Experience is a strange kind of wealth. You do not build it by saving it. You build it by spending it.
Years ago, I read a book by Lee Brower that changed how I define "wealth." Instead of focusing on monetary wealth alone, Brower separates wealth into four categories: Financial, Charitable, Core, and Experience.
As a wealth advisor, most of my career has lived in the first category. That is the lane I know. I can build a portfolio. I can fund a goal. I can move money from one generation to the next and guard it the whole way down.
But lately, the one category I keep circling back to is experience.
I have started to see that experience is the one kind of wealth I cannot hand my daughters. I cannot wire it to an account. I cannot leave it in a will. They only get it if we go and live it. And for most of their lives, I have not given them very much of it.
For most of our marriage, I have been working to build a life that lets my girls accomplish more than I ever could. That is a noble goal on paper. But somewhere along the way, building that life started to crowd out actually living it.
Add in everything we have walked through with our middle daughter: The heart condition. The surgery. The years of appointments and what still comes next. A pattern started to form. We played it safe. We turned down the trip. We did not book the flight. I worked more. I told myself it was responsible.
There was real fear in it, especially in the early years. The what ifs were not theoretical for us. We lived them.
But fear is only part of the story, and maybe not even the biggest part.
The deeper truth is that I wanted comfort. I wanted the predictable. I wanted the version of life where I did not have to lean into the hard things. The meltdown on the plane. The unfamiliar place. The day that refuses to go the way I planned it. The comfort of home was easier than the unknown of the airport.
And easier is what I kept choosing.
That is the part that is harder to admit. Fear announces itself. Comfort does not. Fear gets sympathy. Comfort gets a mirror. Fear at least feels like it is protecting something. Comfort just quietly talks you out of the things that would have been worth doing. And I think comfort has been doing that quiet work in me for longer than I knew.
By keeping us safe, I have been teaching my girls something I do not actually believe. I have been teaching them that the comfort zone is the goal. That the safest version of life is the best version of life. That the world out there is something to be managed rather than engaged. And that is the opposite of what I want them to carry into adulthood.
I do not want my girls to play it safe. Life is too short for that, and the lessons that matter are not learned when life is going great. They are learned when you have to talk to someone who does not look like you or think like you. They are learned when something breaks and you have to figure it out with what you have. They are learned when you give more than you take. They are learned in places that do not feel familiar. When life is easy, we forget that we need anyone. We forget how to depend on other people. And the trips and the experiences and the unfamiliar places are what remind us.
My middle daughter's name means bright light. From the day she was born, that has been my hope for all three of my girls. That they would be bright lights in the world. And a light hidden in a comfort zone is not really a light at all. It is a candle in a closed drawer.
The hardest part is that the protective instinct in me is real, and the pull toward comfort is real, and neither one disappears just because I have finally seen the contradiction. I am wired to keep them safe. I am wired to choose easy. Both of those are gifts in some seasons and cages in others. Letting them grow, letting them struggle, letting them become who they are meant to be, all of it runs against something deep in me. But it has to.
Because if I love them well, I cannot love them safe, and I cannot love them comfortable. Real love does not cater to fear. And it does not bow to comfort, either.
Brower calls experience a category of wealth, and for years I treated it like the one account I never had to fund.
But experience is a strange kind of wealth. You do not build it by saving it. You build it by spending it. You bank it by going. Every other category I have spent my career protecting, and this is the one that only grows when you are willing to risk the day not going as planned.
So book that flight. Take that trip. Say yes to new experiences instead of letting the what ifs cast the deciding vote.
Don't wait for the fear to pass or for the temptation of comfort to go away, because it won't. True courage is when you feel the fear and take that step forward anyway, because raising bright lights matters more than comfort ever could.
— Aaron Waters
Senior Wealth Advisor & Shareholder