I was obsessed with money… then I found philosophy

Last week I was walking through town with my wife and our son in the stroller. We ran into a former high school classmate. We were both pleasantly surprised to see each other after so many years. He looked at my wife and said: “He was always the cool guy in school.” I laughed because it reminded me how much I cared about how I looked and what people thought of me back then. For a sixteen-year-old, that’s probably normal. But at some point, you’ve got to stop living like that. The thing is, most people don’t actually stop. They just trade one obsession for another. From cool-obsessed to money-obsessed When I was at university, a friend of my father, a very successful businessman, asked me what I wanted to do after graduation. “Work at a bank,” I said, “and eventually become CEO.” I wasn’t joking. I was always obsessed with finance and had been reading about CEO compensation at major banks. The numbers were insane, and I thought: That’s the goal! I had no idea what that actually…