Defining Your Wealth Identity

He is a great man who uses earthenware dishes as if they were silver,

but he is equally great who uses silver as if it were earthenware. It is the sign of an unstable mind not to be able to endure riches.

—Seneca

The previous chapter was about understanding the cards you have been dealt in terms of self/emotions/roles/wiring. We shift now to how to begin to play those cards. The natural place to begin is with what the corporate literature refers to as mission(why)/vision/values statements. At the outset, it is important to acknowledge the varying viewpoints and experience we all bring to those statements. Some of us come from strong corporate and organizational cultures where such statements are a part of a lived reality. For others, they were an exercise engaged in on a corporate retreat and landed on a bookshelf gathering dust. And yet for still others, they are a blunt instrument used at best to create culture—inauthentic—or at worst to brainwash.

But at its core, each statement serves a noble purpose. Mission statements are easy to get confused with vision statements, so I prefer to refer to them as why statements. They answer the question What are we doing all this for? Value statements accompany mission statements and talk about how we conduct ourselves. The mission statement combines with values then to inform and shape a vision, a statement of what the future could look like if we are successful in executing our mission within the constraints of our values. We will consider each statement in turn.