Money & the meaning of life: Part 5

In the meantime, all you really need is a couple of hemorrhoids to learn humility.

Let's go back to our hypothetical company. With the disparities in money among the team members and a CEO who's become so rich he doesn't have to listen to anyone, is it possible that we won't survive our success?

Of course. I've never seen a business problem that was truly about technology or marketing or manufacturing. It always comes down to people problems. If you're not attending to the people in the company, you may still get lucky and be successful. But you probably won't be able to maintain that success.

That's why companies sometimes implode when they go public. At that moment people succeed, but they don't know why they succeeded. They only think they know. And when the company begins to fail, they don't know why they're failing either. The only way to succeed in the long run is to have somebody at the top prepared to handle the really difficult people questions, like dealing with success.

That's true for a company. Does it also apply to an individual who has to deal with sudden wealth?

It's very hard getting rich suddenly. We all laugh and say, "I could handle it." It's one thing to say that. But it's another thing to have it happen. Mike Tyson is not the world's greatest philosopher, but he did say one thing that I think should be over everybody's desk. Years ago when he was being interviewed before the Leon Spinks fight, a reporter told him, "You know, Spinks has a plan for how to fight you." Tyson said, "They all got a plan -- until they get hit."

We all have a plan for how we'd handle getting rich -- until it happens. But we really don't know ourselves well enough to know what suddenly getting rich would do to us. People think they're going to behave a certain way with money: "This is what I would do." But when they suddenly have money, it does something to them that they didn't expect. People who win the lottery can be driven pretty crazy. I've seen it.

On the other hand, I do know people who have stayed quite stable through it. Often they are people who have strong ethical and religious lives. They have a sense that there's something more important than the money. Even when they get very rich, it doesn't really deflect them. Others get a wrong idea about their own importance, their own abilities, and they realize suddenly, unconsciously perhaps, that people are after their money and not after them. They get very lonely and it can really wreck their lives (via fastcompany).