The Naval Tweetstorm Series, Part 1: Seek wealth
Part 1 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.
“Seek wealth, not money or status…”
“Seek wealth, not money or status. Wealth is having assets that earn while you sleep. Money is how we transfer time and wealth. Status is your place in the social hierarchy.”
Growing up in Ireland, one side of my family worked a small farm on the side of a hill in the west of the country, and the other had worked their own small farm on the side of a hill in the east of the country before moving, a few years before I was born, to a slightly bigger farm nearby.
I come from farming stock, as do many Irish people in Ireland.
Some of the things this upbringing brought up most regularly were:
Money was scarce
Money only came through hard work
Having money was having enough to put food on the table
I bring all this up just to drill home the point.
Nobody I knew had a whole lot of insights about money, wealth or status.
Everyone was aware of money, sure, because money touches everything and everything touches money.
Everyone had an awareness of people who might have held wealth or status, but they were always other people.
In short, as ridiculous as it seems, money, wealth and status were alien concepts.
When I was nine or ten a woman down the road, the grandmother of some of our playground friends at school, got the chance to spin the wheel in the National Lottery, and lo and behold, she hit the jackpot.
£250,000, in old Irish pounds, or punts.
This made her, by miles, the richest person any of us knew. We were also certain that she would be the richest person any of us would ever know.
But apart from the local chatter and gossip the weekend she spun the wheel, her money was taboo. Everyone’s money was taboo, no matter how much or how little they had.
So it’s hard to underestimate the impact of seeing somebody so succinctly outline some definitions that made these concepts seem straightforward, even within reach.
It might seem overblown, but that’s how influential Naval’s tweets have been for me, none more than this one which kicked off the famous 39-tweet thread.
I realised that for much of my life I was, mostly unconsciously, seeking the feeling that came with money and the feeling that came with status.
Some of the feeling that came with money was a freedom — of sorts, for a while — from everyone who could tell you what to do.
Some of the feeling that came with status was belonging — or more accurately, being seen to belong.
I never really considered wealth.
I thought wealth was only the equivalent of obscene riches.
In short:
I believed (consciously) that money was the thing you wanted.
I believed (unconsciously) that money could get you status.
I believed (in every way) that wealth was out of reach.
Seeing Naval spell out the difference, in 31 words, was spell-binding. Literally. It cast a spell on me that’s made me see the world differently ever since.
Rather than money or status, said Naval, wealth is the thing to seek.
He defines wealth as nothing more than having assets that earn while you sleep.
By this definition, I still have a way to go to have wealth, but I’m closer than I ever was before, when I believed that wealth was only ever for someone else and always out of reach.
Follow the rest of this essay series here.
I’ll be back with Number 2 in this series next week. In the meantime there will be lots of other content, and another of my longform interviews comes your way on Friday (June 14th).
Till next time.
Excellent article Shane. About the only thing I got out of the famous (infamous?) book, “Rich Dad, Poor Dad”, was Kiyosaki’s definition of an asset as something that earns money for you. So, while most people would think of an expensive watch or a house as assets, his definitions would classify them as expenses, not assets. I do like Naval’s definition of wealth. His tweets were an education that’s helluva lot cheaper than Kiyosaki’s money pit systems.