Lessons - 8 Forms of Wealth and Why You're Only Chasing One | Robin Sharma - Author of The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari (15M+ Copies Sold)

In this lessons episode, discover why true wealth extends far beyond money into growth, wellness, family, purpose, and service. Understand how awareness can expose inherited definitions of success, explore practical ways to rewire limiting beliefs and reshape personal priorities, and uncover why running an individual race creates a more meaningful and fulfilling life. So if you look at those, let's list them out. This will paint the picture for all the discussions. So we have, yes, money, which is what everybody feels is what they're pursuing. I think a lot of us feel we're pursuing that. We have growth, wellness, family, craft, community, adventure, and service. Okay. And I think these are very interesting. And obviously, I would even love, just very briefly, before we go down the rabbit hole a little bit farther, in your own words, what do these different forms of wealth mean? And yeah, let's start there so people can frame it. Okay, so all your viewers from around the world, that's what the model looks like. Quickly, the first form of wealth, growth. If someone is in hot pursuit of becoming their best self, someone is working each day quietly, steadily, through meditation, visualization, prayer, reading, journaling, to become more powerful, stronger, braver, more authentic, more loving. If someone is in growth mode each day, like so many of your viewers are, That's a form of riches. The psychic wealth that comes to us from becoming more of ourselves is pound. Second form of wealth, wellness. Someone once said to me, health is the crown on the well person's head that only the ill person can see. We have good health, good energy, longevity. We had wealth money camp by, free family. What's the point of living in a mansion? Being there all alone. I tell the story in the book about one of my clients. Beautiful home, biggest I've ever seen, art collection, car collection. No one to share his life with. Fourth form of wealth, craft. Whether you are a coder, writer, a yoga teacher, a billionaire, street sweeper, doing your work like Picasso painted, gives great joy and happiness. Fifth form of wealth, money. And there's actually 20 chapters on how the billionaires do it from my intimate knowledge of their mindset, habits, ways of being. Sixth form of wealth is community. You become your conversations. So it's all about stripping out the energy vampires and the importance and how to find people whose lives you want to be living. Seventh form of wealth, adventure. A lot of us are living the same year 80 times and calling it a lie. So there's 25 chapters in that section on how to inject awe and wonder, which is a form of wealth. Wow, my life is amazing. It's magic. That's a form of wealth. And then the final one is service. And before I came onto your podcast, I reread Mahatma Gandhi's beautiful line. And he said, to lose yourself in the service of others is how you really find yourself. So we have these eight versions of wealth, and I think that people probably, again, to the first point, they've participated in some, probably some are lacking. But societal pressure is very strong, exceptionally strong. We didn't just accidentally stumble into just pursuing money. This is to keep up with the Joneses. Cost of living is exceptionally high. So how do we sort of recalibrate? Is this sort of a commentary on Maslow's hierarchy of needs? And maybe we think we need more than we actually do to fulfill that. And we should be pursuing self-actualization versus just putting a roof over our head. But our roof now costs three, four or five million dollars, whatever that is. So how do we reframe? How do we reprogram? And this is something that obviously you teach and you probably help people at any level. So this is not like just when you're starting out. You're talking about billionaires that need reprogramming. So what's the playbook, the first step? The first step is an idea. As I do this podcast tour, Scott, everyone's going, what are the tactics? What are the tactics? Give me the tactics. Methodology without philosophy is an empty victory. So ideas are important. We've become so enamored with tactics and morning routines. I teach them in the book, tactics. There's hundreds of tools. Well, you're kind of known for some morning routine literature. Guilty as charged. So how do we start the process of seeing our programming? We start with the idea of, oh, maybe there are forms of wealth beyond money. And with these ideas and then thoughtfulness and paying attention and then asking ourselves, wow, am I really experiencing all eight forms of wealth? Transformation lives in awareness. As we build more awareness of how we're living, oh, I'm in, I'm, I'm caught up in the cultural hypnosis of chasing money and these mountaintops that in the end will lead to anything. And then secondly, how do you start, there's a chapter in the book called, Know the Penham Principle. PENEM, it deconstructs how we think the way we think. It's an acronym. P, our parents. E, our environment. N, our nation. A, our associations. And M, our media. And those five forces of PENEM create cues. I mean, for example, with our parents, when we're growing up, our parents, we watch them. They teach us how the world works. They give us all these subtle cues. Here's what success looks like, Scott. And now we're 35 or 55 or 75, and we're still running those ancient programs, even though they're not right for us. So awareness is how we start thinking about these things. And then tools, MVP, meditation, visualization, and prayer is just a fantastic tool to rewire the programming. Journaling, this morning I was... operating in my journal, you know? And so just journaling about what success looks like to you, what is wealth to you, what do you want to stand for, what are your top five volumes, those kinds of things. It starts the rewiring process. Final thing I'd say is your social circle. You're around people who are measuring success solely by financial wealth, and you're going to think like them through the power of emotional contagion. So creating social circle of people who go, oh, Money is one form of wealth, but so is family, so is wellness, so is adventure, so is service, et cetera. And I think that that's something that you have to actively potentially edit, not because the people are bad people, but because you want to know the direction that you want to move in. And that's the people that you have to keep close to you. I mean, the tropes are all there, right? The quotes of you are the five people that you surround yourself with. I think people have heard those a thousand times, but it's very, very accurate. So I think that maybe editing that circle is more important than we realize, because I think when we think about. surrounding ourselves with individuals, the first thought is, how do I surround myself with individuals that move the needle in my career or in my company, or how do I add an extra comma in my bank account? But I also want to flip the script a little bit and bring up another habit that I've seen when people pursue other forms of wealth to a significant degree. If they pursue community or religion or physical health and wellness. I feel that people always want to be hyper-competitive and they always want to seem, they seem to want to win in these arenas. So you all know that friend that started working out and all of a sudden they become a little bit preachy about working out and not drinking and about eating right. So when we pursue, why do we do that? Why do we always feel the need to compete? Because I think that there's one toxic behavior, which is pursuing money exclusively. But then the second toxic behavior is always feeling that we have to beat someone if we take something else and assume it as part of our identity, which I think defeats the purpose of balance. Well, you say why? And I go back to that chapter, the wealth money can't buy under growth, the Penham Principle. Right? Kind of parents, environment, nation, associations, and media. We are programmed to compete. We are programmed to see victory as reaching the top of the mountaintop that others are climbing. It's even neurobiological. Back on the savannah, a thousand years ago, we were competing for the resources, competing for shelter, competing for resources. to be dominant in the tribe. So I think as human beings, we are hardwired to compete in some ways, but I would actually suggest that's the reptilian brain, the lower way of thinking in survival mode. As we start to grow, as we evolve, as we think, as we meditate, as we journal, as we think about, you know, how we want to live, we realize there's a higher way to live. And that is running a race against yourself. So not competing. I think competing in many ways comes from scarcity. There's not enough. I must take it all. I think a much wiser, healthier way to roll through life, let's say, as an entrepreneur is you run your own race. And basically, there's a fifth form of wealth and the wealth money can't buy is craft. And one of the chapters is I talk about your Project X. Your Project X is your Taj Mahal. Your Project X is your Sistine Chapel ceiling. Your Project X is your Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata. In a world where so many of us are pushing out so much, Clint, what I'm suggesting in this book is, in this chapter, is you do one thing. It might take you four years. It might take you 10 years. But you push that one masterwork out in the world that stands the test of time. You don't worry about competition. You don't look at what other people are doing. You just do what your instinct tells you you want to do. And I think if you, you know, worrying about competition is exhausting. And I do think it's coming from a place of fear. You kind of put on blinders and say, here's the product I want to push out into the world. Here's my Sistine Chapel ceiling. And you push that magic out into the world, amazing things will happen. It's very powerful. It's almost like we lack self-reflection and self-awareness to a degree, which I think creates all of these negative habits that we're trying to avoid. Because if we had self-reflection in what we were pursuing, or if we had self-reflection in what we were looking to achieve, or I've heard you mention this before, are we climbing the right mountain? Are we climbing the right Everest? And we looked inside, then maybe we realized that we're not. And I was even watching the trailer for the Wealth Money Can't Buy. And the trailer is grandpa's on his last breath, about to die. And I think he's talking to his grandkids. And it's such a powerful image because it happens to all of us and death and our mortality happens. Not to get too dark, but it's like a very powerful motivator to focus on what actually matters. I think actually one of my favorite things to do is to go to the last part of the book. And in the last part of your book, you're speaking about having a living funeral. So it just forces us to reevaluate what's so important. And I think that not many people do that. I think that many people are just waking up autopilot every single day. Yeah, there's also another chapter at the end, the final form of, well, put your service, put your final day first. And I actually would say thinking about your mortality is not a dark thing. It's a light. I would actually say that fluency would, the shortness of life is how the warriors play. If you can regularly think about the shortness of life and remind yourself that soon or late, we will all be dust on a mantle above a fireplace next to our family's Little League trophies. We're going to realize, we're going to live to the point. to the point, you know, look, Scott, accidents, pandemics, wars, illness, disease, emergency. That's the stuff of life these days in the age of poly crisis. And so what I'm trying to do with the wealth money can't buy is say, here are the things that let's call it the eight Mount Everest to climb so that we don't, as you suggested, spend our best hours climbing the wrong mountain. Because I really do think a lot of us have fallen into a series of traps. We are addicted to our phones. We are addicted to being busy, being busy, addicted to endless notifications. We are addicted to comparing our lives with what we see on screens. We are, and we are addicted, I really believe, to this quest of thinking that wealth is only about money and material possessions and fame and fortune. And you look at, like I say, I've worked with 15 plus years, so many billionaires, so many famous CEOs, so many sports superstars and entertainment icons. And so many of them have a lot of money, but that's all they have. Thanks for tuning in. If you found this valuable, don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode. And if you want to dive deeper into this conversation, check out the links in the description to watch the full episode. See you in the next one.