Money and Delayed Gratification

There is a constant struggle between the present and the future. Our desires to attain a pleasurable item now can overwhelm our goals of saving little by little to have a precious treasure in the future. Money and delayed gratification are the balancing act of our psyche and physicality.

One part of us wants to indulge and have it now, while the other is straining to hold on to a better tomorrow. It takes self-constraint and courage to hope in tomorrow and not enjoy what is in front of our eyes. We see opportunity and money with our minds, and it is that imagination and creativity that allow us to have our biggest dreams.

What motivates us?

I often tell my family that we are souls with a body. This helps remind me, and them, that the spiritual motivators are what produce wealth versus the physical motivators. Before we dive into the differences of these two, it would be helpful to qualify what I mean by spiritual motivators. To me, the spiritual motivators are those items things that cannot be measured in a lab. We may listen to music and measure its frequency or volume via physical/scientific methods, but the catalyst for purchasing that music is of a spiritual origin. We decide to purchase that music based on how we feel while listening to it.

Physical motivators are items such as food, shelter, clothing, or possessions that give us great emotional enjoyment. Whereas spiritual motivators are wisdom, skills, friends, love, significance.

One of my life mentors says that he teaches people to go from survival to significance. That desire and transition do not happen with physical motivators. If we only have physical motivations we accumulate possessions and find significance in items that burn. A spiritual motivator is one where you are enjoying the wealth that comes from blessing people, but you are more concerned with blessing them even better the second time than thinking of the wealth you will gain from it.

A person who concerns themselves with spiritual motivators is always learning and is always meeting new people. I have a friend who reads several books a month and meets 5 new people a day. He has accumulated tens of thousands of friends who are willing to help him at any moment - he also owns 6,000 apartments and runs a 6 billion dollar business. You only need to spend 5 minutes with him to know that the physical things are not his motivation - loving people is his motivation.

At the speed of money

Wealth is produced by transactions. The more transactions we do, the more wealth we will have. When our desires are more heavily weighted to the physical motivators, people can tell. We do business and transact with people who we trust, and we certainly only do business with people a second time who we trust.

Delayed gratification is not focusing on how quickly we can earn the money or the physical item we wish to have. Delayed gratification is realizing that something of great value awaits us if we are willing to wait, willing to serve, and willing to focus on motivations that cannot be measured scientifically.

People can tell when we are more concerned about them than the physical money in their wallets. They feel that we genuinely care about them and their well-being when spiritual motivators are our motivations instead of physical ones. The physical ones are still there, for each of us has a yearning to survive. But, a true friend is won, and a referral business is created once they know that we are delaying our own gratification in service of their needs.

Helping people live better lives

One of my monetary goals in life is to become a billionaire. The reason I state that goal as becoming instead of having is because the physical acquisition of whatever humanity values as worth a billion dollars is not nearly as important as being the person who is worth a billion dollars to society.

We have established that wealth is made via transactions and trust. The transactions necessary to earn a billion dollars is not possible with the current state of my being. I must grow to become the type of person that people will be willing to hand over their money in exchange for the value I am giving to them. That does not happen unless I delay my desire to watch movies, play video games, or any activity that is requiring time away from my personal growth. Those activities are not bad in themselves, but when they are stealing my personal growth, I am allowing them to do so.

My wife and I have defined that we believe in helping people live better lives. The businesses we run and the investments we make are filtered through that spiritual lens of wealth creation. We are not so much concerned with the physical acquisition as we are with the outcome of the people we are helping. Are they better off for meeting us than if we never met them? Our desire to be billionaires is rooted in being a hand-up and not a handout. Our children and grandchildren may receive an inheritance, but the greatest inheritance we can give them are the skills to work with people, and a motivation to bless them to the utmost of their ability.

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