Money, Happiness, and Perspective

Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash

“Money doesn’t buy happiness” is the old saying.

That’s a damn lie.

Money buys freedom from doing the things you don’t want to. It buys you an ego boost if you crave it. It allows you to be as bored or overbooked as you’d like.

Six months after selling my business, I wasn’t sure how to spend my time. Should I have sold the company? Do I need to rebuild something? Should I become an investor? How about getting into real estate? Maybe I was just lost.

It is oddly easy to get stuck in a doom loop, and lose sight of the incredible life-changing gift we’ve received.

If you’re feeling down or unfulfilled or wish you could go back to running your company, I challenge you to shift your perspective. Every situation we experience has at least two perspectives.

Perspective shifting is one of the most powerful things I found for navigating a post-exit life. We are some of the luckiest people in the world to be able to experience this, a position that anyone would trade you for at any time.

If you perspective shift, you can navigate your days to being present, filled with pure enjoyment, and only doing things that give you positive energy.

I realize now that the faster you’re able to perspective shift, the happier you become.

Tim Ferris wrote it best:

It's frighteningly easy to develop pessimistic blinders and lose sight of the incredible blessings and achievements in our lives. This is common when a single identity-for example, job title and function-leads you to measure self-worth using one or two metrics (like income or promotions, usually in comparison to others) dependent on some variables outside of your control.

Recalibrate your perspective, and prevent over-investment of ego in one area of life, with scheduled gratitude exercises that take a holistic inventory of the positive people and achievements in your life.

New life KPI: Speed to Perspective Shift!