Happy New Year Everyone!

I hope you all had a restful and peaceful holiday season and got to enjoy some nice quality time with family and friends. I am writing this week from across the world as we are on the back half of an epic family vacation to Japan! 

This is our first visit here and we are having an incredible time. Despite the crowds and frequent bouts of sensory overload, Tokyo might be the best city in the world to visit. Overall, Japan is a beautiful country with a fascinating culture and a place I highly recommend.

Once we’ve gotten home and settled and I’ve had a chance to process everything, I’m planning to write more about what I’ve learned here in Japan. So, stay tuned!

Defining Wealth

While building wealth without compromising your integrity is an evergreen challenge, the turning of the New Year is a good moment to reflect, recharge, and recommit to the mission. 

I want to clear something up today. While I’ve written a lot about the idea of building wealth, I’ve never properly defined it. 

Wealth is about money, of course, but it’s about a lot more as well. When I started Profit+, I wanted to find a phrase and framing that would appeal to as many people as possible but also leave room for me to explore a much broader conception of what it means to live a good life. Given the extent to which the idea of money as the goal has infected our global culture, it’s a subject I couldn’t ignore. Plus, I really do believe that being good with money is a necessary element of a successful modern life. Ultimately though, what I’m advocating for here in these pages is a definition of “wealth” that goes much broader and deeper. 

I’m seeking nothing less than to help you find a way to thrive in life—to be your best self and to do what you were born to do. You see, wealth is a measure of the quality of your relationship with the world around you. It’s no surprise then that money has become a sacred thing because it’s how we transact, exchange, and move around in the world. It’s easy to see how money can grow to feel all-important, but true wealth cannot be measured, analyzed, and evaluated on this one small aspect of your relationship to the world. You have to consider other more profoundly important things like your relationships with other people, your community, your country, the World, Nature, and the Universe itself. 

The mistake that most people make is to focus so much on money that they forget the true goal of life, which is to accumulate wealth across all the dimensions of relationship. So, as you are reading Profit+ this year (thank you very much BTW!) and you see the word “wealth” remember to think in terms of this broader definition. 

Four Resolutions of a Profit+ Reader

Because we live in an ever-uncertain world, building wealth is a difficult proposition. It’s especially so if you care at all about your soul and your psychological well-being (see above). However hard it may be, thankfully, there are some sacred rules we can follow that more or less guarantee the outcome. Now, these rules won’t make you rich overnight or anything like that, but if you can make them a part of your being, if you can live by them faithfully day-in and day-out, you will eventually succeed.

1.  Be an owner

2. Provide exceptional value

3. Contribute more than you extract

4. Don’t be complicit

Ownership matters because wealth only comes to those who accept responsibility.

Providing exceptional value is about figuring what you were born to do and then doing it to the best of your ability. This is never just one thing, by the way, but many. In each relationship you have with the outside world, there is a mission there and it’s your job to find it and do it well.

Contributing more than you extract is the fundamental philosophical/spiritual truth of all relationship. Anytime you violate this in a relationship, you damage not only the other side but also yourself.

Don’t be complicit is a warning/reminder that you can make big moral and spiritual mistakes in life just by going along with things. And because karma is real these types of mistakes will cost you. 

I look forward to sharing more wealth building principles with you all this year.

Cheers to making 2025 the best year yet for the Profit+ Community!

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