Kay:
Hey there Questers and welcome back. It is Monday, January 11th, 2021. We’re now in the second week so we know that it’s not technically weird, but chances are, you’re probably still writing 2020 on all your pieces of paper.
Shi:
I don’t know. I’ve been pretty excited for that year to end and to start into this one and I’m pretty excited about today’s quote too because it’s practical and it’s inspirational and it is an unknown source from anonymous. The quote is, “The real measure of your wealth is how much you’d be worth if you lost all your money.”
Kay:
Oooh, what a fantastic quote and I think an analogy that anyone can step themselves into. Whether you have a dollar to your name or a million dollars to your name, if all of that goes away, who are you without that capital?
Shi:
Right, and realizing the dimension of what it is that we’re really talking about when we say something like wealth or when we think of a concept like wealth. There really are these outside, subjective definitions of what wealthy means and then there’s your own internal definition. This quote is helping us understand more about attaching our own character and identity to that internal definition.
Kay:
Yes. Well, if all of that stuff were to be stripped away today, how wealthy would you be? How well-positioned would your emotional resilience be to come across hard times? Someone who’s truly financially free can come up to a financial winter and not worry. Now, if you’re truly emotionally free, you can come and do an emotional winter and not worry but are you really tumultuous inside, or are you peaceful?
Shi:
The word that’s really popping out is “worth” and because it comes back to that self-worth piece and that question of: how much do you value yourself? The real measure of your wealth is how much you’d be worth if you lost all your money. So, if you’re only identifying yourself as worthy because of a certain title that you have, or money or role that you play, all of those things can be taken away in your life or change over time. So that definition of worth being tied to that can mean you can have a real crisis on your hands just when something shifts which, what we know for sure is that things change.
Kay:
Well. Don’t just take it from us. Over Christmas…
Shi:
Take it from anonymous.
Kay:
Take it from nobody apparently. But over the weekend of Christmas, I saw a really interesting article by a mentor that I love and respect very dearly, Deepak Chopra, and the article was titled, “We are Facing the Third Pandemic”, and the article was really focused on how a lot of wealthy people from a financial perspective are poor when it comes to joy, poor when it comes to peace, poor when it comes to connection, and they find themselves financially free but shackled in a lot of other areas in their lives.
Shi:
That’s the dimension of: how are you defining your worth to yourself and how are you letting others define your worth on the outside and realizing that there is so much more to it than money. Sometimes throughout history, we’ve seen this example happen of not being able to measure that true wealth or worth until the money or the status or the role or the title is gone. It’s one of the reflections of that adage of knowing who someone really is by the way they treat the wait staff at a restaurant. This is a very similar vein of thinking here. If you take away the money and the status and the title, what is that worth? It’s the challenge that we ask you to consider today and when you’re thinking into this self-worth piece, how much you’re really tying that to maybe that number in the bank account?
Kay:
Well, this is so real for so many people. I mean right now in America 77% of Americans report feeling anxious when it comes to their financial situation which means that we have a direct correlation between people’s state of wellbeing and their finances. Now you might say, “Well, yeah, of course, if I don’t have enough money to eat then I’m going to be in an anxious state.” Well, obviously but 77% of our population is not impoverished. In fact, I think it’s only like 10%, 10 to 13% of our population is actually hitting that poverty line. It might even be less than that but with 77% of us having anxiety around our finances, clearly, we’ve invested so much mental energy around that state. Now it’s becoming that ever-moving goalpost at the end of the field that says, “I can’t be happy until maybe that bank account is at that certain number.” So as a reminder, the very illustrious anonymous says for you today, “The real measure of your wealth is how much you’d be worth if you lost all your money.”
Shi:
That brings us to your #MoneyMonday Quest.
Kay:
Ching, ching, ching, ching, ching, ching, ching!
Shi:
Cha-ching, cha-ching! Alright, your quest today is to measure your wealth on this Monday by writing down what your worth is, and here’s the catch – without listing any materials. Ooh, this is a goodie and we’re going to be doing it right alongside you. So, are you ready?
Kay & Shi:
Let’s quest!
