Measuring Wealth
· Updated
Wealth is usually measured in money. Net worth, annual income, assets under management. But over the years, conversations with people who have built, sold, and run businesses have drawn a very different picture.
Five conversations
A friend sold his company. A well-functioning business, good exit. I asked him what's next. He paused and said:
"My friends built great companies. Those companies are still here, my friends died — cardiac arrests, cancer. That was all stress. I'm starting from scratch but care only about life that I can enjoy."
A business owner, when I asked him how it feels to run his own thing:
"I run my own business. And each time I show up in my office, I see 20 chicklets to feed."
Twenty people depending on him. Not freedom — responsibility.
A hobby sailor. I asked him how he measures whether someone is doing well. His question back:
"How many weeks on a boat can you afford?"
Not the size of the boat. Not the sailing conditions. How much time can you dedicate to what you love?
Another business owner, during a monthly sailing trip with his partners — the one reward they give themselves:
"We work hard the entire year for this."
An entire year of work. For a few days on the water.
And then there's the matchmaker. A very expensive concierge. No job title, no office:
"I do parties. People like partying with me. Today, with my friends, we rented a golf range and we'll be racing all night. Many rich people like that. I don't work. But when someone needs something — I have the right contact."
He turned social time into his entire life. No separation between work and play, because there's no work.
The pattern
Allan Weiss, the million-dollar consulting author, puts it plainly: your real wealth is the amount of time that you have at your discretion.
Every one of these conversations circles the same point. The founder who sold doesn't care about the next venture — he cares about enjoying his time. The business owner sees obligation, not freedom. The sailor measures wealth in weeks, not dollars. The partners trade a year of labour for a few days. The matchmaker has no obligations at all.
The division
What emerges is a simple division. Your time splits into two buckets:
- Time you think you have to spend — obligations, duties, consequences you're not willing to endure (hunger, debt, social pressure, dependents who rely on you).
- Time at your discretion — time where you genuinely choose what to do, not because you must, but because you want to.
Wealth is the ratio between the two.
You can have a large income and almost no discretionary time. You can have a modest income and enormous discretionary time. The number in your bank account is a means, not the measure.
The question isn't how much do you have. It's how much of your time is yours.
What this means for your children
If wealth is time at your discretion, a family can be wealthy on a modest income and poor on a large one.
That changes what you are trying to pass on. A house helps. But the larger gift is whatever lets your children spend more of their adult time by choice: skills that are in demand wherever they live, few debts, low fixed costs, and no habit of buying things to impress people. The Kresy families show one version of this. Their descendants own fewer assets than they could afford and put more into education.
Children also learn what wealth means by watching how you use your own free time. If every spare hour goes on work you resent, they learn that adulthood is obligation. If some of it goes on things you choose — learning, building, time with them — they learn that the point of earning is freedom.