success is certainly home
base for Joan. Five years after she and I began to work together, she came to my
office with her husband. They were, she said, at a turning point. Joan was
exploring a big promotion, one that would involve increased travel and much
greater intensity than even her current role. She and her husband were still
living in two cities, although now they at least lived in the same state and
could be together for the weekend with a mere one-hour plane ride.
Despite having racked up more professional
credits and more financial security than when we first met, Joan still had a
deep, unmet longing and a sense that the work she loved was also in some ways
destructive to her spirit.
On a white board in my office, I wrote the
following in large letters:
money +
success = happiness
I then told Joan and her husband we were going to have what she
irreverently but graphically calls “a come to Jesus moment.” That means a
moment in which we strip away every bit of spin, and get dead honest.
First, I asked them to tell me their net
worth, to say out loud the most accurate number they could come up with without
taking time to review their financial statements. With some self-consciousness,
they did. Part of the difficulty we all have in dealing with money is that we
don’t use numbers – we use euphemisms, like “a big win” or
“comfortable” or “pretty well off.” Using the actual number makes a
difference, because it makes our assets tangible. I then asked if the income
from that number – assuming a diversified, carefully monitored portfolio –
was enough for them to live on, even if neither worked another day.
They waffled. “Can’t the money go away
if the stock market really tanks?” “Shouldn’t we really have more before
we think about whether we could live on the income or not?” “How can we be
so cocky as to think about not working, when neither of us grew up that way?
Isn’t that tempting fate?”
They sat for a long time, staring at the
seven-figure number I had written on the board above the word “money.”
Finally, calmly, they said what was obvious. “It’s enough.”
Do you know the number that will allow you
to continue your lifestyle throughout your projected life expectancy? If not,
there are financial advisors or off-the-shelf software packages aplenty that can
help you figure it out. In whatever form you prefer, take the time to do this
analysis. It’s immensely powerful to have an actual number in front of you.
I then asked Joan to focus on the word
“success.” I pointed out that, along with her partners, she had founded a
company, run it according to her values, done great work for clients, sold the
company and had its value affirmed in the marketplace, grown into a skilled
executive in the larger corporate network, and been offered an even bigger, more
complex position. I suggested to her that professional success doesn’t get any
better than that, and she agreed. Whatever else she might choose to do, she’s
already “there” in terms of success.
You can replicate this part of the process
by writing down what you think “success” in your chosen field means – to
you, not to your parents, your spouse, your boss, the cohort of colleagues with
whom you compete most directly, or your most critical and demanding friend.
Then, ask yourself honestly how on track you are toward achieving that success.
It’s not an age thing, or a “years in the business” thing. Some people
achieve success at a startlingly early point.
Finally, I moved to the word
“happiness.” Joan and her husband both agreed that happiness remained
elusive in their stress-filled and demanding lives.
And you? Without making things too
complicated and reflective, are you basically happy? Do you long to be happier
than you are?
Pointing again to the whole equation, I
asked: “If you take the new job, which side of the equation will be enhanced:
the money and success side, or the happiness side?”
They both said, without prompting, “the
money and success side.”
These
are very bright people, and the light began to dawn. Joan spoke first. “I’ve
already done that side, haven’t I?”
I agreed. “You could focus on racking up
more money and more success, but why? You already know how to do that. The
interesting challenge now is to focus on what you don’t know how to do so
well, which is to find ways to let yourself be happy.”
Certain moments in a long consulting
relationship stand out from all other moments. Those are the times when
something that has been shrouded in mystery suddenly becomes clear enough to
touch. Such moments are palpable; you can literally feel them unfolding. They
generally cannot be forced. They come when the person is ready to have them
come. In Joan’s case, this breakthrough took five grueling years. When it did
come, Joan and her husband very rapidly made a series of crucial life decisions.
After some further conversation and within a
matter of weeks, Joan and her husband agreed that they wanted to live in the
same place, literally for the first time in their marriage. Since her work is
the more portable, that meant consolidating two homes into one and relocating to
the city where he is employed. She also decided to decline the job offer and
instead, take a one-year unpaid sabbatical during which she would allow her
spirit to roam. She and her husband planned to work with their financial advisor
to arrange their assets so they would have a stream of income during the
sabbatical, a replacement for the large salary she had been bringing in. After
the year, she would return to work she loved.
What’s
the Point?
The point is to use this
story to clarify what money and success do well, and what they really don’t do
at all, then to figure out how you can apply that wisdom to your own life.
The point is not that you should chuck what
you’re doing, become an entrepreneur, earn a few million dollars, then take a
sabbatical. The point is to figure out how money and success play out for you,
and what they have to do with your happiness.
In my view, money does two really big
things. First, money buys breathing room. When you have to work every waking
moment to put food on the table and pay the heat and light bills, you don’t
have a choice about taking your hand off the hot burner. You’re stuck.
That’s something to think about – ahead of time – if you are a young
person or a person returning to the marketplace who feels drawn to a low-paying
occupation. If you choose low-paying work, or if you’re in low-paying work and
you choose to stay there, you’ll never have much breathing room.
The second important insight is that money
buys “containers” – things that you get to fill with your own sense of
meaning. In Joan’s case, the container is the sabbatical. What the sabbatical
means to Joan is a chance to let her spirit rediscover its roots.
Be
careful to note that the container doesn’t come already filled with meaning.
You have to create the meaning yourself. Money doesn’t buy meaning; money only
buys containers.
What about success? Professional success
allows you to develop your capabilities in a larger world than home and hearth,
and to have those capabilities affirmed by people who have no vested interest in
making you feel good. That’s extremely valuable information, and important to
both self-esteem and having a sense of purpose
Money and success do not, all alone, add up
to happiness. Most of us know that by now, even if we are still in hot pursuit.
The equation is useful to work with because it reflects what a lot of people
start out thinking and it’s highly visual. But, it’s not a “real”
equation because one side doesn’t really add up to the other. A more honest,
if less dramatic, way to write it might be this:
money,
success, then happiness
Both money and success have something to do with containers. Containers
are anything toward which you put resources – time, money, energy – in the
expectation that something will happen. A container can be a sabbatical, a
consumer purchase, a job change, a change in family status, even a change in
fitness level or body shape. “If I join Weight Watchers and get thinner, then
I won’t be so lonely.”
To take a crack at applying the point of
Joan’s story to your own life, consider a financial commitment you’ve
recently made or are thinking of making, in the hope that something will happen
for you. Then try answering these questions:
How
much money did you commit?
What
container did you buy? Did you accept a promotion, adopt a baby, make a large
philanthropic pledge, or sign over your house as collateral for a loan to fund
your business?
What
did you expect the container to do for you? Did you think it would make you
happier, less lonely, more admired, more of a player?
Can
you assess whether the container you’ve chosen can deliver what you’ve asked
of it? For example, if you were seeking more security in your life, quitting
your job and becoming a day-trader probably isn’t the right container.
If
you’ve gotten on the wrong path, do you know how to self-correct?
If
you’ve gotten what you want, can you allow yourself to pause and feel satisfied?
If
you can allow yourself to feel satisfied, can you let that satisfaction expand
into a feeling of happiness, at least for the moment? By that I mean, can you
say to yourself “I’ve gotten what I longed for, and right now it’s
enough”?
Is
All of This Always So Long-Term?
Joan’s
process took five years. You may be wondering whether it always takes that long
to achieve a big breakthrough. The answer is no. Sometimes it can take less
time, sometimes more, depending on the size of the shift you’re trying to
make.
The
CEO of a San Francisco company has just separated from her husband of nineteen
years and bought a million-dollar home in the East Bay. Her house overlooks the
spectacular vista of the Bay Bridge and the shimmering lights of the city. I
asked her how it is to live there.
“Lonely.
A lot to take care of. I get home late, and the last thing I want to do is go
over the contractor’s punch list, or start making calls about finding a
gardener, or go out and look at furniture. Having a house like this has been my
dream for a long time; I really thought it would make me happier than it has.
Right now it’s just another burden.”
This
42-year-old executive is a brilliant business strategist. She literally
“sees” the direction of her fast-moving industry eighteen to twenty-four
months out, and gets herself and her company in the right position to benefit.
She’s earned a solid six-figure salary for at least ten years, and has
recently made significant money on stock options. She has a net worth of several
million dollars, depending on the day-to-day market valuation of her assets. The
choice to leave the marriage was hers. She has no children, and no plans to have
them. Gaining financial independence and being recognized professionally have
long been important goals. She’s achieved both. Looking at her words without
judging her choices, we can see that she hoped buying the million-dollar home
and living among other successful people would bring happiness. So far,
happiness hasn’t come.
As she and I started our work together, I
offered this counsel, drawn from my work with Joan and many others: “If you
want money and success and happiness, there’s something here that needs to be
figured out. Just getting more of the same, that is, more money and professional
recognition, won’t do it. Even more important, the skills you need to figure
out ‘happiness’ are almost the mirror opposites of the skills you’ve
needed to build assets and a business reputation. Now you’ll need to exercise
flexibility instead of control, patience instead of speed, openness instead of
secrecy. You’ll do well to expect the messiness of clashing human values, not
the simple elegance of brilliant business judgment. You’ll also need to
broaden your focus to allow different story threads to come into play, not just
focus laser-like on where your industry is going, or whether your investments
move up, down, or stay the same.”
As in Joan’s situation, we can see this as
another example of money buying a container – the house – to hold a certain
emotional expectation. The CEO hoped the vessel would come already filled, which
it did not.
I can’t make this point often enough.
Money does a generally good job of buying containers. Money does a generally
poor job of buying emotions or feelings, such as happiness, as the filling.
No more than two or three months had passed
when I had another business conversation with this CEO. I remembered to ask
about the house. Our talk took place shortly before the Christmas holiday, and
her tone was very different.
“I’ve
asked my whole extended family to come and stay with me and celebrate Christmas
here. It’s the first time in my life that’s ever happened. Always before, I
was the one without children and the one my family saw as the most rootless, so
I was expected to pick up and come to them for the holidays. Now I have a place,
a home, and I can expect family to come to me.”
What
was really different? The container had been filled – not by things money can
buy, but by an inner sense of meaning placed there by this thoughtful woman. An
exquisite house can mean many things for a fast-track CEO: a place to entertain
business associates, a setting for glitzy political fund-raisers, a choice focus
for a spread in Architectural Digest. Instead, this CEO chose to make her home a
statement of her completeness as a person, with or without husband and children,
and a symbol of her being rooted, not footloose. That statement came from
inside, not outside. “Inside” means that she looked more deeply into her own
motivations for buying the house, and took responsibility for saying what she
wanted this action to mean. “Not outside” means she wasn’t looking for
someone else to validate her decision. Her statement of meaning was significant
in itself, regardless of how her family or anyone else invited to her home might
respond.
Some of you might be shaking your heads,
protesting, “Then this story really isn’t about money. It’s about
something else, such as a woman coming into her own.”
Yes, it is about money. The money bought the
container. It’s also about success. This CEO is not the recipient of family
wealth, or a lottery winner, or a skillful white-collar crook. She made the
decision years ago to take great professional risks, work enormously long hours,
and sacrifice time that might have been spent on relationships in order to meet
certain high standards in the business world.
To the degree that she has been able to
reach inside and discover a sense of meaning in what she now finds possible, the
story is also about happiness.
Might she have reached happiness without the
success, the money, and the house? I don’t know. Perhaps. Perhaps not. We live
in a country, in an economic system, where most of us get to choose a life path.
This CEO got to choose hers, and make what meaning she could of it. I suspect
you have that freedom too.
Having felt a sense of happiness, is this
woman done, her breakthrough complete? The answer is “not yet.” Leaving her
long-term marriage had an enormous emotional impact. After her family dispersed
and she was once again alone, she had this to say: “It took so much emotional
energy for me to leave my husband. I wonder now if I have enough life force on
my own to fill up all this space. I now understand that you have to bring your
own life force. It doesn’t just come with buying the house.”
Money
stories have a long reach. They cycle back in time to pull in our families of
origin. They go forward in time to test the quality of hope we are able to
sustain for the future. They remind us, often in jarring ways, of the cost of
continuing to grow. They evolve throughout our lifetime, picking up depth and
complexity as they move through the years. Only after a person’s death can we
listen to his or her money story and call that part of a family money saga
“done.”
Taking
Stock
The point of this chapter has
been to give you a baseline for exploring how successful people – you included
– juggle money, success, and happiness. Here are the most important elements
of that baseline:
Think
about money in a new way, as formative of who you are and as influential in your
search for happiness.
Learn
to work with the money + success = happiness equation.
Understand
that the equation is deeply affected by social and cultural trends that have
changed all of our lives over the past thirty years. Now, the predominant anchor
for exploring the money + success = happiness equation is work, not religion or
family or local community.
Remember
that money buys containers. You create meaning.
As
you progress through the book, I’m going to ask two things. If by chance you
bought this book because you’re concerned about the way someone else uses
money, will you set aside that concern for the moment and focus on yourself?
Quite simply, you have to work on your own experience of money before you can
have integrity broaching money issues with another person. If you’re in the
position of depending on someone to provide for you financially, you may feel
the book doesn’t apply to you. It does. Each of the questions I raise is as
important for people without their own direct source of income as for those who
are feeling financially flush and professionally challenged. If you’ve never
acted as if money mattered to you, you need to change that. You also need to
know how you’d manage if the person now providing for you were no longer
available. If you’ve never asked yourself how power relationships are wielded
through money, you need to start. If you don’t currently have the leverage you
want because you know you don’t have the money to walk away, how will you
begin to change things?
If you’ve been telling yourself that
despite your high-pressure life you really do keep all the balls in the air and
cover all the bases, this book may challenge that belief. Becoming clear about
your experience of money is absolutely fundamental to your achieving happiness.
That means you need to be as honest and as non-judgmental as you can. If you
grew up with a critical tape running in your head – something along the lines
of “nothing I do is ever good enough” – mentally press the “pause”
button and put that tape on hold. Hypercritical perfectionism will really get in
your way. Also, keep in mind that taking an honest look at where you are
doesn’t mean instant change. If you decide later that you need to shift your
behavior in some way, you get to establish the timeline and make changes when
you’re ready. Remembering that will help you manage any unsettled feelings
that may arise.
Money is very good at buying containers in which we get to try out
certain expectations. Money isn’t very good at buying meaning to fill the
containers – meaning has to come from inside. Learn to use money to do the
things it does well, and look elsewhere for the things money does poorly or not
at all.
Reprinted with Permission by
Basic Books, A Member of the Perseus Books Group -- Copyright © 2002
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