After getting rich, the speaker realized expensive status symbols like Corvettes and mansions lost their appeal. Instead, a rich life meant savoring everyday things: pizza, bagels, coffee, walks in good weather. The dream only mattered when it felt impossible.
I'm planning to leave New York for a while and I'm doing my last minute things here before we go. And my friend asked me, what are the places you're going to eat at? What are you going to do before you leave? And I told him, I want to eat this slice of pizza, I want to eat a bagel from Apollo's Bagels, I want to get this coffee. And like, that was it. He was kind of surprised. It's like you don't want to go to some fancy restaurant. And I think that one of the bigger surprises of building a rich life is that when I started to finally have money or I could go to a nice restaurant, I tried them, I like them. But suddenly that dream of, I want to buy a Corvette or a Lamborghini. Once you can, you start to go, do I actually want it? And that's actually my wish for everybody, which is the idea that sometimes it is really fun to dream about all the things that we would buy. We'd buy a huge house, we'd buy a fancy car. And I like those dreams. Sometimes you want to get those and I want you to. But once you can do it, once it becomes realistic and not a dream, then you actually start to say, wait a minute, if I buy that big house, who's going to clean it? If I buy that fancy car, I'm going to have to be careful when I go over bumps in the road. And so I hope that as you start to think about your rich life, you don't just wait until it's a dream down the road for some huge house or fancy car. But actually you start to systematically build your rich life. For me, today it was stopping, getting a great cup of coffee, going to a bagel place in the East Village, having the bagel, it's early, the line wasn't too long, and walking back in beautiful weather. To me, this is a rich life right now.
