What I learned from Being a Tiger 21 Chair

Many people ask me about my experience of being a Tiger 21 Chair, a peer group for ultra high net worth people.  To become a member of this peer group you need USD$20million personal assets (not including the house).  Many members have considerably more, a small percentage are billionaires.

When people learn that I did this work it almost always goes into a criticism about people who have this amount of money.  The main narrative is:  They have must have been wounded children who hyper achieve to find inner peace.

This is not my experience. 

What I personally noticed is that this can be the case, but it was certainly not the most interesting part of being a Tiger 21 Chair.  Rather, it was observing those who are so beyond this narrative.  They are not run by their ego.  They are not chasing more wealth.  The people who I really learned from were the people who had experienced terrible life events that forced them to go inward – usually the death of a family member or devasting loss of some kind. In that moment, their life unravelled, their wealth was hit.  They had an opportunity to fall apart, let everything crumble – sometimes it did.  They could distinguish between what part of their life was a performance, a mistaken identity about what was important, and what part of the life they built was feeding their life force energy because it inspired them to create.

Those people who have a mistaken identity and are owned by their wealth (not the other way around) are not that pleasant to be around.  But, those who can build the wealth, and enjoy the wealth without their wealth becoming a prison have a lot to teach us.

To have real wealth, real abundance, and to create companies and portfolios and to still be at peace and still be grounded in themselves and loved by others is a phase many people never get to. It requires the ability to hold uncertainty and to not identify with all the challenges that show up every day, but instead to stay connected to your vision and creational power.

I only met a few like this, but I will never forget them.  They were my teachers.

Watch where you identify with your success.  Cultivate peace more than prosperity.  The peace will enable you to hold the prosperity and the journey that comes with it.