Something of an insight came to me recently.
Like a splinter, I don’t know exactly where it came from… and the idea isn’t fully formed in my mind. It’s just kind of there – poking at me.
So if you’ll permit me, I’d like to explore this idea with you today. But what follows may meander quite a bit more than our usual missives.
The insight is this…
We all are blessed with the energy we need to live. That energy affords us time on this Earth. They are gifts – time and energy. We can’t truly explain them.
What we choose to focus our time and energy on is what will define our values and ultimately our lives.
It’s a simple thing. But if we think about it… it’s quite profound.
Just reflecting on my own life, it’s become clear to me that I largely wasted my first 30 years here. That bothers me.
But I also understand that it wasn’t completely my fault. I didn’t know any better. The institutions of this world led me to believe that my purpose was to be a little cog in their wheel.
And you know what, being a cog did help me build a financial foundation for myself and my future family. That’s worth something.
But I didn’t live purposefully. I didn’t have the mindset that I was the “captain of my fate and master of my soul”, as William Ernest Henley once put it.
This is the only reason why I care about money and finance.
Money is just a tool. It allows us to store our economic energy for later use. And if we are purposeful, we can direct that energy towards projects that we deem important.
That’s what I care about. Since I’m blessed with this time and this energy, I feel like I should use them constructively.
This is what prompted me to create the investment membership I sent you so many emails about last week.
We have a battle-hardened system for helping people get their money and their investments right. And we help our members build extra monthly income streams as well. That increases their economic energy… which they can later use for purposes important to them.
This is why free-market capitalism is the only moral economic system. Because it’s the only system that allows people to build economic energy and then freely choose how they will use that energy.
With socialism, it’s the State that chooses how all your economic energy will be used. With crony capitalism (what we have today), the State chooses how a portion of your economic energy will be used.
I got a kick out of Argentina’s new president Javier Milei trying to explain this concept to the control freaks at the World Economic Forum (WEF) last week. And I saw this dynamic at work first-hand with a project our non-profit foundation just completed in Uganda.
Many households throughout Uganda still lack electricity and running water. That’s especially true outside of the capital city of Kampala.
How is that possible in our high-tech world today?
It’s all because overt corruption in Uganda prevents people from creating and storing their economic energy. As such, there’s no incentive for anyone to build out modern infrastructure outside of the capital city. Most people can’t afford to pay for it.
That’s where our non-profit organization came in.
We decided to focus our time and energy on building a water collection and distribution system to serve two remote villages in Uganda. Previously the villagers were walking about a mile to the nearest natural spring twice a day to get water for daily use.
And I’m happy to say that we just financed the final phase of construction right before Christmas.
If I may, I’d like to share with you the project’s full status report this week. Then we’ll get back on the money and finance beat next week.
And if you’re interested in keeping up with what we’re doing on the non-profit side, our organization is called Foundation for Human Civilization. You can find the site and sign up for the email list here: https://f4hc.org/
Fair warning, there’s nothing fancy about our website. We run the non-profit on a volunteer basis and we pay all expenses personally. That way 100% of our donations can go towards the projects we commit to.
More on our first project tomorrow…
-Joe Withrow