The Price of Money, Part Two

After all, I hadn’t spent more than ten years in this damn business for nothing! I knew about loans and credit reports and debt and stocks and real estate and banking. I knew plenty! In addition to that, I’d managed to single-handedly destroy my own credit and then rebuild it, so I had the experience I needed to teach these things intelligently! 

I was indignant.

He looked at me across the table incredulously. “Have you ever had to live on a dollar a day?” he demanded to know.

I paused. I sucked in a deep breath and held onto it for a minute. 

I had not a single thing in my experience with which to respond to this question. No, I had not lived on a dollar a day. Even when I was being an irresponsible slacker, spending a few nights on the couch of each of my friends in clever and calculated rotation, I knew that if I was ever hungry, despite the fact that I’d drank all of my money up, my parents would always send me cash for food, if I’d humbled myself enough to ask. I had absolutely no idea what it was like to sleep under a bridge or actually worry about where my next meal was coming from. 

In what seemed like half an hour, but was really only about ten seconds, I gradually came to let go. My ego, my pride and every lesson plan, worksheet, and exercise that I had spent hours preparing for this moment fell away into a pathetic heap at the foot of this young kid whose life experiences and suffering now seemed so large compared to my own small and coddled existence. I realized that none of it mattered. This wasn’t a corporate workshop or a seminar, of which I had given plenty in my business life. This wasn’t some picturesque snapshot of my suburban high school, where the biggest problem was finding a place to smoke half a cigarette without getting caught. This was real. Real kids, real suffering, and a real and desperate need for help. 

My company’s mission is to provide the financial skills required to empower people who are actively seeking to improve their lives. By definition, the child that sat before me was seeking to improve his life. He was in the job center of an agency who had told him they could help him, and I had told him the same. It was my job (and still is my job), to ensure that I gave him what he needed, and right at that moment he needed me to be real.

I shook my head slowly. “Nope. I never have. That’s quite a skill. Do you do that?”

He nodded.

“Well,” I said, “I bet you could teach me a thing or two.”

He nodded again, this time more vigorously, and straightened up in his seat with a proud and satisfied grin. “Yep. I bet I could.”

I nodded my head in a gesture of approval, acknowledgment, and genuine respect.