The Most Important Relationship You'll Ever Have, That Nobody Ever Talks About

Friends, Family, Lovers, and Loved Ones. 

Your own Mental, Physical, and Emotional Health. 

These are all really important relationships you create and foster over the course of your life. However, there is one relationship that is with you your entire life that powers these things in the modern world, one way or another. As business professionals on LinkedIn, this is the world we all live in. This is, our individual relationship with money.

However, very few people ever talk about or even stop to think about how they feel about money. 

Pause and reflect for a second. What is your relationship with money? Have you ever asked yourself, or your partner, or your family, "What does money mean to you?"

Over the next few weeks, my partner and I will be working on a prenup. It was the first time we ever openly discussed our finances. Prenup or not, most people don’t discuss money deep enough. Not with their partner, and not with themselves.

After all, financial problems are consistently listed as one of the biggest drivers of divorce. We spend 1/3 of our lives working to make money. This doesn't account for the schooling it takes to get a job, and the time in our lives that we work which are the ones where we a) meet and bond with our significant other and b) create and form our children's lives.

We were both very transparent in this conversation, diving into our own net worths, debt if any, trusts/inheritances if any, etc. Fortunately, we're very good at communicating with each other but this was the first time we really discussed this at any real level of depth. 

Once we set the foundation, we asked ourselves the question. What does money mean to you? (ie. why is it important to you? What service does it provide? What does it allow you to do that you couldn’t do without it?)

For her, money meant health. She has Chronic Lyme Disease and having money meant she could be safe should she need to spend money on medical treatments. Money meant that she could also spend extra to eat healthily and that our kids could always be covered in case of medical issues arising. To me, this is all about Safety.

She also cared about the Opportunity money creates for our kids. It was less about her, and more about them, but money provides more and bigger at-bats when it comes to what our children can participate in like special schools or programs for all areas of their lives. When she was a child, she was trained as a concert pianist. Having the means to enroll in special programs could’ve allowed her to take that to the next level. It would’ve provided Opportunity.

For me, money means freedom. Beyond covering my basic needs (Safety), money allows me to build. Build people (career hacking), build organizations that can help people and animals (charity), build fun things that allow me to be creative (future vision businesses like a farm for fresh organic foods or a vineyard).

Money allows me the freedom to have unique experiences. The Opportunity to work where and when I want so I can be there for my kids. This goes back to my childhood in which I saw how important it was that my dad was at every one of my hockey games growing up.

In fact, everyone has a slightly different answer, but many are based on their childhood experiences. Humans are typically an exaggeration of their parent's best and worst traits, mixed with the micro-society they grow up in. We tend to overcorrect when we see or feel something we did or didn't like growing up. If you grew up poor, you might hoard money and never spend it, always worrying that if you do, you might go back to being poor again. To this person, money equals Safety.

Crazy tangent, but being at a company like Outreach, one that sells software to sales professionals, I think about this frequently. The question of, “Why do salespeople do what they do?” Ultimately, they have a career that directly ties their compensation to how much they sell for the company they work for. The ones who are coin-operated (most, if not, all of them), do it for a deeper reason. They do it to make money in order to be able to take their kids to Disneyland or go to Coachella with their friends (Opportunity), or pay for their parent's medical bills (Safety), and so on and so on. It always comes back to the relationship with money.

The best lesson I learned a few short years ago is that the most dangerous relationship with money you can have is that money equals Status. If your self-worth and net worth are tied together, you'll surely never be happy. Unless you're Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates (you're not), someone will always be richer than you. The sooner you can stop seeing money as Status, the healthier your relationship with money will be, and the more confident you will be.

After I had this conversation with my partner, I went on to try to understand others in my family. It was fairly eye-opening to see what others felt money meant to them. These conversations were healthy. The most important things to them kept coming back to the two broader buckets of Safety and Opportunity, no matter the age of the family member. Knowing this, it puts me in a position to support my family in the way they need to be supported as they move into the latter stages of life (if I even need to support them financially).

For me, my relationship with money is an on-going evolution. It’s the most complicated relationship I’ll ever have. I think many feel the same way. In some cases, having less of it makes it less complicated because you have fewer options. Hence why Biggie used to say, “Mo Money Mo Problems”. 

The good news is that the foundation in any good relationship is good communication. Making an effort to understand money and even how the people around you think about money is a great first step in living a life in which your most complicated relationship is, well, a little less complicated.  

I’d love to know - 

• What does money mean to you? 
• Why do you do what you do? 
• What are your buckets? Do you see any others outside of Safety, Opportunity, and Status?

I love the psychology behind why we do what we do and how it makes us act, so I’m curious to hear your feedback!

*As always, I post on my personal LinkedIn about things that I think about or do in my daily life that I believe might be helpful to others in my situation. If even just one person gets value, it’s worth it to me. If you like these posts, please let me know in the comments and share with friends and colleagues. I have a lot of material but want to make sure there's interest!