More Than Money: Questions Every MBA Needs to Answer: Redefining Risk and Reward for a Life of Purpose (BK Life (Hardcover)) by Mark Albion

Author:Mark Albion [Albion, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
Published: 2008-10-16T16:00:00+00:00

Destiny Plan Questions

How much is enough? How much money do you need each year to have a decent standard of living? How much to retire? What is the impact of those numbers on your options of what you can do?

What are you willing to give up to make more money?

What do you see as the biggest risk in your relationship with money?

■ LIFELINE 6 ■

Don’t Treasure Your Trash and Trash Your Treasures

It’s easy to lose your way, to fall off your destiny path by getting too caught up in what seems to be important and neglecting what really matters to you. It’s all about knowing your priorities and living them.

At my twenty-fifth college reunion (where I stayed until the very end!), I saw a classmate whom I’d just read about in a Forbes magazine cover story. He and his business partner looked great on the cover. The story highlighted that they had just sold their business for hundreds of millions of dollars, each owning 50 percent. I gave him a big hug and my hearty congratulations. He thanked me graciously and asked if we could find a quiet spot to talk. We did. He then told me: “Mark, my best friend from childhood and I built that business together from the ground up, but we had disagreements before the decision to sell. Once the sale was finalized, he said he never wanted to speak to me again. I’ve been heartbroken. To make matters worse, my wife and three 46daughters barely saw me all those years. Now they just treat me like a one-arm bandit, talking to me only if they want money. I lost sight of what I really wanted out of life, and now I wish I could change it, but I can’t.”

I gave him another hug and talked with him throughout the reunion, observing just what he said about how his family treated him. As you may have guessed, his wife subsequently divorced him, and he and his daughters are estranged.

The most difficult challenge you face may be how to move a career forward without leaving a family behind. You see success as multidimensional, including a good income, good job, good family situation, and often children. As a recent MBA graduate told me, “Dr. Mark, my dream is to raise my children to be economically successful enough so that they can afford the therapy required to get over me.”

Tongue in cheek, but this woman understands how driven she is and how difficult her achievement orientation makes it to live all parts of the good life—at least at the same time. She has experienced how the arc of life, culture, and subliminal societal voices can draw you away. You concentrate on your work, in which you are replaceable. Yet the only place you’re truly irreplaceable is at home.

High achievers can get sidetracked in subtle ways by not appreciating what they have and always putting their energies into what they don’t have. As the Polynesians are said to query, “Are

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