What Would You Choose? Is A Million Right?

Recently, I saw this image on Facebook…

Being a know-it-all, I assumed I know the “right” answer.

I shared my thoughts, and invited the thoughts of others, and discovered that I did find the right answer for me, but that it’s dependent on where one is in life.

My initial thought was that the $1,000,000 was the right way to go. With the 50/50 shot had a 50% chance of getting nothing, and the money, effectively deployed, could create massive traveling opportunities and give me the chance to hang out with whoever I wanted.

On further reflection, I’ve found that each choice is correct at a certain place in life.

$1 million in cash

This is a great choice… if you have the knowledge and discipline to use it correctly.

With that kind of money, you have money to pay the bills for long enough to effectively deploy the rest of the cash to develop additional assets.

However, there are some people for whom this would be a terrible choice.

If your thought is “I want a million bucks because I could buy a house and a car and take a vacation,” then you shouldn’t choose this.

Why? Because you want to buy liabilities.

When the money is spent, you’ll find yourself worse off than before. That house will need maintenance and incur taxes. The car will cost taxes and require maintenance.

Likewise, if you already have over a million dollars in assets, then the million is just your next million.

50% Chance of Winning $200,000,000

A comment from a real estate investor friend made me realize the value of this choice. His worth is over a million dollars, so a million dollars would just be another million.

If he lost this bet, he’d still be in good shape, and if he won it, it would take him straight to the next level.

On the other hand, for someone who doesn’t have wealth, the downside risk doesn’t make sense.

Hang Out With The Richest Person on Earth for Three Years

If you know what to do with a million dollars, then you could leverage that into increasing wealth and it would give you the opportunity to hang out with whomever you want.

However, if you’re still in the place where you think about buying liabilities rather than assets with the money, spending time with the rich person would teach you how to use money to create wealth rather than to get things.

One person commented that they’d want to be paid to hang out with the rich person, which completely missed the point. People waste hundreds of thousands of dollars to get “education” at college, but they wouldn’t take the opportunity to get the massive opportunity of hanging out with the right people for free.

Heck, if you have the opportunity to carry the bags of a billionaire in exchange for hanging out with them and no pay, that’s still a fantastic deal.

Lifetime of Traveling For Free

At first I thought this one didn’t fit. I thought it was a wrong choice, but I recognized two scenarios in which this would make sense.

The first is for someone who is very young and immature. If you are not in a place where you would recognize or appreciate what the rich person could teach you, the travel gives you the opportunity to develop that maturity.

The other is someone who is just done. Life has beaten you down so much that you just want to go on vacation forever.

This is the one of the four options that does not directly lead to the next level of opportunity. However, it makes sense for someone who either isn’t prepared to receive and leverage the other three, or someone for whom this is the final step they’re seeking.

What do you think?

Do you agree with this reasoning?

What would you choose?

What Business and Life Coaches Can Learn From Sex Workers

They identify the right kind of potential clients, tease them with a preview sufficient to get them excited and into the right state of psychological arousal. At the proper moment, when the prospect is at peak excitement, they make their offer, and the client happily hands over their money for the services they are excited to receive.

Of course, what I am describing is the funnel sales process that many successful coaches use. Only a small proportion of coaches are actually able to use this strategy effectively while most struggle to get clients. If you are in the second group, you will find this article very interesting.

What coaches can learn from sex workers
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Man Who Writes for Living Calls Others Indolent

We should always be suspicious when someone who writes, thinks, and speaks for a living opines on how lazy people are.

The Day, in their July 3rd edition, published a piece by professional writer and pundit Cal Thomas entitled “Getting Paid Not to Work Is Addictive.

In it, he laments that human nature leads people to be lay about, taking advantage of enhanced unemployment to indolently bum around at home. He paints in your mind a lazy laggard who drinks and plays video games as the rest of us hard working folk put money in their bank account.

Nice story. Too bad it is mostly fictitious, and largely classist. The reality is that working is expensive.

When my daughter was in daycare, it cost $270 per week. That’s for one child.

Minimum wage in Connecticut is $12 per hour, which means that a 40 hour week pays $480. That assumes that you can get 40 hours, which you probably can’t.

Take out $270 for childcare, and now you’ve got $210 left. That’s before taking taxes, the cost of getting to and from work, and all the other costs of working. Can you live on $150/week? Didn’t think so.

In his article, Thomas pontificates, “It makes one wonder what happened to…the ‘work ethic’ when work was seen as a noble.”

Perhaps what happened is that work became less noble when wages remained stagnant for 40 years while the cost of living rose. Maybe it’s that workers are treated like replaceable cogs, liabilities rather than assets, due to misguided “lean business” philophies.

Or it could be that the concept of “work ethic” has always been an idea propagated by those who profit from cheap and abundant labor to convince people to work long hours, exhaust themselves too much to think, then sooth their fatigue with consumerism.

I know quite a few millionaires. None of them work more than 40 hours a week. Most of them less than 20. They deploy their resources efficiently, leverage connections, and find the places where their time most efficiently converts into money.

Anyone can do what they do, but it takes time and energy to learn to do it, to make a plan to do it, and to actually do it. Someone who is struggling to figure out how to pay the rent on $150 per week has neither time nor energy.

However, what happens when that person is given the time and the space to decompress, think, and explore? They start to discover opportunities that they were never aware of before. They find that they can start a business. They find jobs that pay considerably more than what they were settling for. They may even find that, net of childcare and other expenses, it makes more sense to be a single income household.

What would this look like in the macroeconomic numbers? Lower labor force participation, higher wages, more business starts. Just like we are seeing right now.

Covid support didn’t make people lazy. It made them creative. Maybe if Mr. Thomas got away from his computer and did some real work once in a while, he’d see that.


Michael Whitehouse is a motivational speaker, mindset coach, connector, and he helps people make a living by avoiding miserable, soul crushing work. If you’re interested in how you could shift from survival work to thriving work, set up a complimentary coaching session.

High Ticket Coaching Nearly Killed My Business

High Ticket Coaching Nearly Killed My Business

There is a certain area of coaching that teaches that your worth is determined by net worth. They tell you that if you don’t have a $10,000 offer, you ain’t nothing. If you’re not bringing in $20,000 a month, you’re a failure.

This mindset derailed my business off of a successful growth path into the doldrums.

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5 Reasons Why the College Admissions Scandal is Neither Surprising Nor Upsetting

There is a college admissions scandal, but it's not what you think.
There is a great scandal about higher education, but possibly not the on you’re thinking of.

A great college admissions scandal was discovered when it was revealed that wealthy and influential families were using bribes and faked test scores to get their kids into prestigious schools to which they were not entitled.

Here are five reasons why the college admissions scandal neither surprised nor upset me.

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