Editor’s note: This article was first published in September 2015. Microsoft bought Mojang/Minecraft in 2014 for 2.5 billion dollars, and Persson’s posts about feeling lonely date from August 2015, which the article calls a few days ago.
He’s not the first, and he won’t be the last, to think one day that being rich would solve all his problems, only to see his life get considerably worse. I’m going to sum up Markus Persson‘s story briefly so we can get straight to the point.
Markus Persson created a video game called Minecraft, which has now been bought by Microsoft for 2.5 billion dollars. Persson began to enjoy his new status as a multimillionaire, and a few days ago he set social media alight by saying that being a multimillionaire is hell for him. He explained that his girlfriend had left him because his new lifestyle scared her, that his lifelong friends have no time for him, and that despite going out with new rich friends and being able to do whatever he wants with whoever he wants, he feels lonelier than ever.
Many readers will be thinking right now: “What an idiot… if I were a multimillionaire, there’s no way I’d be sad.” Well, the truth is that there’s a high chance that anyone criticising this newly rich man would feel exactly the way he feels right now.
It’s the eternal debate I always have with the people around me: whatever we may think, practically nobody is prepared to receive a huge number of millions; practically nobody is prepared to manage them, and practically nobody is prepared to enjoy that new life.
Whether we’re talking about winning a large sum (more than 2 million euros in the lottery) or building a company and selling it with the idea of enjoying life, the most likely outcome is that, instead of a blessing, you’ve been struck by one of the worst curses.
See also: 3 different ways, mindsets and attitudes to do the same job
Recently we heard about a 27-year-old who got rich and retired to enjoy his new life, and took just 3 weeks to go back to work, because he got tired of doing everything he had dreamed of doing.
As the old saying goes: “Be careful what you wish for, because it might come true.”
Why does this happen?
The question of why the newly rich end up living in hell has a very simple answer: it comes down to a lack of purpose and mission in life, and a lack of ongoing goals.
If your only goal is to have enough money to retire and do nothing (or do everything you want), you’ll most likely become one of the living dead once you get there. That explains the high percentage of new millionaires who end up with drug and alcohol problems. Let’s say they are rich people going through a deep existential crisis. They fought all their lives to get ahead, driven by earning more money so they could do more things, and since that was their only goal, once they reached it they were left without new goals and discovered that they had idealised a goal based solely on money.
See also: Why the rich don’t want to retire
Why doesn’t this happen to billionaires like Warren Buffett, Bill Ackman or Mark Zuckerberg?
This is the part most people find hard to believe and understand. For these billionaires, ironically, money isn’t the cause but the consequence of doing their work well. Warren Buffett still has the passion of his first day, keeps learning and keeps enjoying his passion (doing business, investing and helping other companies through his investments).
Bill Ackman, whose fortune is estimated at 9 billion dollars, keeps taking on challenges. He keeps competing in the market (his passion) and still sets himself goals such as, right now, bringing down Herbalife.
Mark Zuckerberg could have sold Facebook, made more than 25 billion dollars and never needed to work again for the rest of his life, but he didn’t choose that option, because he likes competition, new challenges, new goals and new milestones to reach at Facebook.
See also: 8 life lessons from Warren Buffett
Why does it happen to middle- and lower-class people?
It’s simple. Most people have no defined purpose or mission in life. They work to live and live to work, dreaming of everything they could do if they didn’t need to work.
As someone once said: “If you work at what you love, you’ll be on holiday all year round.”
In fact, these people aren’t happy with their current lives and think that if they had a lot of money, they’d be very happy. When they get that “lucky break”, they’re happy for a while thanks to the excitement of the moment, but over time they discover that they won’t be happy either without money or with it, because you either have happiness or you don’t. It isn’t something material or external; you live in happiness or you live in unhappiness.
That’s why, statistically (and you should never ignore statistics), people who won big lottery prizes were, as a rule, worse off years later than when they had no money. For most of them, life had changed for the worse in every way.
From the young man from Granada who spent 15 million euros in 8 years on drugs, alcohol and prostitutes, to the Spanish family who celebrated their millions with the couple’s divorce and, years later, with the father entering an Alcoholics Anonymous clinic, where his own son would later be admitted too.
We tend to underestimate a message we put out from time to time: “Don’t focus on making a million euros; focus on helping a million people.”
If you manage to create something that improves society and helps people, the money will follow. Over time, you’ll want to bring your product to even more people, you’ll have competition and you’ll be forced to fight it. That, in turn, becomes both your mission and your purpose, so your drive to keep fighting and improving won’t run out.
In this life you can get bored of everything except getting better every day and learning new things every day. The Japanese call it kaizen: continuous improvement in the pursuit of excellence, a process that never ends. That way you never lose the purpose and mission of getting better every day at whatever you do.
By contrast, lying in a hammock, going out partying, drinking, and travelling to lie on the beach, party and drink leads in the long run to something very common. At the end of the night, when you go to bed and ask yourself “What did I do today?”, you find the same answer as on every other day of the last few weeks and months of your new rich life: “Nothing. I didn’t do anything.” And a life in which nothing gets done is an empty life. And empty lives weigh more than full ones.
So find your purpose in life beyond quick wealth, because quick wealth is very likely to finish you off if that purpose isn’t there.
Read next: Tony Robbins: the simple secret to wealth
Featured image: Official GDC, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
