Moment 75 - What You Think You Know About Money Is Wrong: Mo Gowdat

In these ‘Moment’ episodes of my podcast, I’ll be selecting my favourite moments from previous episodes of The Diary Of A CEO. In this moment Mo Gawdat lays out a philosophy for how to admit when you’re wrong, and the right way to go about setting priorities in your life. As Mo powerfully says, ‘50% of what I know is wrong’, and this is true for everyone. Coming to life from this position of humbleness is the only way we can truly get our head straight on what our life is and where it’s taking us. There are things that you need, like food and human interaction, and there are things that you want, like status or expensive possessions. Interrogating the insecurity in our wants and why we really want them is the best way to be at peace with ourselves, and to cut out toxic habits from our life. Because as Mo never tires of pointing out, it’s not how much money we have, but what amount of money we’re happy with, that counts. Listen to the full episode here - https://g2ul0.app.link/4GuqQfBYltb Mo: https://www.solveforhappy.com https://www.instagram.com/mo_gawdat/?hl=en Watch the Episodes On Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/c/TheDiaryOfACEO/videos Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Steven Bartlett?

  You asked me a question about money. And then you said, you know, what does money mean to me? And then when I asked you, you said you think you've come to learn that you think money is one of your illusions. What did you mean by that?

• 0:15Mo Gawdat?

  Money is an illusion at every, every level. Money doesn't exist, you and I know that. Anyone who understands fractional reserve and how money is printed and generated. Money does not even exist. You walk into a bank and you ask for a £50,000 loan for a car. And they literally write the numbers 50000 in a spreadsheet and poof. Money comes out of nowhere. That money never existed before you borrowed it. Okay, and will only exist when you work your backside off to pay it back. Right? And interestingly, that illusion was created to make our lives easier. And then it ended up creating, making our life a lot more difficult. Now, why?

• 0:58Mo Gawdat?

  Because most of us are so chasing the revenue side of money without a full understanding of the cost side of money. Let me try to explain. For you to get a job in London that pays you £100,000.

• 1:16Mo Gawdat?

  Just for simplification of the mathematics, you have to live in London, which costs you £70,000. For example, I don't know London very well, but let's say these are the numbers. But on top of the £70,000, it also causes, costs you your stress. It also costs you being far away from your mom if your mom lives elsewhere. It costs you, you know, your time, which is your most valuable resource. The only thing you really have in your life is your time. And it costs you so many other things. Right? And so most people don't understand the cost benefit relationship to start. Now, you, you take that and then you add a Louis Vuitton bag or a fancy car.

• 2:00Mo Gawdat?

  And suddenly, your money is not even going as far as it could. Because you could get yourself a bag that is beautiful and everything for £100, but then... You choose to to buy one for several thousand pounds. And then you have to work harder, which makes you may pay more costs and that and the cycle becomes even more vicious. Right? You continue further than that and you start to say, so I save some of that my some of some of my money in the future. But your savings are suffering inflation. So you save a thousand pounds, they become nine hundred, they become eight hundred. When in reality, by the way, you've saved the the thousand pounds when you could have borrowed borrowed them by entering some numbers in a in a spreadsheet.

• 2:41Mo Gawdat?

  The entire recipe around that story is wrong. Everything around money is not what we believe in it is, okay? Which basis basically makes it an illusion. Now, the biggest part of that illusion, believe it or not, is, and I know you have money in the bank. Is that you have nothing. I I don't know if you realize that. I most most people don't understand that. If I have a hundred pounds in the bank, I literally have nothing. I have nothing. The bank has my hundred pounds. And the bank can decide whatever they want to do if they wanted to take it away from me. Okay? And it is only my money when I choose to buy an iPhone or something with it. For that one instant, that money is mine.

• 3:22Mo Gawdat?

  And then, once I get the iPhone, it's not mine anymore. I now have the iPhone, right? You you basically assign that money that is never yours, it's the banks until the minute you spend it. To spending it on things that most of us don't ever ever interact with. I mean, look at your own home, anyone listening to us. And how many things you have in that home that you've not ever used, ever? You know, you you saw that pair of shoes in the window and you were like, oh, my God, I have to have them. Spent several hundred pounds on them or several tens of pounds on them and then ended up taking them home, never ever putting them on.

• 3:59Mo Gawdat?

  Right? Now, all of that waste along the way, the cost of earning the money, the things that you spend it on, the actual value of the things that the things that you spend it on. Basically tells you that there is one truth. To money, which is, I have basic needs. I have basic needs and my basic needs are to be reasonably covered, reasonably fed, reasonably safe, and so on and so forth. And in the Islamic culture, we call this risk, which is different than income. Risk is not what, how much money you earn. It's the good that that money brings you. It's, did you eat a meal today? That is actually what you're looking for in life. It's not the money that gets you the meal. Okay, what you're looking for is the meal.

• 4:45Mo Gawdat?

  Could you actually buy something for your daughter today? The thing is what you're looking for. It's not, it's not the money that got the thing. And if you start to chase that, something very different happens, right? Suddenly, you start to ask yourself, hmm, is buying that thing worth the seventeen hours of work I'm gonna put in them? Right, which of those, which would I prefer? If I gave you the two choices and said, buy this bag or spend seventeen hours with your friends? If you see it that way, you may make very different decisions. It leaves us with a very big other illusion, which is, but money is safety mode. You know, it's not like I want money because I want more fancy things.

• 5:30Mo Gawdat?

  I just want to feel safe because the world is unpredictable. Sadly, when the world is unpredictable, money's not gonna save you. Okay, and I think my story's been very, very, very big eye open. I had enough money, I, you know, I had enough connections and enough influence and I, you know, failed to protect my child's life when it was time for him to go. Right, I, you know, I think we know many stories of someone that maybe falls and breaks your back. What will your money do for you? Safety is a much bigger thing than just a little bit of money in the bank. And by the way, safety is an attitude, is an idea to tell yourself, when I need it, I will make it. When I need it, I will have it. Perhaps the answer is, I don't need so much of it anyway.

• 6:16Mo Gawdat?

  And I think, you know, again, like everything in life, you, you want to have the skill of making money. Money is power. You know, again, when you were speaking on slow mo, you basically said, I love the idea of being able to build this setup for the podcast of spending on my show and so on. That's wonderful, okay? Money is power. But it's power as long as you own it and it doesn't own you. The minute money owns you and lack of it starts to distract you and looking at how much your your other friend has and he has a little more than you, you know, hurts your ego. Once it gets into that realm, then money works against you. It doesn't work for you.

• 7:00Steven Bartlett?

  Do you think it's a noble cause that when I answered that question and I said, for me, money is basically the fuel of my mission. It enables me to, I said, I put on my my Diary of a CEO Live tour. It cost me about six hundred thousand pounds to book these ten venues, to book the London Palladium for three nights, to book this massive choir of forty people, to book this big musical. There was about a hundred of us, a hundred people I had to book and pay for to put on that show. At the end of the show, I break even, but without the, that tour, you know, reaches almost twenty thousand people. It's the most thrilling, fulfilling and biggest honour that I've ever had to be able to do that in front of all of those people and to share that message, which is very much in line with my mission. And I look at money and said, if I didn't have the money, it would have been much, much harder.

• 7:45Steven Bartlett?

  Not impossible, but much, much, much harder to do that.

• 7:50Mo Gawdat?

  Absolutely.

• 7:51Steven Bartlett?

  So do you feel like that is a noble relationship with money?

• 7:56Mo Gawdat?

  Look, we agree on this. Nothing is good or bad. Nothing is right or wrong. Everything is both right and wrong and everything is, can be both good and bad. It depends on what you want to do with it. And one of the messages I constantly tell everyone in the world is absolutely become successful, become powerful, become rich. Because the biggest problem with our world is that the most successful, most powerful and the richest are the worst of us. Okay, and I don't generalize and say that's the truth, but it's actually easier to make money if you break some rules than it is if you're ethical. And so as a result of that, a good chunk of the big money in the world is not super ethical, right?

• 8:41Mo Gawdat?

  And if I have more money, I can fuel my One Billion Happy mission and that's a good thing for the world. That's by the way, owning money, not letting it own you, right? So if I can get to the point where I make it and actually give it to One Billion Happy, then that's amazing. If I get to the point where I make it and then suddenly go like, oh, let's wait a little bit, grow it a tiny bit and then give it to One Billion Happy, then I'm not doing the right thing. Having said that. You know, of course, you know how I admire you and and respect you. This is your zoom lens of the world, okay? For someone else, four pounds, some sticky paper and a couple of scissors,

• 9:23Mo Gawdat?

  and spending an hour with her daughter doing something beautiful, okay, is as impactful, maybe even more impactful than the entire show. Because that one daughter with the sticky paper and scissors might end up becoming one of the most pronounced artists in the world, prominent enough to change the world with four pounds, scissors and a piece of paper. Right? Now, we we somehow, especially those of us like you and I, who who had experiences in life where they put effort and the effort rewarded them. Okay, we think that we're the ones that are changing the world or making a difference. No, we're not. Okay, the reality is we need we need to understand that.

• 10:08Mo Gawdat?

  Again, I, you know, I admire you and I know you you you not feel upset. But half of what you know is wrong, half of what I know is wrong. More than that. Absolutely, right? And it's it's just an attempt, it's just an attempt with, you know, whether that attempt, uh, uh, uh, Steve is is is an attempt because of money or is it it's an attempt because you just spend time with your driver talking about something or, you know, you you you were telling the story. All of those things, huh? I think the game is I'm going to do the best that I can

• 10:46Mo Gawdat?

  to acquire the resources that I'm good at acquiring, to direct them in the investments that I have accessible to me. Okay, if if you are a cashier, uh, you know, at a supermarket and you're making enough money to spend wonderful time with your daughter to, you know, to to do a bit of art, then that in itself is a form of contribution that changes the world. And you'll never know that one daughter might cure cancer.