The Naval Tweetstorm Series, Part 2: Ethical wealth creation
Part 2 of 39 short essays in response to Naval's famous thread.
Series intro
If this is your first time here please check out this post which explains my reasons for writing this essay series. Thank you.
“Ethical wealth creation is possible…”
“Understand that ethical wealth creation is possible. If you secretly despise wealth, it will elude you.”
In our hectic world, to pause is a nourishing thing.
It’s good to stop for a moment on a busy street and look around, or turn the phone off and sit for a coffee and watch people pass.
Jim Rohn, the great mentor of personal development, often said,
“Success leaves clues”.
Same with behavior.
What people do tells us all we need to know about what people value.
As the scornful old adage goes: “Do as I say, not as I do”.
When we slow down to look around and observe, something emerges in the behavior of others, from the low hum of entitlement and complaint to broader unrest and take-to-the-streets activism.
What emerges is low agency.
Low-agency people might complain about the advantages of others, or they might make a list —an ADHD diagnosis, say, or an address in the wrong part of town, or bad teachers, or lack of mental health supports, or the government, the media, the economy — of all the reasons that add up to explain their own shortcomings.
Low agency people complain about injustice, but their complaints about injustice might have their roots in their hatred for wealth.
Let’s make sure, before we go on, to pay attention to the definition of wealth from the first tweet in Naval’s tweetstorm.
Wealth is not one of a long list of billionaires.
Wealth is not corporations striking deals with business-friendly tax regimes.
Wealth is not the guy in the brand new Mercedes with the top down in the sun.
Wealth is just having assets that earn while you sleep.
When you’re sitting over that coffee in the heart of any medium-sized city in any medium-prosperous country, you might sense an undercurrent of anger.
You might sense it in the way people sit in cars at traffic lights with a slightly revving engine, or the way they talk to bus drivers, or how they skip the queue in the café.
The anger is common and the anger is real.
When angry, it’s always easier to look outwards, to seek a target, than it is to look within.
Looking inwards is hard.
There are few easy answers inside, but the answers are all there.
When people look themselves in the mirror with absolute honesty, the source of the anger, the reason they might despise wealth, might just be because they have not been able to do what others have done.
More often than we care to admit, secretly despising the wealth of others is merely despising our own inability to do the same.
When we take the step of acknowledging this — and it’s a big step to take — then the other two parts of Naval’s tweet become much more straightforward.
The first part is wealth, and our attitude towards it.
The second and third parts are:
2. Wealth creation
3. Ethical wealth creation
Firstly, wealth creation, and a quick story from Daniel Priestley.
Priestley is an Australian entrepreneur and author of several business books including The Entrepreneur Revolution. He was a guest on The Diary of a CEO podcast with Steven Bartlett recently, and there he said something interesting:
“Never before have people had the opportunity to build a global business full of fun, freedom and flexibility. Today that is accessible to almost anyone listening to this podcast. The baby boomers got access to affordable housing. We get access to affordable global small businesses.”
In other words, wealth creation — remember: wealth as nothing more than an asset that earns while you sleep — is accessible to everyone in ways that would have looked like magic to our parents and grandparents’ generations.
Secondly, ethical wealth creation.
This one can get thorny, because you can spend whole semesters debating ethics at some of the biggest universities in the world.
Is there a generally accepted standard of ethics? If so what is it?
Is ethical behavior innate, or learned?
Do different ethics apply in different situations?
Is ethics related to common sense, or something else?
Is the same action right in one situation but wrong in another?
Can we even agree on what’s right and what’s wrong in the first place?
For the purposes of this essay, let me suggest this as a rough definition:
An ethical course of action is one that feels right to us, and is not judged to be evil by the marketplace of ideas or bad by the marketplace of commerce.
Three points on that:
It feels right to us
It’s not judged to be an evil idea
It’s not judged to be a bad commercial offer
This does not, in my mind, mean your idea needs to be an idea for good.
It doesn’t mean your commercial offering needs to be business for good.
From calm companies to conscious capitalism to ten-a-penny mission statements that aim to “make the world a better place”, there are endless examples of businesses trying to do something businesses are not brilliantly equipped to do.
A business, at its core, must do just two things: deliver value for the income it generates, and generate more income than it costs.
If either one of those runs into the red, the business enters decline and death.
In short, to be ethical is not necessarily to be good.
To be ethical is to be not bad, which is a slightly different thing.
If karma is real — and I think it’s probably as real as all the matter in the universe put together — then rather than relying on public validation as a good barometer of what’s ethical, just listen to your heart speak.
More than any textbook or any global leader, your inner wisdom knows what’s ethical, and it’s steering you silently in the right direction every day of your life — including when you’re working on your wealth.
Follow the rest of this essay series here.
I’ll be back with Number 3 in this series next week. In the meantime there will be lots of other content, so please subscribe here.
Till next time.