No, You Don't: An open letter to people who say “I want to be a millionaire.”

The other night, I spent the evening with some folks at a local restaurant. We were celebrating because one of them won a huge contract that firmly placed them in the territory of "millionaire."

Another one of the folks who were there is an accountant. This accountant is doing well, but they aren't anywhere approaching a millionaire. During the night, the accountant said to the millionaire, "I wish I were you. I wish I were a millionaire."

For the rest of the night, the comment rubbed me the wrong way.

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There's nothing wrong with wanting to be a millionaire. During my experience in the tech and startup world, I’ve met a lot of people that dream about having bathtubs full of money. For a few years, I was one of them.

It isn’t about having the money for the sake of having the money. Having money is nice, for sure. But people who want to be millionaires so bad they can feel it want it for more than that. They want it because:

• As a business owner, having piles of money means you have tons of customers who love your product. It feels great to create something that the world loves.
• Having piles of money enables a level of freedom most people don’t have. You know that, at any moment, you have enough money to stop doing something with your life if you don’t like it and switch to something else - whether that’s moving out of a town you don’t like anymore, or switching careers from building software to shoeing horses.
  These are honorable reasons to want hilarious amounts of money.

But still, the accountant’s comment rubbed me the wrong way. The longing in his voice stuck with me, the way he spoke of millions of dollars as if it might solve all his problems.

This post is for him and anyone else who says, with longing in their voice, that they want to be a millionaire.

No, you don't. You think you do, but you don't.

Allow me to explain.

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We all would quite like it if, out of the clear blue sky, someone gave us million dollars. We would be able to pay off all our debts, buy a reliable car and a lovely house to live in. With whatever’s leftover, we’d buy gifts for our loved ones, travel, and start small businesses. Whatever it is that we would do with that money, we imagine that it would Change Our Lives.

The reality is, one million dollars coming from the clear blue sky wouldn't Change Your Life.

Don’t get me wrong; one million dollars would certainly make a lot of your problems more manageable. But making your life easier is all it can do. It can’t change the path of your life. At most, all a million dollars can do is move you farther down that path. (And for those whose problems are not financial, such as a failing marriage or a cancer diagnosis, a million dollars can't do anything at all).

If you are now an accountant, you would (after your vacations are over) continue to be an accountant. If you spend two and a half hours watching TV in the morning instead of working out, you would continue to spend two and a half hours watching TV in the morning instead of working out. You are who you are. A million dollars wouldn’t change that.
When talking about the lottery, this doesn’t matter. But when people start trying to earn a million dollars (getting high-paying careers or getting a massive investment to start a business, for example) it matters. To earn a million dollars, you need to fundamentally change the sort of person that you are.

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The ultra-wealthy aren’t only separated from the bulk of the population by their extreme wealth. They are also separated because they are a different sort of people.

No, not because they are superior people. I didn't say that. In one sense, the ultra-wealthy are very ordinary people. They put their pants on one leg at a time, they get rocks in their shoes, and they worry that that weird lump could be cancer.
But when it comes to money, the ultra-wealthy think and act fundamentally differently than the rest of us (which is how they got so wealthy). People don't become ultra-wealthy by doing what everyone's already doing; they become ultra-wealthy by thinking, and doing, radically different things.

It’s not that money makes people eccentric - it’s that eccentric people make money.

The problem with doing these radically different things is that, well, they’re hard to do. Like your dad used to say, “if it were easy, everyone would be doing it.”

Here are some of the things that make radically different action so hard:

It’s physically challenging. It often involves years of unpaid labor while you build your skills in the radically different things. You have to spend the next six years working nights and weekends for no pay and no reward. (This is in addition to your 9-5 job and any household commitments you may have). There is no more time to rewind or relax.

It’s intellectually challenging. When you move into the radically different, you have to chart your course. There’s no one to tell you where to go next, and like old world explorers, you have to take a look at the world around you and make an educated guess. You will get lost. And like when you get lost in the real world, you will become angry and exhausted after looking at the map two hundred times and wondering how you got here and where ‘here’ even is. There’s no Google Maps for the path to wealth.

It’s emotionally challenging. You’re in it alone. People have walked the path before, and you can talk to people who have walked the path, but you must walk the path alone. Spouses and business partners may believe in you and support you, but they don’t understand. They aren’t walking the path. As you go farther down the path, you become emotionally separated from the people around you. It’s lonely at the top.

The more money you want, the more you have to do these things. As income climbs more and more, so too does the strength and self-discipline to do these things.

This results in some pretty wacky behavior from the ultrawealthy.

• Mark Zuckerberg wears the same t-shirt and jeans every day and has for the better part of a decade. He does this to eliminate the intellectual challenge of having to decide what to wear every day. (So does Barack Obama).
• Most successful people repeatedly say one of their biggest keys to success is never checking their email in the morning. Email is a Pandora’s box, containing an infinite amount of distractions which cost you intellectual and emotional energy.
• Many high-performing wealthy people have daily routines so strict that they never, ever deviate from them. This can appear from the outside to be an unhealthy obsession with routine. It isn’t that the wealthy are obsessed or mentally ill - it’s that they are conserving their energy for the physical, emotional and intellectual challenge. (Incidentally, this is the same reason mentally ill people love routines. The mentally ill simply have less emotional and intellectual energy to work with).
• Millionaires don’t use to-do lists. They work from their calendar. If it isn’t on their calendar, it doesn’t get done. They live off their calendar down to the minute, with no time for things that are unscheduled. Again, this is to maximize their time and cut down on decision fatigue. This is why the wealthy and the powerful seem inflexible.

This is why you don’t want to be a millionaire. You don’t want to do all this wacky shit. If you wanted to do all this wacky shit, you’d be doing it.

You don’t want to be a millionaire because you like your life the way it is. Sure, a few things could stand to change. You would like a new boss, one you don’t hate, or to finally finish that bachelors that has dragged on seven years. But on the whole, you are already who you want to be. And who you want to be isn't the sort of person who does the weird shit you need to do to make millions of dollars. Do us all a favor and admit it.

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Accepting this isn’t some esoteric philosophical realization from which you will emerge with serenity and inner peace. Accepting this has here-and-now implications in the real world, the same world that has an economy and careers. I’ll tell you about what they are in Part 2 (when it’s published).

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I’ll admit, there’s no accounting for dumb luck. You can’t engineer becoming the next Mark Zuckerberg. But even if Zuck hadn’t been in the exact right place, and the exact right time, he would have still been a member of the ultra-wealthy because he was willing to do what it took. (He was already a student at Harvard, and that doesn’t happen by accident).

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Photo by Tracy O on Flickr