Building Wealth Without Compromise

What does it mean to build wealth without compromise?

Given everything I’ve been writing and podcasting about, I get this question a lot. Many people are looking for an easy answer. I don’t blame them. Our whole culture is based upon the presumed existence of one. Unfortunately, that’s all a big lie.

There are no easy ways to build wealth. There are even fewer when you start talking about keeping your integrity. 

In the best of lives, you find your path and destiny early on and spend your days doing exactly what you were born to do. But that doesn’t always happen or even make sense. For every one lucky person like that, there are a million others who struggle to find their way. It’s not just that our society can be fundamentally unfair—though it often is—it’s that life itself can be as well. Who really knows why some people make it and others don’t?

I believe firmly, though, in striving and the strenuous life. Far better to go for it than not! Yeah, you might make some mistakes along the way. There’s probably no avoiding that. But as long as you don’t make the big ones, the ones that compromise your integrity, striving will always bring you to a better place. 

So, let me try to answer the question here.

For starters, Don’t lie. As we have discussed in the past this is way, way harder than it seems but it is a profoundly necessary condition for living a life of integrity. White lies told for social grace are probably ok but you should never lie to others or yourself in order to achieve some apparent gain. You always end up losing way more in the end, and even if you don’t, you foreclose the possibility for an authentically good life. 

Don’t break any laws. This one is pretty self-explanatory but there are caveats and nuances here too. Sometimes, in the course of history, you’ll come across laws that are morally reprehensible—think Jim Crow in the pre-Civil Rights era. These you can and should resist, even if it damages the economic side of your ledger. Many things are more important than money in life. We also live in a world where governments might pass laws that make things legal that probably shouldn’t be. Best to steer clear of these areas as well. 

Don’t cheat. Capitalism is a kind of game, one more serious than most, but a game nonetheless. Occasionally, you will come across a situation where maybe you aren’t breaking a law outright or lying per se but there’s something you can do that looks advantageous but it just doesn’t feel right. For example, while you could sell crypto tokens, that look and feel like a security but maybe, just maybe don’t meet the definition of one, and just hope everything works out, you most definitely should not. 

Pay your taxes! You laugh but this has ruined more successful people than you can imagine. I mean, they ultimately got even Capone on tax evasion charges. Don’t mess around with taxes. Hire a good CPA and pay what you owe.

Don’t sell anything you wouldn’t buy yourself. This is the business version of the Golden Rule and a good reminder that you shouldn’t check your conscience at the door when it’s time to conduct business. If something doesn’t feel right to you, you shouldn’t be a part of it. 

Finally, Don’t do anything you’d be embarrassed by if it ended up as a front-page news story. This serves as a kind of general safety reminder and covers things like stupidity in decision-making, recklessness, hubris, arrogance, being a jerk, associating with people of dubious moral character…basically all the things that have the potential to cause long-term damage to your reputation.

Of course, you cannot build wealth on the back of a bunch of “shoulds” and “don’ts.” There’s way more to it than that. But I start with these because we live in a hard world, one where it is exceedingly difficult to break through, and the false allure of these various shortcuts shines bright. 

Believe me, I know. I have made several of these mistakes actually and the results weren’t pretty. While my mistakes weren’t that big of a deal and I avoided ruining my life, they scared the sh$t out of me and completely altered the trajectory of my life. 

Putting those wild stories aside for another day, let’s talk about the other parts of the challenge of building wealth without compromise. 

First of all, if you want to build wealth, there’s no getting around learning the practical tactics of the art of capitalism. This is a huge subject area, one that is impossible to do justice here in a single article. As my faithful readers know, I’ve been regularly covering some of these ideas here in Profit+. But for those interested in learning more, the best thing to do is to check out the Profit+ Lab. 

Building wealth is a highly individualized affair. There are literally as many paths as there are people in the world. While you can learn a lot about business and investing from books, articles, and podcasts, I’ve found that the best learning comes from one-on-one interactions with experienced people. That’s certainly how I learned how to be an entrepreneur anyway! 

In all the change brought forth by the Industrial Revolution, we lost touch with an essential element of the art of education. For countless generations, apprenticeship was the primary way we transmitted knowledge, skills, and wisdom from one generation to the next. While schools and Universities existed in the pre-Industrial era, they looked much different than today’s educational institutions, which eerily resemble systems of mass production. Look, maybe this was all necessary and inevitable but I believe something valuable was lost in the process. What can you really learn about business, investing, or entrepreneurship in a crowded classroom? 

Anyway, what I’m trying to do with the Profit+ Lab is help people in this more direct and personal way. Given everything else I’m doing, I have limited time for this. But for a small, select group of aspiring individuals I’m going to open up myself and my entire network and business ecosystem to help people make serious progress on their journey. If you are interested, click here to book a call!

Believe it or not, we are not done yet. For there is one final step in the art of building wealth without compromise. It has to do with the nature of the work you choose to do in the world and its relationship to your true self. This is important and tricky stuff. Make a critical mistake here and you could ruin everything.

I don’t know about you all but I really believe in the idea of callings. We are born with things to do—specific things—and the mission of life is to discover what they are and then do them to the absolute best of our abilities. 

Finding your calling may sound like some frou-frou quasi-spiritual exercise and maybe it is. But I’m absolutely convinced it’s real. With everything I’ve seen and experienced, all the strange forces and occurrences, all the little coincidences and synchronicities, I just cannot get myself to believe this is all random. Everywhere I look, I see purpose. Sometimes it’s hard to see in the moment why something happens or doesn’t but eventually it all makes sense. 

I think there’s an order to our lives just as there is to the Universe. We may not know what it is or even how to describe it when we see it. But it’s there and our true mission in life is to find it. This is no easy task, of course, and something hard to give generalized advice on. For those interested, I’ll leave you with this: check out Gregg Levoy’s conveniently entitled book “Callings.” The book is an inspiring survey of all the different ways you can go about finding your calling and will leave you looking for and finding meaning everywhere. 

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