Wealth, Love, and the Trouble with Yes

Exploring money and wealth is a big part of my Heart-Strong Adventure this year. Not because I’m chasing money, but because it’s one of the most acute places where fear shows up in people’s lives. My friend Don Schaefer once said that, and it stuck with me.

When I look at the places where I’ve hesitated, avoided, pushed too hard, or said yes too quickly, money is often somewhere in the mix. So, I’ve known for a while that I wanted to go deeper there. Not just through a budget or a plan, but through something more spacious. Something that lets me ask, “What’s underneath this?”

That’s what drew me to the book, The 5 Types of Wealth, by Sahil Bloom.

I first heard about the book on Finding Mastery, the podcast by Dr. Michael Gervais. The title caught me, but not in the narrow sense of wealth. Not just money.

The book opens with a simple but important idea: we’ve let the word wealth get hijacked. Wealth has come to mean money. But money is only one form. There are others. Bloom argues there are 5: Time, Social, Mental, Physical, and Financial. Four of them make life feel full. The one we most often associate with wealth, Financial, is just a facilitator. An enabler.

That resonated. I decided this was the moment to read it. But I am not just reading it. I am doing the exercises.

Early on, the book offers a short quiz: five statements for each type of wealth, rated on a 0 to 4 scale. I sat down, took the quiz, and totaled my scores.

Nothing shocked me. Still, it made me pause. Time was my lowest score, and that made sense. I’ve struggled with time for a while. Not the existence of it, but the shape of it. How full it gets. How thin I feel when too many yeses pile up. How hard it can be to protect what matters without feeling like I’m letting someone down.

I went for a run the morning after I took the quiz. I wasn’t trying to solve anything. I just wanted to move and think and let whatever was there rise up. And what rose up was this question of time. Not time as a calendar, but time as tone. Time as love or fear. Time as the moment when I say yes or no, and why.

That’s when a book I read recently came rushing back. Love, by Leo Buscaglia. It holds a passage I’ve come back to more than once:

“Perhaps the most positive word in the English language and that most
conducive to continued growth in love is ‘Yes.’ ‘Yes’ is the best ‘defroster’
of frozen symbols and ideas. A lover says ‘Yes’ to life, ‘Yes’ to joy, ‘Yes’
to knowledge, ‘Yes’ to people, ‘Yes’ to differences. He realizes that all
things and people have something to offer him, that all things are in all
things. If ‘Yes’ is too threatening, he tries ‘Maybe.’

To say ‘No’ to something, is to exclude it; to exclude it is to close it out,
perhaps forever.”

I remember reading that the first time and feeling so much resonance. Yes, as love. Yes, as life. Yes, as a posture of openness. I have always viewed myself as a YES person.

But on this run, I felt the complication in it too. Because sometimes I say yes not from love, but from fear. Fear of disappointing someone. Fear of closing a door that might not reopen.

The result is a calendar that looks alive from the outside but doesn’t always feel that way inside. And so, I started to ask, what if love also includes the power to say no?

Not a defensive no. Not a retreat. But a no that honors what matters most. A no that creates room for a deeper yes.

This is the edge I’m walking as I explore Time Wealth. Not how to fit more in. Not how to optimize. But how to let love be the guide, even when it’s hard. Especially when it’s hard.

That’s what brought me to a line I’ve been carrying for a while but hadn’t fully named:

I am the type of person who leads with love even when it’s the hard thing.

One of the exercises from the book asks you to create a life razor. A sentence you can hold onto when decisions come, especially hard ones. Not a slogan. Not a rule. A reminder of who you want to be. This is mine. I am the type of person who leads with love even when it’s the hard thing.

I am coming to believe that leading with love doesn’t always mean saying yes. Sometimes it means saying no with care. Sometimes it means having the harder conversation now so that something doesn’t fester. Sometimes it means leaving space. Or asking better questions. Or walking away from the shiny opportunity that doesn’t align with how I want to spend my life.