Source: iexpats
As corny as it sounds, I was listening to a Tony Robins talk the other day on YouTube where he said if they took all the money away from all rich people right now and gave it to all the poor people, in a matter of time, most of that money would just end up back with the rich people.
Mind blown.
Source: Wikipedia
What he was saying was not that poor people deserve to be poor but that most people who become rich have a certain drive and consciousness to be able to make and keep money that many people who stay poor don’t. Again, it’s not that poor people deserve to be poor, it’s that many times they don’t make the decisions or have the examples around them to lead them to not stay poor.
A few days later, I saw a clip from the HBO series The Shop where rapper Meek Mill, Lebron James and others talked about how they don’t give money to family and friends because, in the words of Meek Mill:
If you give your cousin $10,000, what are you gonna give your aunt $20,000 because she babysitted you? What you gonna give your grandma? It’s never gonna stop.
Jerod Carmichael then talked about how an Aunt wanted him to buy her a house, “Well I wanna buy a couch.” He said “What did you do other than say, yeah you can do it? I’m supposed to buy you a house because of that?”
Source: HBO
Even when it comes to history, this can be true on a bigger scale. When I studied Latin American history, I learned that Spain saw a huge influx of gold and silver into the country after the conquests in the Americas. But most of that gold and silver ended up being a boon to British and French industry as these countries industrialized and started creating goods and services that the Spanish were demanding. In the course of a few decades, much of that gold and silver ended up being in Northern European bank accounts while the Spanish were just left with inflation.
Money As an Amplifier for Problems
People say money is the root of all evil, I don’t necessarily believe that’s true. I think more so, that it has the ability to bring out the hidden vulnerabilities and insecurities in people in how they feel about themselves when they see someone close to them “make it”.
This could be why some studies have shown that lottery winners experience an initial sense of intense joy but over time tend to revert back to their previous level of happiness or even become less happy after winning the lottery. There’s even a name for it: hedonic adaptation. Think about after the sheen wears off, friends and family consistently asking you for money. Maybe many of them are not very responsible with it and blow through it quickly and end up back on your doorstep with their hand out again. What should you do then? Is it then at that point you become an enabler to bad behavior? If you were to deny them they may look at you as greedy and selfish, when it’s really their own greed, selfishness and laziness that has them coming to you with their hand out.
Many people, even the successful ones, aren’t strong enough to handle these pressures and end up either caving in. For those that are strong and resist the urge to give to those close to them, they may end up losing some of the people they deeply cared about. Be they friends or family, money can put a real spotlight on the feeling of entitlement that some people have when they know or are just friendly with someone who “made it”.
However it doesn’t have to be lottery type money that can bring out these insecurities in people. Maybe it’s a promotion you received, maybe it’s the success of a business you are building. Or it could be a feature in the media that gets you attention and starts accelerating your career. Whatever it is, we often compare ourselves to our peers and when we see someone successful at what they are doing, we tend to discount or not even give weight to all the hard work, dedication and daily habit that they have put in to becoming that success that we see before us. Someone’s “success” as defined by you, doesn’t have to mean your failure.
Not Everyone Wants Success or Riches
For those of us who have become accustomed to being around smart, ambitious and driven people, we can forget that a lot of people don’t want the social pressure that can come with success. In some cultures, it is expected that the successful child or children provide for the whole extended family. Some people relish in feeling like they are carrying their family along but I can definitely also understand the point of view of a friend of mine who once admitted to me he had a deep seeded fear of success.
This friend explained to me that growing up he saw how people treated those with money or a good job in his community and it just seems like an unbearable amount of pressure to him. Just as I described above, at a young age he had decided that all the pressure and potential for frayed relationships with people he loved because of money and success just wasn’t worth it.
What people need to understand is that’s ok. At least this friend of mine had the conscious of mind to think about how he would realistically feel in that situation and determined it just wasn’t for him. It’s a a bit defeatist mentality but I wouldn’t be surprised if deep down there are people we all know in our lives that feel this way.
What’s not ok are the people in our lives that don’t have that consciousness. Their conscious mind thinks they are fine and their actions and requests are based on reason, but in reality they are based on irrational emotions.
Your Next Challenge
For those of you that are successful and have people like this around you, you have to resist the urge to feel guilty about your success. Yes, luck and your background does play an important part, just like most successful, mentally balanced people would acknowledge, but resist the urge to give in to the demands of those that may not have your success or best interests in mind. You can’t be in the trenches everyday with your friends or family and put in the work to be successful for them, that is something that comes from deep inside all of us, and produces the behaviors and the habits day in and day out that result in success.
Most important of all, of you have had success and you have given or lent friends and family money, then subsequently gotten burned, it’s important to take away the lessons from this. If that person was close to you, then they may have done you a favor and kept you from losing more to them down the line. Or they may have opened your eyes to people’s insecurities so that you are better able to read people from a distance now. Either way, the point is to take bad experiences with friends, family and money as another failure in your own path towards continued success. In essence, these failures are there to set you up for your new challenge: maintaining success, which can be just as hard, if not harder than becoming successful in the first place.
Conclusion
So if you got this far and assume the answer is no, you should not lend money to family or friends, my answer may surprise you: it depends. The picture I painted was a cautionary tale. Anyone around us, no matter how much we think we know them, can change when you “make it.” That is not to say those that change are bad people, but maybe they are the type of person that you shouldn’t have around you. Just like on the path to success, it will likely take some trial and error in your dealings with close family and friends until you are better able to handle these relationships in the right way. At that point you will likely know who you can lend money to and who you cannot.
I will end with one last quote from The Shop by NBA Star Anthony Davis: “The first thing my parents did when I made it was take me aside and say: you don’t owe us anything. That freed me.”
Source: ESPN