This is not about money. If you came here looking for inspiration on how to get more money in your life, you’re in the wrong place. I really don’t know. But that’s not important.

I have no influence over your decision to continue reading, but I have one for you question before you go:

Assuming you finally become rich, what are you going to do with all that money?

Keep the answer to yourself. Try to remember it or write it down somewhere, it will become useful later in your life.

Money is not wealth. Money is not a manifestation of wealth exactly as a map is not a manifestation of territory. The menu is the not the meal. Money is not wealth.

A lot of business men spend their lifetime becoming rich and when they finally have the money, they don’t know what to do with it. It’s a vicious circle, once you confuse money with wealth you start thinking that status is happiness and so on and so forth. As many dogmas and religions have preached along the millennia, your kingdom lies within. There you will find all the riches you need. Your want is an illusion of your need, dressed in a very sexy disguise.

Being wealthy is, in principle, a state of being, not a material manifestation. Wealth can have many material manifestations in the form of material goods, but it’s only a fraction of it’s true value. Wealth is the quantum of your experience. If you live a life seeking to learn and explore, instead of continuous gain and spend, you will be wealthier than the richest man in the world.

Durring our history as a species we have shown a great hunger for learning and exploring, a hunger that has lifted us to our peek of evolution that we know today. By passing on each other’s experiences we learn to grow, faster, better. We don’t reinvent the wheel and we don’t make the same mistakes. We walk on the shoulders of giants, the ones who were before. Their past experiences give us a head start, and it potentially saves us from a lot of stupid mistakes and suffering. It’s a glimpse of maturity without having to get old. How cool is that?

Mentoring takes learning from experience to the next level. First of all, mentoring or being mentored requires a reasonable dose of maturity. A point in your life when you start asking the right questions. A time when you see things from a different perspective than how you’ve seen them before in your life. It’s a different kind of learning, it’s not like in school. You are not stuck with just some default teacher or some kid who’s counting the seconds till recess. You get to choose. Both the mentor and mentee get to choose.

How you relate to learning and the relationship you have with your mentor is different. It’s a relationship based on respect and deep appreciation, a relationship which requires a certain level of humbleness. One seeks a mentor to tap into a deeper perspective, one that he desires but lacks experience.

There are no rules, only the ones you set between each other. There is no mandatory duration, it stops when both feel they got what they wanted. I say both, because it’s a relationship which benefits both the mentor as the mentee.

You can have one or more mentors. They could be people from your work, a friend, a teacher or just some person you admire. If you are seeking a mentor, my advice is to be humble and dare to ask, you will be surprised.

Learning or helping someone learn is, I think, one of our deepest purposes in life and one of our core values. It’s the never ending spiral of life, as long as we keep it going it will unfold like the petals of a flower. Our flower of life.