Why losing millions doesn't scare me anymore

My security is based on my abilities, not on the materialistic stuff that I have. Not the gold in the safe, not the money in the bank, not the real estate I own. All of that is transient. It can disappear in the blink of an eye.

People hear me say that and think it is a nice slogan for a poster. It is not a slogan. I am living it right now, in real time, with a machine I happen to love. Let me give you the example.

The flying limousine

I bought a helicopter. Twin engine, jet engine, a badass flying limousine, and I flew that thing all over Italy. And I will be very honest with you: after a while I kind of got bored with it. That happens with toys. So I went, all right, maybe I will sell it.

I found someone literally ready to pay me more than double what I had put into it. And just about the same time, the financial authorities here in Italy seized it from me. They are the guys with the guns, so you have to listen to them. Now we have lawyers, and paperwork, and all this stuff going on.

And you know what? There is a big chance those guys might win. They might win. So there it is. Somebody may end up snagging a serious chunk of the physical universe from me, something I own outright and righteously.

It is just a thing

Here is my reaction, and I mean this all the way down: get over it, man. It is just a thing. A beautiful thing, a fast thing, an expensive thing, but a thing.

The freedom does not come from the helicopter. The freedom comes from my belief in myself that I can go replace it, and five times over. That is where I become something. Not by holding on to an object, but by knowing what I can produce.

That is what I mean when I say my security is based on my abilities. The stuff, any stuff, can be taken, lost, broken, or seized. My belief, my knowingness, my certainty that I can replace it and continue to flourish, continue to prosper, continue to go higher and higher, nobody takes that.

The road through Texas

People talk about making it, as if success is a finish line you cross once and then you get to park. Let me tell you what the road to greatness actually looks like. It never ends. It just goes on and on.

It is like driving through Texas. If you ever drove through Texas, you know it just goes on forever, and at some point you go, how big is this thing? It never ends, man. You do something great and you go, okay, pretty cool. How do I top it? Then you top it, and you go, okay, pretty cool. Now what?

There is no such thing as making it. There is only the voyage of arriving. That is what I really dig about being alive, for lack of a better phrase. We get to choose, and it is endless. It is boundless. It is like space. It just keeps going, forever.

Where your security lives

So do an honest inventory on yourself. If everything you own vanished tomorrow, in the blink of an eye, what would be left standing? If that question scares you, your security is parked in the wrong place. It is sitting in objects, and objects are transient.

Move it. Put your security in the abilities that got you the objects in the first place: your skill, your work, your certainty that you can go produce it all again. Build those up and you can lose the toy, shrug, and go build a better one.

That is why losing millions does not scare me anymore. They can take the machine. They cannot take the pilot.