One of my unlikely financial heroes was Bill Cunningham. He didn’t manage money. He took photographs. The friends who nicknamed me Donkey (“noisy, stubborn, ignorant”) will appreciate why I love his line, “if you don’t take the money, they can’t tell you what to do”.
He was not rich. Quite the opposite. Yet since he lived so cheaply, that gave him the creative license to do whatever he truly wanted to do. That passion fed through to his art.
If you are able to build an engine that earns reliably more than you consume, you can focus on things that aren’t conspicuous. You are wealthy. You can release yourself from the pressure to constantly justify yourself, and prove that what you are doing adds value. You can do things that only have value in the long term.
Rather than disappointing people who expect far too much in too short a time frame, you can wow people who underestimate what you can do in the long term.
Especially if the time you are thinking of is longer than people use to judge.
"If you don't take the money, they can't tell you what to do."
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