When I started my company, I had a fountain of ideas, heaps of energy, and relatively little money. 

I had built up some home equity and squirreled away some savings, and I hardly considered myself impoverished, but I was effectively living paycheck to paycheck and certainly carried an appropriately defensive mindset. 

Meanwhile, I was building a business buying and operating hydroelectric plants. While ideas and energy were crucial to the company’s growth, we needed dollars to buy hydro plants— a truth my investors were only too happy to point out. I quickly internalized their perspective. Looking back, I think I respected it too much.

Money is the measure of success or failure in the capitalist system, so respect for money, especially when you are growing a business, is crucial. You want to conserve cash, spend it wisely, and collect it efficiently. In a capital intensive business, money is even more important, by definition. 

While I needed money for my business, I did not need a particular person’s money. Money is a precious commodity, but an awful lot of people in this world have a lot of it.  And, like entrepreneurs, money that serves its masters has a particular challenge of its own: it needs to be put to use. If you stuff your money under a mattress, inflation begins to eat away at its value. Money needs good ideas to invest in. And those ideas need money. 

Like most founders, I wanted to build a business that would do some good for the world. And I wanted to make some money for myself to support my family.

“There’s nothing like your first million,” an early Google engineer and friend once said to me. 

On one level, his point was obvious: being a millionaire creates options that people with less money do not enjoy. As soon as you have significant savings, you can quit a job without concern of being left out on the street while you look for a new one. If you get a surprise bill, you aren’t going to have to triage between food and electricity. You can donate to causes that matter to you. 

But there’s a deeper point. If you’ve never had money and then you make a significant slug, you get to experience the world in a different way. And while some things are different (see above) many things aren’t: Time is just as scarce. Kids are just as precious. And work, for most people, is just as essential. 

Most of us have heard about the research suggesting happiness plateaus at $75,000 of income. Other researchers suggest in fact more money can increase happiness until $500,000. Either way, at a certain point, we can all agree that the incremental benefit ends at some point and when it does, you get to see money simply as another form of energy. 

“Form is no other than emptiness and emptiness is no other than form,” the Heart Sutra reports. You could rephrase this by saying: Money is empty and emptiness is money. 

In order to work with money comfortably, a must for high functioning executives, one has to value the structure and import of money and at the same time understand its fundamental emptiness. Money doesn’t buy happiness or security or success.

And there are many of us entrepreneurs who cannot wait until we are financially secure to get this lesson. I simply couldn’t grow my business using my defensive perspective on money. I needed to make big bets and make tough calls. I did not have the luxury to be as conservative as I had trained myself to be personally. 

I knew that I needed to hold onto money and let it go. I needed to hold it not too tight or too loose. 

That balance, that wider awareness of money, that’s the real lesson of the first million. And you don’t even need a million dollars to learn it.

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Exercise

Find a comfortable seat or lie down. Take a few calming breaths. 

Now ask yourself: what number would I need to see in my bank account that would make me feel like I have no more concerns about money? Perhaps it is one million dollars. Maybe it is a lot more. Whatever the number is, note it. 

Now imagine yourself three years older than you are, but now, when you check your bank account, you see the number you identified above. Congratulations! You made it! 

Take a few moments to really let the reality settle in. Notice how it feels in your body.

Now for the fun part, imagine you’ve just woken up for another day in the future where your bank account matches the number you named. Ask yourself the following questions and note the answers in a journal:

• What do you want to do today?

• What are the most important relationships in your life?

• What are you spending too much time doing at work?

• What do you want to spend more time doing at work?

Now get up and stretch, Maybe take a walk outside or play with a dog. Then return and read your answers. Do the answers resonate with you now or are they truly only applicable to the future where you've made more money?