The Musings Of An Opinionated Sod [Help Me Grow!]

If you haven’t read it, you can see it here.

The underlying point being we seem to accept the shitty behaviour of the super rich, but are hyper-critical of the humble – even though we know the former are making choices to become even richer whereas the latter are simply trying to survive.

In the post, I highlighted a valuable lesson I learned when I was starting out in my career from my then client – and now mentor – the wonderful Lee Hill.

He told me:

“There’s nothing wrong making lots of money, it’s how you do it and what you do with it that counts”.

It would be easy to think that in this Trumpian, authoritarian World, the ability to be ‘decent and rich’ is a pipe dream.

But I remember many years ago, George interviewed a bunch of wealthy people for a project we were doing at Cynic and came back saying he had discovered a group he called ‘the reluctantly rich’.

Basically, these were people who had made a lot of money but never felt they deserved it.

Maybe they inherited it, maybe they were in the right place at the right time … maybe they were just lucky … but they didn’t connect to it so did all they could to be generous to others with it.

Some to that was because it helped offset their guilt a little bit.
Some was their way to let others experience what they were going through.
But most of it was simply because they wanted to help others who hadn’t been blessed with the good fortune they’d received.

Often this was done quietly and privately because the goal was never about recieving gratitude, they just wanted to do some good with it, helped by the fact they never felt connected to the cash, so giving it away was easy … even though they were perfectly aware of what it offered and could do.

Admittedly there weren’t masses of people who felt this way, but there were more than a few.

Still are.

I say this because recently I saw a video of Steve Wozniak – Woz – the co-founder of Apple.

At a time where Musk, Bezos, Zuck and countless other ultra-wealthy tech and finance bros revel in their elitist, vulgar, arrogant lifestyles, he is a reminder of when the tech industry consisted of a few people trying stuff they hoped could help millions grow, express and explore their lives … which is a world away from where we are today, where the tech industry seems to be a few people designing products that enable them to control, contain and restrain millions for their own, fucked-up benefit.

So thank you Mr Woz, you’ve just proved you don’t have to be a prick to be rich.

It just feels that way.

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