A Billion Dollars

What would you do with a billion dollars?

I am occasionally asked by young people for my life advice. Could I counsel them as they decide what to do? They are thinking of going into something new. Or thinking about quitting their job. Should they work for a non-profit? There is usually a financial undercurrent to their concerns. I have a pretty standard response; I ask them to explore this scenario:

Imagine I am a wizard with a magic wand. I wave it over you and now you have a billion dollars. What would you do with your life? The price of things is no longer material. What do you use the money for?

The answers are wild and vary. They first buy a house, and maybe one for family members. Maybe even a second home at the lakeside. They get a car they always wanted. Travel some. Support an artist friend.

I tell them, that is all good, but after all that you will still have a billion dollars. You’ve only spent millions and you’ll make that back in a day or two. And you still have the problem of what you are going to do with your precious time.

Here the answers get interesting. Some would start their own business, or open a bakery. Work with doctors serving the poor. Go pro with their band. Become a YouTube creator. None of this requires anything close to a billion dollars.

I am reminded of a scene in the movie Wall Street where Bud, the protagonist, is working in a high-paying finance job he hates so that he can make a million dollars, retire and ride a motorcycle across China. The inside joke is that you don’t need to work on Wall Street, or to make a million dollars, to buy a motorcycle to cross China. You could easily do that whole trip for $2,000 dollars, saved from a short summer stint working at Costco.

The point of my exercise is that most people’s dreams are not gated by money. Sure you need some money, but you probably don’t need as much as you might imagine. You most likely don’t need multi-million dollars to start your dream.

The bottleneck for most dreams is not financial. It’s a lack of confidence, willingness to take a risk, and face failure, or a lack of imagination of what is possible with current resources. If you want to write a novel you don’t need capital — you need discipline and 1,000

words a day. If you want to start a consultancy you need expertise and a first client, not a war chest. A lack of money is a convenient thing to blame because it feels concrete, but it’s rarely the actual blocker for achievements.

I am not suggesting money is not necessary, or that you should go into debt to pursue your desires. This exercise assumes you’re not choosing between your dream and your next meal. If you are, I would use my wizard’s wand to first grant you a safety net — everything after that is what this essay is about. Money is the fuel you need for a trip – but it is not the goal of the trip. You most likely don’t need more money to accomplish your dream. You need time, skill, relationships, courage, and perseverance.

I’ve managed to do a lot of things without having much money at the start. Here are some tips that I have used:

Start Small, Scale Later – Whatever the cost of a dream, you usually don’t need it all up front. You can begin with a little and if the path is a good one for you, you can gain the additional resources as you proceed.

Constraints Breed Ingenuity — Forward motion and ingenuity often open up new possibilities that can route around costs. This is why most breakthroughs happen in startups. If you could ensure a breakthrough by spending money, all the new inventions would only happen in big corporations. They don’t, because you can’t buy breakthroughs. Startups have no money to buy a solution, so they are forced to be ingenious, clever, thrifty and bold to invent one. They have no choice but to spend their imagination and creativity. That outside thinking generates the new ideas. It is often the financial constraints that make dreams come true.

Small Tweaks, Big Difference – If you are an average worker, you’ll channel more money in your lifetime than you think. The typical median American will see several million dollars of income flow through their accounts over their life. Small tweaks in handling those quantities can make a big difference in achieving your dreams.

Prototype Your Life – Try a scaled-down version of your dream first. Start with a pop-up instead of a storefront; or a self-published ebook instead of a commercial press deal; some hand-made versions instead of a factory run; volunteer to intern with a lawyer before heading to law school; do a self-contained weekend camping trip before tackling the Appalachian Trail. The prototype will reveal what your actual monetary costs might be, and what the real bottlenecks are. Prototyping will often adjust your dream and save you a fortune.

Relationships Beat Capital – Friends and relationships are more important than money. If you want to go sailing, a friend with a boat is better than you owning a boat. Investing into relationships is a better deal than investing into crypto. The most valuable things in life – the things your dreams should include – are actually things that no amount of money — especially a billion dollars – can buy.

1,000 True Fans – My theory of a 1,000 True Fans is aligned with this perspective. It says you do not need a billion fans, or a best seller, or a billion dollars, to succeed in your creative endeavors. To make a living you only need thousands of super fans, if you have direct relationships with them. The key is the direct relationships with your fans.

Lower Barriers – The “minimum viable capital” for most creative or entrepreneurial dreams has collapsed over the last decade. Because of new technologies, the barriers to making stuff have lowered. It is cheap and easy to print a book, to 3D print an ingenious device, to generate a film. You simply need a whole lot less money to make something compared to previous generations.

Other People’s Money – There may be dreams where a lot of money is required at some point: maybe you want to do a hardware chip startup. This is where relationships are important again, because you want to use other people’s money. And the big secret in raising other people’s money is that it is ALL about relationships and character.

Take a small amount of money, and leverage it with great ambition, imagination, and creativity. Try something that no one has tried before, where the solutions are not for sale. Make something that no one is selling. Become the world’s expert in something – anything – and use that expertise as a platform to do more things you like to do. Cultivate friends and make their relationships your capital. Focus on being valuable, helpful, interesting, weird, rather than on being rich. I love what Brian Eno said, “If all I’d ever wanted to do was make money, I’d probably be really poor by now.”

I’ve had the privilege of hanging around a dozen actual billionaires. Despite the myth, they are not unhappy. But here’s the thing: they are still trying to figure out what they want to do next, and who they want to become. And their billions of dollars don’t help them in that. In fact, their billions of dollars are almost a prison. Their previous success hemmed them in, set unhealthy expectations, and will never go away (it is hard to get rid of a billion dollars). The hurdles they have in achieving their new dreams are exactly the same as yours: the need for will power, perseverance, ingenuity and imagination. None of these cost a billion dollars; all of them are available to anyone anywhere.

The goal is not to acquire, but to become. At your funeral people will remember what kind of person you were, not what kind of stuff you had. Your everyday life will need money, and no matter what you do, a fair measure of it will flow through your days. But beyond some minimal amount (way less than a billion) money is not important to who you become. Other assets like your character, your ethics, your work, your relationships, your word, your spirit, your drive – these are your real treasures. Use them to achieve your dreams.

The wizard’s wand is a magic trick. You already have everything the wand would have given you — everything except the billion dollars — which, it turns out, you didn’t need. Nor do you need a magic wand to materialize these powerful assets. They are in your hand right now.