CHAPTER 1
Facing the Future

Why We Are Expanding Your View of Investing

WE HAVE LAID OUT A RADICAL NEW MAP OF THE INVESTING universe, and we are inviting you to navigate your own path across this vast terrain. But before we start exploring the nooks and crannies, let's take a moment to ask the fundamental question: why invest?

Some would say this is obvious—we invest to build wealth. And what's the point of building wealth? To be secure? To then build even more security and more wealth? Isn’t that what we all want? Well, no, at least not in the way it is usually presented. While we take it as a given that most people want to increase their financial assets (at least up to a point) and have some nice things, traditional measurements of personal wealth are inadequate, often ignoring that which gives us the most satisfaction. Economists measure our “standard of living,” but what we are really after is a higher “quality of life”—and while there is overlap, those two are not the same thing! The point of investing, we would suggest, is not just about having more but about being happy in a full, classical sense.

Let's look back—back as far as 2,500 years—for help in answering these questions. Aristotle, writing in the Nicomachean Ethics, described the point of a well-lived life, the goal we should be aiming for, as “blessedness.” For Aristotle blessedness meant enjoying family and friends, with a deep feeling of well-being and contentment. In our day this ideal might suggest a mature experience of knowing one's mission, succeeding at pursuing that mission, having a solid primary relationship and close friends and family, having sufficient financial resources to live well according to one's own standards, making a contribution and leaving a legacy one can be proud of, and staying in right relationship to the natural world that sustains life. It is not about more—it is about better.

We do not think of investing as simply a professional, numbers-crunching discipline; for us it is something much more fundamental. We believe investing should support financial goals (buy a house, start a business) and it should support the bigger and deeper and more profound purpose of a life—Aristotle's blessedness. Investing can help each of us live a better life, and it can help improve communities and build a better world for all.

To do this we must first break out of the confines that limit our ideas about wealth. Financial choices are just one part of a continual process of giving and receiving, balancing risk and reward, and exchanging time, energy, and money with those around you. So let's make room for values and communities, for society and the earth. And let's expand our vision to include the interior realms of emotional and spiritual well-being as well, which are enduring elements of healthy human development. By doing so we are bound to get results that are more relevant and more life-nourishing.