by Adam Carolla
You Kids Have Lost the Meaning of Money
Now I know that, by nature, kids understand the cost of things. Especially you, my children. As I mentioned earlier, you treated the cars in Jay Leno’s garage like the rack of candy bars at the grocery-store checkout. Remember, Natalia, when we went to Lowe’s to pick out a new light for your room?
We were in that section where they have a hundred and fifty lights dangling from the grid on the ceiling. I asked you to pick out which one you wanted. With no hesitation or thought, just an instant gravitational pull, you pointed to the one that was two hundred and nineteen dollars.
I was blown away. This is Lowe’s; I was unaware they even had an option this pricey. I didn’t even know they made lights over one-fifty that didn’t have fans attached. The lights at Lowe’s start at around eighteen bucks and average thirty-nine. They’re all stamped out in China. But you found the one that was the shiniest, with all the glitter and spangles. Seven-year-old girls are like largemouth bass. Everything is a lure to them. If it winks at them, they buy it.
I thought I was safe heading to Lowe’s. I even threw out the “just get anything you want” line because I’m a baller like that. Of course, you quite literally found the diamond in the rough.
Money has no meaning anymore because every transaction is handled with plastic cards. And soon, we’ll just use our phones. You won’t even need to swipe a card; you’ll scan your iPhone screen. Money used to count for more because you held it in your hands. It’s not tangible anymore. My kids have never seen their mom take out cash to pay for anything. I don’t even think they’d know what it was. “Mom, why are you handing that person green paper instead of the magical never-ending money card?”
Here’s how bad our lack of understanding of money has gotten, and how badly it’s affecting our kids. I always look for the little signs that our society is coming apart at the seams. The latest is a public service announcement billboard I saw that read “It Takes Courage to Save Money.” I thought that things had taken a turn a few years back when, during the State of the Union, Obama told us it took courage to raise your kids. Now it takes courage to save your own money? Is this what it has come to? We’ve so lost touch with the value of the almighty dollar that we have to have a public service campaign to remind kids that bread doesn’t just appear when you click your heels together?
And what message does this send about keeping your shit together in general? Twenty-five years from now what can my grandkids look forward to as far as PSAs? “It Takes Courage to Sit Up”? “It Takes Courage to Wipe”? “It Takes Courage to Chew and Even More to Swallow”?
I know I’m talking a lot about money, but I want to be clear as we come to a close about one thing. Sure, money helps, but I have a lot of bread and I’m still pissed off all the time. You should make as much money as you can, especially since I won’t be leaving you any. But don’t expect it to solve all your problems. Trust me, the whole “money doesn’t buy happiness” thing is actually true.
When you’re poor, you feel that the reason you’re unhappy is because you don’t have money. “I’m eating at the Shakey’s Bunch-of-Lunch buffet again. If I could just afford to go to a nice restaurant I’d be happy.” But then, sometimes those people get money and realize their lives are still filled with unhappiness and problems. And now that they can’t blame their poverty, they have to start looking within and changing and there’s nothing harder or scarier than trying to change your life. If you’re unhappy without money, you’ll be unhappy with money. Dr. Drew often says that we all hit our mean. Just like we have a biological homeostasis, we have an emotional homeostasis. We’re always trying to find balance and get back there when we’re out of whack, even if it sucked. So you are who you are, and getting a sixty-inch flat panel television is not going to change that. A little introspection, a little therapy and making different choices might.
I know what I’m talking about. I’ve been the guy in the Shakey’s booth with the Mojo potatoes thinking, “If I could just afford to go to Sizzler, that would be sweet. Then I’d be happy.” I could buy a Sizzler franchise right now, and I’m still not happy. And there have been times when I was broke and very happy. When I was a drunk teenager visiting Tijuana and didn’t have two pesos to rub together, I was quite happy. Having money doesn’t make you happy, being happy makes you happy.
And no matter how much money you have, you can’t buy friends. If you’re rich or poor, it doesn’t matter when it comes to friends. You can be broke as shit and still sit around with friends high on pot brownies and watch Caddyshack over and over again and laugh your ass off. As I noted earlier, a lot of times money comes between friends and ruins those relationships. You lend an old pal money, never get it back, stop talking to each other and have him be the one pissed at you.
Don’t buy into the myth that when you get to the top of the mountain you’ll be happy. It’s the constant chase that makes the one-percenter the one-percenter. The key to financial and career success is to never be satisfied. But that’s not necessarily the key to life success. No matter what you end up doing for a career, have the mind-set that you’re never done. Elon Musk, Richard Branson and Oprah wake up hungry every day. Especially Oprah. No one our society has deemed successful ever feels like they’re finished. The reason billionaires get mad when they go from the third-richest person on the planet to the eighth is not because they have a couple billion less. That’s more money than they, their kids and grandkids and the country of Chile will ever spend. It’s because to them, they lost. These are just ultra-competitive guys. They don’t see money as a way to purchase things. They see money as units of success. It’s simply a measurement of how hard they’ve worked, how hard they’ve beaten the competition, how much they’ve innovated and challenged themselves. But do you think they’re always happy?
Here’s the real message I want to end with, kids. Even if you don’t heed my advice, somehow become rich and successful and manage your money well enough to not fuck up your relationships, even if you can pull off the being rich and happy thing . . . what you should really be aiming for is satisfaction and gratitude.
We equate happiness and satisfaction. But they are actually two very different things. Our culture foists this upon us. Our society has created this myth that you’ll be satisfied if you can just stop driving that Camry and start driving a Lexus. We watch the Kardashians and The Real Housewives and think, “Why don’t I have what they have?” We have a constant stream of self-esteem wounds being pumped into our homes and mobile devices. Every commercial, every reality show, is “How come you’re not in charge? How come you’re not partying on a rooftop? How come you’re not walking a red carpet in a designer dress and a million-dollar necklace?” We’re taught to be disgruntled at all times, that there’s something better out there if we could only afford it.
And then, we’re taught not to earn those things. Between the lottery, casinos, subprime mortgages, Wall Street Ponzi schemes and reality shows we’re constantly barraged with messages about how everything we want to make our lives better we need to have right now. We’re either supposed to scratch off a ticket and win our happiness or be so pitiful that Ty Pennington and his bus full of experts come by and fix it for you. But satisfaction is earned. Chasing happiness is what drugs, junk food and amusement parks are for. Quick hits. But when you earn it, it’s so much sweeter. Going out for a meal is good, but cooking one for yourself feels better. Sucking off a drinking fountain at a high school is not a satisfying experience, but when you’ve been out running wind sprints it is. It’s not the things you accumulate, but how you accumulate them.
When it comes to career, remember success isn’t about the job, it’s about you. You should have one mode: Work hard and do your best. Put in the same effort every day, no matter where you are on the corporate ladder. Many of my years as a carpenter were spent with me just half-assing it. My tools were disorganized. I wasn’t efficient because I knew that I didn’t want to be a c
arpenter for the rest of my life. But what I didn’t realize was that the way out of that miserable life was to do what I was doing well. Not to become the foreman, but to just train myself not to be miserable. I needed to flex the mental muscle of giving a shit and putting in effort. I eventually realized that as long as I was stuck doing that work, I was going to do it the best I possibly could. I actually got a lot happier doing the shitty job I didn’t want to do by doing it well. And that carried over into other areas of my life.
Don’t think about what you’re getting paid when you decide how much effort to put into any task. Just put in what it takes. When you have a chore to do and you’re putting in a lackluster effort ask yourself this: If it paid ten thousand dollars, would I step up my game? If the answer is yes, then do it. Because putting in the effort is the reward in and of itself.
Whether it’s restoring a car, rebuilding a house or writing a book it’s all about the process. Let’s go with restoring a car first. You look at that thing and think, “It’s covered in rust, who knows if we can even salvage it. I really want a shiny red convertible, but I don’t want the part where I’m covered in grease and my hands are banged up from rebuilding the engine.”
The same comes with remodeling a house. My first house was a disaster. It was a termite-infested death trap. All I could think about was how nice it would be if it had central air and a new kitchen. For people like my mom, that journey would have been devastating. She’d never even start because the task seemed too difficult.
I dreaded writing this book. I’ve dreaded writing all of my books. It’s a long process. The words that are being typed right now will not be read for a year. There will be months of scrutinizing them and rearranging them. It’s not a quick, smooth journey.
No matter what the task is, remember, it ain’t going to be nonstop fun. It’s about embracing the journey, not about enjoying the journey. No one looks forward to taking a scraper and removing undercoating from the bottom side of a fender, tearing out an old lathe and plaster ceiling or agonizing over the exact right words to best describe how much it sucks writing a book (wait, I just did). But just one person could read this book, and I’d still be satisfied with how it turned out. Would I be happier if it were read by millions? Yes, of course. But my feeling of satisfaction is in the final product and the process of creating it. I mean that.
So with all things, have a goal and have a plan, but throw yourself fully into each step along the way and before you know it, you’ll be at your destination. If you can embrace the journey, rather than the outcome, you win.
And gratitude is the key to happiness, plain and simple. Are you happy to be alive? Just being amongst the healthy and living? Your alarm going off, you waking up, getting out of bed and having another day on the planet is enough to be grateful for. A lot of people didn’t live to see their twentieth birthdays. A lot of people saw their eightieth, but that was two hundred years ago and they’re in the cold ground right now. When you look at the age of the earth and the universe the amount of time we exist and can enjoy life is limited. So soak it all up.
I’m reminded of my dearly departed friend, Philip Wellford, a.k.a. Philip the Juggler. Philip died in December 2012 of early onset dementia. He just fell apart. It was devastating. He was a virile guy. When we were younger, he would be on a unicycle juggling butcher knives. He hiked the John Muir Trail with his father. But in May 2012, I had him onstage with me one last time in Kansas City. He had to wear a helmet and was using a walker. And he was dead seven months later. So if that’s not enough of a message about embracing life while you’ve still got it, I don’t know what is.
But just to double down on the gratitude point, here’s another Philip story. Around 1999, when Loveline was in full bloom and The Man Show was taking off, we had a conversation about our careers. He was telling me that he lamented not making it in Hollywood and achieving the success he dreamt of, like a sitcom. He was impressed with where I was in my career and called himself “just a juggler.” He had a standing gig opening for Andy Williams in Branson and would do that five nights a week for years. He’d do twenty minutes before Andy came out. This was in a ten-thousand-seat room. Every night. I told him, “Philip, you have not had a job, a real job, for twenty-five years. You don’t understand the odds that you beat just being a performer, just having a regular gig. You’re not waiting tables right now. You’re working. You do twenty minutes a night, then play golf during the day and hang out with your wife in your beautiful home.” He was standing on the ninety-ninth step of a pyramid and thinking, “Damn, I didn’t make it to the top.” So make sure, kids, to look back at those other steps and see how far you’ve come. Look back at all those people struggling on step one and think, “I’m grateful to be where I’m at.”
You’ve got to grab those moments of gratitude where you can. One afternoon a few years ago, I was driving down Wilshire Boulevard to do an interview at People magazine and going straight from there to do a live spot on The O’Reilly Factor.
As I was driving, I realized I was about to pass a Pier 1 Imports that I had built many years back during my construction days. One of my worst days, a watershed low point in my construction misery, was building that store. I was working in the lot behind that place and there was a mound of dirt about the size of a Humvee. It was on one end of the parking lot and there was a dumpster on the other. I showed up on a Friday morning at the crack of butt and was handed a shovel and a wheelbarrow and told to go to town. (I remember it was a Friday because at that point, just like Loverboy said, I was working for the weekend.) There was a narrow plank leading up to the doors of the dumpster so I could wheel the barrow into it and dump it out. The foreman told me, “If you hustle, you can get that whole mound moved into the dumpster before you knock off tonight.” This was mule work. If it was two hundred years ago and I was black, this would be slave labor.
It felt like something you would do if you were trying to torture someone. It brings to mind two great scenes, from two great movies. It was a hell of a lot like the “What’s your dirt doin’ in his ditch?” scene from Cool Hand Luke. Just mental agony. But it was also like The Great Escape, when Steve McQueen’s character is in the cooler counting the number of times he can bounce the baseball off the wall just to keep himself sane. I was counting the number of steps between the dirt pile and the dumpster, just to keep my mind from eating itself.
The dumpster was full by five, and I knocked off having made just enough money for a six-pack and the gas that it took me to get to the site.
So even though I was running a few minutes behind already, I pulled off Wilshire and into the Pier 1. I did a nice victory lap around the parking lot where I had suffered so much misery. It was like MacArthur returning to the Philippines. It felt good. I didn’t do donuts or urinate in the lot, just drove the length of it and took a moment to feel some satisfaction, to acknowledge where I had been versus where I was.
Taking time out to feel that gratitude for where you’ve come to in your journey of life is so crucial. Because of our cultural messages, people treat their lives like there’s a party going on and they’re not invited. Your life isn’t “out there.” Maybe it’s right under your nose. There’s a fantastic John Hiatt song called “You May Already Be A Winner” about a guy who gets a Publisher’s Clearing House–type letter in the mail addressed to “Mr. and Mrs. Permanent Dweller” that says, “You May Already Be a Winner.” And he realizes that the letter is right.
I know you’re tired of the same old dress, I know the car’s been repossessed
I know this house is just a shack, but there’s this love we can’t hold back.
He’s satisfied, happy and grateful with what he has. I wish that for you, Sonny and Natalia, and for all of you readers out there and your kids, too. Again, that thing you’re chasing is not out there. It’s in your garage when you wrench on your car rather than sending it to a mechanic. It’s in your yard when you cut your own grass instead of hiring the Mexican t
o do it. It’s in your empty in-box at the end of the week when you’ve completed your work. It’s in your kids’ bedroom when you tuck them in for the night.
I’ve had this moment. It was in October 2011 and I was putting the kids to bed. I was kissing and hugging them after a spirited wrestling match and singing a song that always cracks them up. It’s sung to the tune of “Silent Night.”
Silent night, holy night
All is calm, all is bright
Round yon HAMBURGER mother and child
Holy HOT DOG so tender and mild
I change up the food every time and it always kills Sonny. He probably laughs harder at this than you have at any line in this book.
It occurred to me that I could have easily not done this. When it came to having kids, I thought, “I’m old enough, I’ve got a pretty good thing going here. Why mess with it?” And the message I got from my parents was that there was no upside to being a parent. I was a burden to them, why wouldn’t my own progeny be a pain in the ass, too? Had I listened to that retarded inner voice, I would have not had you two in my life, Sonny and Natalia. I would be a completely different person with a completely different purpose. I feel a little like a born-again Christian who, once he sees the light, looks back on all the years before like it was someone else living them. If I hadn’t gotten past myself and past my shitty upbringing, my life wouldn’t be nearly as fulfilling as it is today.
Being a parent is the greatest success. It’s the ultimate in long-term thinking. When you’re wiping poo-poo and not getting any sleep, you want to kill yourself, but the pride you feel when that kid does something right and shows you that you did your job well, when they have kids of their own and become good parents themselves, that’s the payoff. There’s no way to look that far down the road, but that’s when you feel satisfied. And when you do sense that satisfaction, take a beat and be grateful you could.