In today’s episode I’m interviewing Rob Moore. Rob and I discuss his personal story, and the importance of life leveraging. He also talks about why he thinks it’s a fabulous time to be a woman in today’s society!
Listen to the interview
Welcome to the podcast Rob!
The first thing I actually want to ask you is; I’ve just finished reading your new book I’m Worth More, and I absolutely loved this book for several reasons. I resonated with quite a lot of your story, and I wanted to just go back to one of the earlier chapters in your book about your hero growing up, Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Yeah, he’s one of them. My dad as well.
I think the concept of the book around focusing on your self worth is hugely important when it comes to money, because actually our early relationship with money has a huge impact on how we behave with money. What was your earliest experience growing up around money?
I remember this clear as day. My dad always used to have his money in his right hand pocket, and back then because I was small and money was bigger; there was massive the old brown 10-pound notes in the 1980’s and big five-pound notes. He used to have this big wad of cash and he used to go around to pubs, auction houses, and liquidation sales, and he would buy stock for his pubs, restaurants, bars, and hotels. It was all in cash, and I’d ask him for money and he’d often give me a little bit of money here and there he didn’t usually make me work for it. Then my first job was bottling up in his pub. Bottling up was going down to the cellar which was behind the bar but a straight drop down, so it’s actually quite dangerous but I loved that. I used to go down into the cellar and bring all the crates of bottles up, and they were heavy for a kid; I was probably only six.
He got me working really young. I’d load up all these crates carry them up this almost vertical flight of stairs in the cellar. I had to always put the oldest bottles at the front and the newest bottles at the back so they didn’t go out of date, and rotate them so that the cold ones are at the front.
You know you get coke out of the pump; it’s a mixer these days, syrup which mixes with soda, but back then we literally opened two-litre bottles of coke and poured it into this massive canister and then it would vacuum seal shut and that would come through. It took me like an hour to fill these things up, and then I’d change all the beer kegs and everything. I was doing this at six, and I absolutely loved it; I felt like the right don!
Dad would pay me about a pound a week to do that, but I’d probably end up earning maybe five or six quid because one of the carpets in the disco room at one of his pubs was pretty much the same color as a pound coin. So if you dropped a pound coin you were screwed you couldn’t find it! Me and my sister used to go and find a few quid after a busy Friday, Saturday, or Sunday night. I’d take all that money down to the local pound shop and I’d either buy Airfix airplanes or I’d buy pictures of Ferraris, Lamborghinis, and stuff and I put them all over my wall.
That’s my first experience of money as six years old properly working for money, and I think that’s where a lot of my relationship with money came from.
And so your dad rewarded you by giving you money before the work that you did?
Yeah. I mean he made me work hard for not a lot of money, but he would give me stuff too; he was very generous and still is. He wanted to teach me if you work hard you get rewarded, but also it’s alright to ask every now and again because my dad’s favourite saying is if you don’t ask you don’t get. So it’s not like he’d never give me money – if I asked he would often not, but sometimes I think if he thought I asked well or I pitched good, or he thought this is for a good thing, he’d give me money instead of making me work for it.
I don’t know how strategic that was, or if it was accidental, but I have no problems with asking for money and I have no problems with asking for things now. I have a little bit of cheek I suppose, or I’m quite direct. Maybe some would regard it as a bit cheeky and audacious around asking for things, and I think that’s because that was ultimately how my dad raised me. And that’s how I want to raise my kids.
I was just going to ask you how does that influence how you teach your children about money? You’ve got two children haven’t you?
Yeah, so I want to instil in my children the work reward ratio. So if you apply yourself to something there will be a reward, because I believe that’s how society works. Where there’s a salary, or you sell to a client or a customer, or you get a retainer or whatever. So if I feel like my kids have done worthy work I’ll reward them. I also give them good prizes if they win things, so if they play golf and they do well or they try hard, or they overcome a big challenge there’ll be a prize and that prize is usually quite generous, because I want to teach them that if they train hard and practice hard and they win something, in the world that’s gonna get rewarded.
I rarely if ever just give them stuff but I also at some point want to start teaching them that it’s not just hard work that equals money. There’s plenty of people that work really hard on minimum wage, so it’s actually not the case that the world rewards just hard work. The world rewards attention, the world rewards reach, the world rewards impact, the world rewards smart work and leverage as well as hard work. And they’re things that I’m going to have to introduce into teaching my kids. But they’re still quite young so there’s time.
Do you think you teach kids different things at different ages?
100%. People are always saying to me I should write a book for children on money, and I’d love to except to a 16 year old and a 6 year old it’s a completely different thing that you’re teaching them. I mean I taught my son to count with golf balls and pound coins from probably the age of not even two. My son knew what a Krugerrand was before his teachers knew what a Krugerrand was because he was winning them when he was getting hole in ones – he’s had 8! Krugerrand’s are worth nine hundred and fifty quid-ish at the moment!
I wanted to introduce him to counting with money, and we travel a lot around the world as well, so I also wanted to get him counting in Euros, US dollars, Cayman dollars etc and he does that as well. I think it’s vital that young people are taught money but I feel like from 0 to maybe 5 or 6 it’s a phase and you gotta teach them to count and then you know maybe 6 to I don’t know eight nine ten I think there’s different stages and it as such that’s hard to write into one book that might be a series of books.
I want to instil in my children the work reward ratio. So if you apply yourself to something there will be a reward, because I believe that’s how society works.
Rob Moore
Have you seen the recent Monopoly launch of their digital version? You play the Monopoly game but with digital money rather than physical pounds.
Yeah we play it you actually. You have a card not coins, and you put the card into the machine and you charge the card. It’s great, I got my kids playing it years ago when that came out because I thought that that was a great way of teaching them how money works works in a modern way and where money comes from.
In everything I want to teach my kids what the world is like and I don’t think the world just bungs kids a bit of money or a reward just for being. There are times that you can be generous with kids; birthdays, Christmas, and other occasions I like to be generous, but I want my kids to experience the world as it is not as I see it per se. I’m not a parenting guru here by the way, I’m still figuring it out because my kids are eight and four, but something I think I have figured out is that we often parent in the way we feel is best to parent.
Now I know that sounds obvious, but what we do with that therefore is we shield them from things we didn’t like, and we expose them to things we didn’t have, or things we wanted, or things we had and liked. So what we’re doing is we’re giving them our experience of being parented filtered through our perception of how parenting should be. That’s actually biased and then the interesting thing is you’ve got your wife or your husband or partner doing exactly the same thing but through their own filters, and their values and their childhood.
I want to show my kids what the world is really like which is why from time to time if I lose my rag with them that’s okay. From time to time if I push them a little bit hard that’s okay, and from time to time if I rescue them and help them out that’s okay too, because the best way to prepare them to be successful in the world is to show them what the world is really like before they get out there. The world is all those things; it’s a paradoxical balance of all those things.
One of my mentors John Demartini said to me ‘nothing that you do is a disservice to your children’ and he was telling me that at a time when I was feeling quite a lot of guilt because I’d lost my shit with my son. He was just pushing me as kids do, and we were quite near a road and he was messing about, so I pushed him away from the road. I pushed him harder than I should have and he had his golf bag on and fell. His legs went up in the air and he cried, and I immediately felt like the worst parent in the world. I picked him up in quite an angry way and dumped him in the back of the car. We were in silence for about five minutes and then I went on to my phone and opened Audible and downloaded every single parent book I’d never read. Over the next week I listened to them all.
Any good ones?
Yeah. Calmer Happier Kids is good. I read quite a few but the point I’m making here is I would not have gone and downloaded all those parenting books and learned better strategies had I not lost my shit with Bobby and then felt guilty. The guilt drove me to do that. Also kids are always trying to find your boundary, and he found my boundary. If you push your kids a bit it teaches them to be independent which is a great gift to them. John Demartini’s message to not beat yourself up about all the stuff you do as a parent is an important one. I think a lot of parents beat themselves up about not being a perfect parent, but let’s be honest every day you don’t punch your kids in the face that’s a good day! You should go to bed go and know I had a good day; today I did not punch a kid!
We’re just back from holiday and had a lovely time, but it’s not really a holiday for you as a parent, is it, because you’re looking after the kids!
One of the things you just mentioned there Rob about trying to shelter your children against things that happened to you in the past or things that you grew up around is so true.
My son’s not going to boarding school because I’ve got the worst painful memories of boarding school; showers, y-fronts yeah… But we do that with the stuff we hated growing up with; we want to shield our kids from it. If I’m looking at it in a more balanced way my dad, for example, sent me to rugby camp and I hated it. I hated that camp and my natural instinct wants me to not send my kids to that camp because I hated it, but I thought, actually, every kid should go to a camp they hate for a week. That’s part of growing up.
I remember I did the Duke of Edinburgh and we were staying out in the pissing rain all weekend having to put up a tent we couldn’t put up, and it took hours. I hated that and I thought I’m not putting my kids
through that. But no, every kid has gotta sleep in a tent that they haven’t put up properly in the rough, pissing down with rain, for one weekend! You’ve got to go through all this stuff, it’s character-building. So this is what I’m trying to balance; the things that I hated that I’m trying to protect my kids from, actually some of it I’ve got expose them to some of it.
What things looking back at your childhood would you say were your biggest lessons?
What taught you the most growing up? Because in your book you talk about a lot about the episodes of bullying that you had at school. Was that the biggest lesson for you growing up do you think?
I mean that’s a huge question isn’t it? Do you mean in any specific area?
Well I think we go through lessons in life to learn something. There’s always a positive to be taken out of every single experience.
Yeah but I never saw that as a kid. I didn’t know that there was always a positive. I thought that life happened to you not for you, and I felt like I wasn’t in control. Okay, I could and would try hard and put effort into exams or whatever, but a lot of things in my life like my weight and how people feel about me the things I wasn’t good at – I just assumed that this is me. This is who I am. I’m not good at this stuff, I’m never going to be good at this stuff.
Now I like to get a lesson out of everything because I’m a bit more experienced, but back then I don’t think I saw a lot of the lessons. So looking back; what did I learn the most? I learned a lot from my dad about business and money, and I learned a lot from my mum about compassion and patience. I’m not the most patient person, but my mum really is and I’ve had to learn that. I think most people have got a story of things in their childhood that made them feel vulnerable, weak, or rejected. The fact is I was a really fat kid and that was my story. What I learned from that is that I’m worthy of love, attention, praise, a feeling of importance, and being noticed and respected. I’m worthy of that just as much as anybody else, and it’s okay to seek that in the ways that I want to seek that. Whether that’s through my fans and followers, the books I write, or the interviews and the podcasts I do.
It’s okay to get that need met, whereas I always used to feel guilty and like there’s something wrong with me because I wanted to be noticed and liked by people. Every human being has a need to be loved, and every human being wants to be liked, respected, and admired for what they do in your own way. I guess I learned that was okay, and I found that now in the last ten years at least I get it, and I get that need met through books, podcasts, the people that I help inspire, educate, and influence. Some of the nice material items and things I’m lucky to have; I think that certainly meets a little bit of that need too. But above all I learned that every day that need needs to be re-met again.
Is it a constant journey this discovery of self-worth and did you have a pivotal moment where you realised that actually I’m worth more? Or was this a journey of discovery?
There was definitely no day when I woke up and went ‘finally I’m worth more!’ I mean, I’ve had some moments like when my dad had his big nervous breakdown on December 15 2005; that was a lightning bolt for me. I think it’s a progressive mix of doing a lot of personal development, reading a lot of personal development books, podcasts, going on a lot of personal development courses – understanding myself, having that self-awareness understanding about mindset psychology. I think looking inwards and valuing what I’ve already done, who I already am, what I’ve already got to offer, that I’m unique and that I have got talents, and that I have got control of my outcomes in my life. I can learn things I didn’t think I could learn; that’s been an ongoing journey which for me never stops.
So there’s that, and then there’s also the progressive experience and results. So if you have one property, 10 properties, 50 properties or 100 properties, that’s going to impact your feeling of worth. If you have a hundred properties you’re going to feel like you’re worth more than if you have one, so as I’ve read more books and bought more properties and made more money – I became a millionaire between the age of 30 and 31 and then a deca-millionaire a few years later – as you check all of that stuff off the list, break the world records like I have, write the books I have that have got to number one, and all these things – in fact that just naturally increases your self-worth.
And to a certain degree it gives you these pillars or this big foundation rock that can’t be infiltrated, but that doesn’t mean you’re immune because something can happen to humble you very quickly. I’m still quite susceptible to things happening that make me feel like that kid again, or feeling like actually I’m not really that good and I’ve got so much work to do. So I do think it’s a journey and a lot of people think that’s a bad thing. They’re like ‘when are you ever going to be happy, when are you ever going to be satisfied, when are you ever going to retire, when are you ever going to be made, when is it ever going to be enough?’ Well that is not the journey of evolution. Evolution never gets to the point where it’s like oh we’ve evolved to our maximum capacity, let’s stop. It’s continual, and so is the journey of self-discovery. So is the journey of wealth accumulation, and so is the journey of what gets you up in the morning. A lot of people are looking for this retirement day in business and money, and I think it’s an illusion because for me then retirement means atrophy and boredom. I want to know that there’s a new challenge tomorrow. And of course there’s part of me that doesn’t want to know that because part me wants it to be easy, because that’s also the human paradoxical nature; we love the challenge and the growth but we also secretly want it to be really easy.
It’s really interesting; I talk about this regularly on the podcast – I hate the word pensions because as soon as I mention the word pension, people think of being old, buying in an annuity and all of these things, and it’s depressing. People don’t want to think about it so they just don’t think about it and bury their heads in the sand. I think you’re absolutely right that retirement isn’t about finishing work, sitting in your slippers, and playing golf. It’s this progressive journey isn’t it?
So I guess that leads on to my next question.
A lot of women that listen to the podcast are stuck in this kind of transition world where they may be in a nine-to-five job, or they’re maybe starting their business, but they’re at this crossroads where they’re a little bit lost. They’re thinking I want to build income, I want to build wealth, I’m reading some of these books or listening to some of these podcasts. But how do they know what their next step is to discover who they are and what they should be doing in the world to make money and to grow?
Okay so I think the first thing you’ve got to do is you’ve got to think about what are you excited about? What you’re passionate about, what makes you feel alive, and what could you see yourself doing as a potential career beyond your employment? I think now is actually easier than ever to pick something because there’s a passion-profession merge. A hobby can be a business because of the internet and social media. A sixteen year old kid just won three million dollars in a gaming competition, and I like to use that as an analogy; that kids now can monetise playing computer games, and kids can monetise YouTube channels. There’s Ryan’s young lad who’s seven now I believe – he’s got Ryan’s Toy Reviews that did $18 million in revenue last year.
So it’s a great time to monetise your passion, because a lot of people are going into something just for the money. I’m also not one of those people that says I’ll never do it for the money, I just don’t believe people when they say ‘this is not about the money’. I’m sorry part of it has to be about the money because if it’s not about the money either give it all away or don’t ever charge anyone. So there’s got to be that symbiosis of passion and profession. You’ve got to figure out what the best model is and what your passion is.
Now the problem with that is for some people they perceive that they don’t know what that is, or that could take a long time. I like to go into testing mode and think ‘okay what could I try that I might like? I tried various martial arts for a few years – I mean there wasn’t hope to be a professional at them, but I tried them! I thought well I’m gonna try. I tried traditional kickboxing, karate, and I tried Taekwondo a bit.
That’s how it can be. You could try training, you can set up a podcast in what you’re interested in, you could try setting up an online course, or you could go and do some extracurricular study and get some qualifications. Obviously you want to think about ‘what do I think I could be the most interested in?’ and then you want to start doing it part-time; evenings, weekends, when the kids are asleep in the afternoon, between school runs, or whenever else you can. In an hour a day you could probably get a bit of momentum going. Obviously full-time it when you’ve got more momentum, but you start where you start. And then when you sort of think yeah okay I’m finding something here, I’m really onto something; then what you do is you set an income goal sometime in the future whereby you can replace and leave your current job. So you’re going to work out do I want to replace all my income or do I just want to replace the overhead part? Because the less you like your job you should just replace the overhead part and then get rid of it. Okay you’re going to be tight for a bit but you’ve got your big expenses covered. Quality of life is really important.
I’m not the sort of person that just says sack your boss. I’m not into this ‘sack your boss’ all the time. I’ve got 86 staff around the place it’d be a very stupid thing to say! But also I think a lot of people want to develop towards running their own business, but the entrepreneur takes the risk.
I’m taking the risk for everyone here; they have autonomy and choice and freedom and input but of course I take the risk and their exchange is that they get a salary.
I’m a fan of trying on the side to see if you really like it, because you might actually find after two years of doing a part-time job that you don’t like it. It’s definitely not for everyone. In fact it’s not for most of the population, let’s be honest.
Do you believe that everybody has it in them to be a successful entrepreneur?
I think anybody can be but not everyone will or not everyone wants to. I think every human being has latent within them the capacity to be everything that every human being could be. Taking aside genetic advantages; so if some people are very physically strong, or very physically tall, or very physically short, that’s going to give them a genetic advantage in certain disciplines. But for example Connor is a watchmaker so no one has a genetic advantage where they’re born to be a watchmaker. What Connor does is learn-able and he’s learned from some very very wealthy watchmakers. In property, in watches, in running a podcast and being an influencer, in marketing, in making iPhones – we are all levelly equal when we’re born. It’s a question of what are you surrounded by in your environment to program your mind, and what do you want to do.
Do I believe everybody has it within them the capacity to be an entrepreneur? Yes. What’s an entrepreneur? Someone who takes risk in the hope of profit. Well everybody on the planet’s got that within them, it’s just a question of is it what they want and have they found the model and can you stomach the risk. Can you handle learning about sales and marketing because any entrepreneur when they start has got to go and sell things and take a load of rejection, and then you’ve got to go and generate a load of leads.
There’s all the business elements of it, and you get protected from a lot of that when you’re an employee. None of the staff here have to pay all of our invoices; Mark and I do that. They don’t have to deal with any legal cases; Mark and I do. They don’t have to deal with any reputation issues; Mark and I do. The reason the entrepreneurs at the top get paid well if they’re successful is because we take the bigger risk. It’s simply risk reward.
Do you think there’s different risks that women take in business versus men? Without this being kind of a gender thing; The way I run my business is 9:00 to 3:00 I’m in a hundred percent entrepreneur mode.
Do you want the politically correct answer or do you want what I really think? I don’t think that women should ever use it as an excuse, and I don’t think they need to hear people like me saying it’s harder because I don’t think that serves. Its situationally different, so if you’ve got less time fine. What do you have to do to have your Darwinian advantage more leveraged. You have to get yourself a VA, you know – I can definitely waste a few hours a day, and actually if I’m gonna be stereotypical – most women I meet are more organised and are more efficient. So I’m going to be positively stereotypical! We have more women in the office here than men, and they’re generally more loyal and generally will take less risk. That’s our experience – by the way my MD says that and she’s a woman, so that’s from her not me.
So situationally it’s different; if you have to look after your kids and if you have to do the school run, you just have to figure that out and you have to get in what you can get in when you can get it in. You have to set up your life to enable you to do that. Give yourself a business model where you can work from home, get yourself on a laptop and your phone all synced so that if you’re waiting 15 or 20 minutes before the kids come in from school you can do a bit of cheeky social media, or you can go and do an inventory check, or go and list some stuff on eBay. You have to do what you can do. The world’s changing as well as in men are much more house able, and the roles are more joined now. I think it’s different and I think you should just own how your life is and figure it out.
There are very successful young entrepreneurs in my communities – fiercely successful – and they’re juggling kids too. I know parents who’ve got two kids and they’re split with their partner; they’re juggling having have two kids full-time, or the partner has two kids full-time. They’re buying dozens of properties, they’re travelling all up and down the country doing all of our events, and they’re making it happen. There’s plenty of those doing really well, and of course there’s plenty struggling as well.
Situationally it’s different; if you have to look after your kids and if you have to do the school run, you just have to figure that out and you have to get in what you can get in when you can get it in. You have to set up your life to enable you to do that.
Rob Moore
I think what you say about leveraging – one of the first books I read one when I joined your mastermind was Life Leverage – I leveraged way to late and I knew I should have done it much sooner.
I think as a mum I have to leverage more because I don’t have as much time in the day. I might have more time in the evening when the kids are in bed, but my day just looks slightly different. So it’s just how you manage your time and how you leverage and outsource.
The world is not nine-to-five anymore. So it might have been harder if you’re looking after kids all the way through your working hours. That’s hard. But now you can work evenings, you can work in the middle of the day, you can work at five o’clock in the morning. The world is different, and it’s great time to be a woman. I’m going to tell you little secret; so I did a sort of semi casting for a TV show for a production company just recently, and we were talking through some concepts and the guy said ‘well the only thing I’ve got to say Rob, is TV doesn’t really like white men at the moment’. Women are really popular at the moment; it’s a really good time to be a woman in society. Probably the best time in terms of the equality balance and the ability to be career . Some seriously big hitting career women like Sheryl Sandberg, Oprah Winfrey, Michelle Obama, Arianna Huffington; they’re making loads of money, are really successful, and they’re all mums – I just wouldn’t want anyone to become a victim and use it as an excuse.
Just to finish on that, in terms of who inspires you – you’ve mentioned a few female entrepreneurs there, but who inspires you in business?
I mean anyone who takes the risk and sets up their own business inspires me. I love studying successful entrepreneurs. I don’t really mind who it is! Steve Jobs was a fascinating case study, from his upsides and downsides. I studied all the big businessmen from the 80s and 90s like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett and Jeff Bezos. And of course Elon Musk is an interesting character. Alexander McQueen I think is really honest and I just think his story is so amazing. You’ve just gotta watch his documentary, I can’t even put into words.
I love watching about fashion designers and how they merge the creative with the commercial element. So I don’t have one hero really… Arnold Scwarzenegger if I had to say one.
And one final question, just a little bit of a fun question; can you share something with us that you’ve not shared before or an interesting fact for my audience?
Okay so when I was an artist I was trying to get myself out there more, and I was trying to be a bit provocative because I figured I’m a Peterborough guy and I’m not doing that well at art so I’ve got to make some noise. I was quite into poetry at the time and I was writing some pretty weird poetry because I was in a pretty weird place when I was an artist, listening to German heavy metal, painting through the night. So I wrote this little ode to cats, but it was about all the things that annoy me about cats and all the different way you could kill a cat. It was supposed to be tongue-in-cheek. On the front of my house which was a sort of a cream render, and all the way down the side that was brick. On the front cream render I wrote the poem in brick colour, and then down the brick I wrote it in white graffiti paint. So all over the house was all of these different ways to kill a cat; cut off his head and parade his head around on spears and all sorts of stuff. It went wild in Peterborough. Everyone was talking about it. I got slaps in the face from women when I used to go out into town, or drinks thrown over me. I was in the local paper, people writing in every week; one woman wrote in and said she saw me hiding in my bushes with a gun shooting the cats, which of course I never did! It was supposed to be irony – everyone knew I had a cat! And and then the council got all over me and tried to get me to take it down. My dad’s brewery wrote me a letter saying it was affecting the pub business, and the whole of Peterborough turned on me.
A lot of people were like this is art, this is great, it’s provocative, it’s his house he can do what he wants and he’s made a statement, he doesn’t need planning permission. So some people got it. That that went on for like a year, and in the end I kind of bottled it and painted over it because I didn’t want my dad to lose his pub for one, but I just didn’t really like all the negative attention retrospectively. That was the best piece of art I ever did, and could have really catapulted my career, but I kind of hid away from it. Still to this day in the council they use that as a case study for planning law so, there’s still a little bit of me left in the beautiful council!
And I won face of Peterborough 1999 in a modelling competition. So there you go. There’s two stupid things you didn’t know about me that now you do!
I know you love your cars, and interestingly my dad was an entrepreneur and he loved his cars. He had a Jag when we were growing up; I remember this one day where all four of us were crammed in the back and we bought this huge great big plant from the garden center. We had to try and get this plant in the back of the car through the sunroof, and actually for me that taught me quite a lot of messages about money, because I was taught that it was all about status and stuff. So I spent most of my 20s buying stuff because that’s how I thought I would be happy, but I guess with cars there’s an element of happiness there?
Can money buy happiness?
Let’s have this debate because I think it’s a good debate. So a lot of people say that money doesn’t make you happy. I don’t agree with that; I think that money in and of itself doesn’t make you happy, but what money is is an enabler, a fuel, an exaggerator, an accelerator. Money is the universal exchange of value in which we’ve decided democratically across the world to measure value and worth. So people want freedom and time and fulfilment and all these other things that make them happy – well money enables that. If you want freedom, or you want to travel the world, money enables that.
But then a lot of people go to another level and say actually it’s about experience not material things as materialism is evil. But for me experiences are as materialist as material is, and material is spiritual. So let’s say for example you want to go to one of the most beautiful locations in the world, and you want to be treated like a prince or a princess, and you want lovely spas and really nice food – these are all experiences, but that costs a lot of money, and you have nothing left of that except the memory which fades over time. But my Ferrari has beauty, heritage, culture, flair, passion from a lot of people all put into that chunk of metal. It has the hopes and the dreams from when I was a kid, and symbolises all the hard work and the graft and who I wanted to be – all in that hunk of metal. So there’s something quite spiritual in that.
I think it’s very bad to only get happiness from material items, but nice material item does is gives you a feeling of satisfaction. An experience gives you a feeling too, so it’s the same thing. I say this because I just don’t think it’s as binary as ‘materialism is bad’. Being a slave to material items, and getting yourself in debt for the instant fix of feeling good about having a new shirt or anew dress that you can’t afford; that’s a bad cycle to be in. I think money does make you happy it just doesn’t make you fulfilled and what makes you fulfilled is your relationships with people.
What you get to give and how you get to help, and the purpose and the meaning of your life. Money, material items, and the experiences you get from that are an enabler of that so knowing the difference between happiness and fulfilment I think is vital.
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Life Leverage: How to Get More Done in Less Time, Outsource Everything & Create Your Ideal Mobile Lifestyle – Rob Moore
I’m Worth More – Rob Moore
Calmer, Easier, Happier Parenting – Noel Janis-Norton
Becoming – Michelle Obama
Lean in – Sheryl Sandberg