The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett - Moment 75 - What You Think You Know About Money Is Wrong: Mo Gowdat

Episode Date: September 16, 2022

In these ‘Moment’ episodes of my podcast, I’ll be selecting my favourite moments from previous episodes of The Diary Of A CEO. In this moment Mo Gawdat lays out a philosophy for how to admit when you’re wrong, and the right way to go about setting priorities in your life. As Mo powerfully says, ‘50% of what I know is wrong’, and this is true for everyone. Coming to life from this position of humbleness is the only way we can truly get our head straight on what our life is and where it’s taking us. There are things that you need, like food and human interaction, and there are things that you want, like status or expensive possessions. Interrogating the insecurity in our wants and why we really want them is the best way to be at peace with ourselves, and to cut out toxic habits from our life. Because as Mo never tires of pointing out, it’s not how much money we have, but what amount of money we’re happy with, that counts. Listen to the full episode here - https://g2ul0.app.link/4GuqQfBYltb Mo: https://www.solveforhappy.com https://www.instagram.com/mo_gawdat/?hl=en Watch the Episodes On Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/c/TheDiaryOfACEO/videos

Quick one, just wanted to say a big thank you to three people very quickly. First people I want to say thank you to is all of you that listen to the show. Never in my wildest dreams is all I can say. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I'd start a podcast in my kitchen and that it would expand all over the world as it has done. And we've now opened our first studio in America, thanks to my very helpful team led by Jack on the production side of things. So thank you to Jack and the team for building out the new American studio.

And thirdly to Amazon Music who, when they heard that we were expanding to the United States and I'd be recording a lot more over in the States, they put a massive billboard in Times Square for the show. So thank you so much, Amazon Music. Thank you to our team. And thank you to all of you that listened to this show. Let's continue. You asked me a question about money. And then you said, you know, what does money mean to me? And then when I asked you, you said you think you've come to learn that you think money is one of your illusions. What did you mean by that? Money is an illusion at every, every level. Money doesn't exist. You and I know that anyone who understands fractional reserve and how money is printed and generated,

money does not even exist. You walk into a bank and you ask for a 50,000 pounds loan for a car and they literally write the numbers 50000 in a spreadsheet and poof, money comes out of nowhere. That money never existed before you borrowed it, okay? And will only exist

when you work your backside off to pay it back. Right. And interestingly, that illusion was created to make our lives easier. And then it ended up making our life a lot more difficult. Now, why? Because most of us are so chasing the revenue side of money without a full understanding of the cost side of money. Let me try to explain. For you to get a job in London that pays you £100,000, just for simplification of the mathematics, you have to live in London, which costs you £70,000.

For example, I don't know London very well, but let's say these are the numbers. But on top of the 70,000 pounds, it also costs you stress, your stress. It also costs you being far away from your mom if your mom lives elsewhere. It costs you, you know, your time, which is your most valuable resource. The only thing you really have in your life is your time. And it costs you so many other things, right? And so most people don't understand the cost-benefit relationship to start. Now, you take that and then you add a Louis Vuitton bag or a fancy car, and suddenly your money is not even going as far as it could, because you could get yourself a bag that is beautiful and everything for a hundred pounds, but then you choose to buy one for

several thousand pounds. And then you have to work harder, which makes you pay more costs. And the cycle becomes even more vicious, right? You continue further than that. And you start to say, so I save some of my money in the future, but your savings are suffering inflation. So you save a thousand pounds, they become 900, they become 800. When in reality, by the way, you've saved the thousand pounds when you could have borrowed them by entering some numbers in a spreadsheet. The entire recipe around that story is wrong. Everything around money is not what we believe in it is. Okay. Which basically makes it an illusion. Now, the biggest part of

that illusion, believe it or not, is, and I know you have money in the bank, is that you have nothing. I don't know if you realize that. Most people don't understand that if I have a hundred pounds in the bank, I literally have nothing. I have nothing. The bank has my hundred pounds and the bank can decide whatever they want to do if they want it to take it away from me. Okay. And it is only my money when I choose to buy an iPhone or something with it. For that one instant, that money is mine. And then once I get the iPhone, it's not mine anymore. I now have the iPhone, right? You basically assign that money that is never yours. It's the banks until the minute you spend it to spending it on things that most of us don't ever, ever interact with. I mean,

look at your own home, anyone listening to us and how many things you have in that home that you've not ever used ever. You know, you saw that pair of shoes in the window and you were like, oh my God, I have to have them spent several hundred pounds on them or several tens of pounds on them. And then ended up taking them home, never ever putting them on. Right. Now, all of that waste along the way, the cost of earning the money, the things that you spend it on, the actual value of the things that you spend it on, basically tells you that there is one truth to money,

which is I have basic needs. I have basic needs, and my basic needs are to be reasonably covered, reasonably fed, reasonably safe, and so on and so forth. And in the Islamic culture, we call this rizq, which is different than income. Rizq is not how much money you earn. It's the good that that money brings you.

It's, did you eat a meal today? That is actually what you're looking for in life. It's not the money that gets you the meal, okay? What you're looking for is the meal. Could you actually buy something for your daughter today? The thing is what you're looking for in life. It's not the money that gets you the meal. Okay. What you're looking for is the meal. Could you actually buy something for your daughter today? The thing is what you're looking for. It's not, it's not the money that got the thing. And if you start to chase that, something very different happens, right? Suddenly you start to ask yourself, hmm, is buying that thing worth the 17 hours of work I'm going to put in them, right? Is it, which of those, which would I prefer if I gave you the two choices and said, buy this bag or spend 17 hours with your friends? If you see it that way, you may make very different decisions.

It leaves us with the very big other illusion, which is, but money is safety, Mo. You know, it's not like I want money because I want more fancy things. I just want to feel safe because the world is unpredictable. Sadly, when the world is unpredictable, money is not going to save you. Okay. And I think my story has been very, very, very big eye open. I had enough money. I, you know, I had enough connections and enough influence and I, you know, failed to protect my child's life when it was time for him to go. Right. I, you know, I think we know many stories of someone that maybe falls and breaks your back. What will your money do for you? Safety is a much bigger thing than just a little bit of money in the bank. And by the way, safety is an attitude, is an idea to tell yourself, when I need it,

I will make it. When I need it, I will have it. Perhaps the answer is, I don't need so much of it anyway. And I think, you know, again, like everything in life, you want to have the skill of making money. Money is power. You know, again, when you were speaking on slow-mo, you basically said, I love the idea of being able to build this setup for the podcast

of spending on my show and so on. That's wonderful, okay? Money is power. But it's power as long as you own it and it doesn't own you. The minute money owns you and lack of it starts to distract you and looking at how much your other friend has and he has a little more than you, you know, hurts your ego.

Once it gets into that realm, then money works against you. It doesn't work for you. Do you think it's a noble cause that when I answered that question and I said um for me money is basically the fuel of my mission it enables me to i said i put on my my diary of a seo live tour it cost me about 600 000 pounds to book these 10 venues to book the london palladium for three nights to book this massive choir of you know 40 people to book this big musical there was about a hundred of us a hundred people i had to book and pay for to put on that show. At the end of the show, I break even, but without the, that tour, you know, reaches almost 20,000

people. It's the most thrilling, fulfilling, biggest honour that I've ever had to be able to do that in front of all of those people and to share that message, which is very much in line with my mission. And I look at money and said, if I, if I didn't have the money, it would have been much, much harder, not impossible, but much, much, much harder to do that. Absolutely. So do you feel like that is a noble relationship with money? Look, we agree on this. Nothing is good or bad. Nothing is right or wrong. Everything is both right and wrong. And everything both right and wrong and everything can be both good and bad. It depends on what you want to do with it. And one of the messages I

constantly tell everyone in the world is absolutely become successful, become powerful, become rich, because the biggest problem with our world is that the most successful, most powerful, and the richest are the worst of us. Okay. And I don't generalize and say that's most successful, most powerful, and the richest are the worst of us, okay? And I don't generalize and say that's the truth, but it's actually easier to make money if you break some rules than it is if you're ethical. And so as a result of that, a good chunk of the big money in the world

is not super ethical, right? And if I have more money, I can fuel my 1 billion happy mission. And that's a good thing for the world. That's by the way, owning money, not letting it own you, right? So if I can get to the point where I make it and actually give it to 1 billion happy, then that's amazing. If I get to the point where I make it and then suddenly go like, oh, let's wait a little bit, grow it a tiny bit and then give it to 1 billion happy, then I'm not doing the right thing. Having said that, and of course, you know how I admire you and respect you. This is your zoom lens of the world. Okay. For someone else, four pounds,

some sticky paper and a couple of scissors and spending an hour with her daughter doing something beautiful, okay, is as impactful, maybe even more impactful than the entire show. Because that one daughter with the sticky paper and scissors might end up becoming one of the most pronounced artists in the world,

prominent enough to change the world with four pounds, scissors, and a piece of paper, right? Now, we somehow, especially those of us like you and I who had experiences in life where they put effort and the effort rewarded them, okay? We think that we are the ones that are changing the world or making a difference. No, we're not. Okay. The reality is we need, we need to understand that again, I, you know, I admire you and I know you'll, you'll, you'll not feel upset, but half of what you know is wrong. Half of what I know is wrong. Absolutely. Right. And it's, it's just an attempt. It's just an attempt with, you know, whether that attempt, Steve, is an attempt because of money or is it, it's an attempt because you just spend time with your driver talking about something or, you know, you were telling the story.

All of those things. the game is I'm going to do the best that I can to acquire the resources that I'm good at acquiring to direct them in the investments that I have accessible to me. Okay. If, if you are a cashier, you know, at a supermarket and you're making enough money to spend wonderful time with your daughter to, you know, to do a bit of art, then that in itself is a form of contribution that changes the world. And you'll never know that one daughter might cure cancer.