The Most Philanthropic Thing You Can Do Is Get Rich

Why building wealth can give you the capacity to do more good.

There is a sentence I came across recently that made me stop and think:

The most philanthropic thing you can do is get rich.

At first, I wasn't sure what to make of it. We tend to think of philanthropy as something that happens after generosity has already been established: you give your time, your money, your resources, or your influence to help someone else. Getting rich, on the other hand, can sound almost antithetical to that idea. It conjures images of accumulation, consumption, and the pursuit of more for the sake of more.

But the more I thought about the statement, the more I understood the argument behind it.

It isn't that wealth makes someone inherently generous, or that becoming rich is somehow a moral achievement. It certainly isn't a suggestion that people without wealth cannot be generous. Some of the most generous people in the world have very little in the traditional sense. They give their time, their energy, their homes, their skills, and whatever resources they do have. Generosity has never belonged exclusively to people with money.

The argument is really about capacity.

There are things you can do when you have resources that you simply cannot do when you don't. Money does not make you a better person, but it can give you a much greater ability to act on what you value.

And I think that distinction is worth sitting with.

Hard work matters, but hard work alone doesn't create wealth

We have a complicated relationship with the idea of wealth.

On one hand, we are often told that hard work is the path to financial success. Work hard, be disciplined, stay focused, keep showing up, and eventually you will get ahead. On the other hand, many of us understand intuitively that the equation is not quite that simple.

Hard work matters enormously, but it is not a guarantee of wealth.

There are people who work incredibly hard their entire lives and never accumulate significant wealth. There are also wealthy people whose financial position has had as much to do with inheritance, access, connections, timing, geography, family circumstances, or luck as it has with their own effort. And there are people who work extraordinarily hard while simultaneously developing valuable skills, taking calculated risks, building businesses, investing, creating assets, and benefiting from opportunities that allow their effort to compound.

Wealth is rarely the result of one variable.

I think it is important to acknowledge this because conversations about wealth can become overly simplistic in either direction. We should not pretend that anyone can simply work hard enough to become rich, because that isn't true. But we also shouldn't go so far in the other direction that we begin treating wealth creation itself as inherently suspect.

There is nothing inherently virtuous about struggling financially, just as there is nothing inherently virtuous about being wealthy.

Money is a resource.

What matters, in large part, is what you do with it.

What if getting rich is about creating capacity?

This is where the idea becomes much more interesting to me.

I don't particularly care about the idea of getting rich if the goal is simply to accumulate more things. There is nothing wrong with enjoying beautiful things or wanting a comfortable life, but if the only purpose of wealth is to continually increase your consumption, I don't think that is a particularly compelling reason to spend decades pursuing it.

What interests me is what happens when wealth becomes a means rather than an end.

Financial resources can give you choices that are otherwise unavailable. They can allow you to leave a situation that is no longer healthy or sustainable. They can give you the ability to take a risk, start a business, change careers, take time away from work, or pursue an opportunity without knowing exactly how it will pay off.

They can allow you to help your parents when they need it, contribute to your child's education, support a friend going through a difficult season, or give generously to a cause that matters to you without putting your own household in jeopardy.

They can allow you to invest in someone else's idea, create jobs, fund scholarships, support organizations doing important work, or provide opportunities to people who may not otherwise have access to them.

This is the part of wealth that I find much more compelling than the traditional conversation about luxury.

Wealth expands your ability to participate.

When you have enough financial margin, your resources no longer have to be devoted entirely to keeping your own life afloat. Some of them can extend outward.

And that changes what is possible.

You can't give what you don't have

Of course, I don't mean this literally. You don't need money to give something of yourself to another person.

You can mentor someone without being wealthy. You can volunteer. You can share your knowledge. You can make an introduction. You can cook dinner for a friend. You can sit beside someone who is hurting. You can encourage someone who has almost given up.

Those things matter enormously.

But there are also problems that require resources to solve.

You can volunteer at a school, but you can also fund a scholarship. You can support a small business by becoming a customer, but you can also invest in that business and potentially help it hire employees. You can donate what you can when you have extra money, but having significant financial capacity means you can potentially fund something on a scale that would have been impossible before.

Neither form of generosity makes the other less meaningful. They simply operate at different levels of capacity.

That is why I have never found the argument that "money isn't everything" particularly useful when it is used to dismiss the importance of financial security. Of course money isn't everything. But pretending that money doesn't matter is just as unhelpful as believing it is the only thing that matters.

Money matters because it can solve certain problems.

Money matters because it can create options.

Money matters because it can buy time.

And money matters because, once you have enough of it, some of what you have can become useful to people beyond yourself.

There is nothing wrong with wanting more

I sometimes think ambitious people have been taught to apologize for wanting financial success.

We are comfortable saying that we want to help people, make an impact, build something meaningful, or leave a legacy. But saying, I want to become wealthy, can suddenly feel like something that requires an explanation.

Maybe it shouldn't.

Wanting financial security is not greed. Wanting to build wealth is not automatically materialism. Wanting your work to produce a significant financial return does not mean you care only about money.

In fact, I think there is something empowering about being honest about the role you want money to play in your life.

Maybe you want enough money that your children have opportunities you didn't have.

Maybe you want to be able to care for aging parents.

Maybe you want the freedom to work less someday.

Maybe you want to fund a nonprofit.

Maybe you want to invest in other entrepreneurs.

Maybe you want to create jobs.

Maybe you simply want to stop making every financial decision from a place of fear.

All of those are legitimate reasons to want more.

The question is not whether you want wealth.

The more interesting question is what you intend to do with the capacity it gives you.

Wealth can change the scale of your generosity

One of the things we sometimes overlook in conversations about philanthropy is that generosity becomes easier to scale when resources increase.

A person making $50,000 a year may genuinely want to give $5,000 to a cause they care about, but doing so could mean sacrificing something important in their own household. Someone with significant wealth may be able to give that same amount without feeling the impact in quite the same way.

That doesn't make the second person's generosity more virtuous. It simply means their financial circumstances give them a different capacity to give.

And perhaps that is why I find the idea of building wealth as a form of philanthropy so compelling.

What if instead of thinking, How much can I afford to give right now? we occasionally thought about, How much capacity could I build over the course of my life?

That is a very different question.

It moves the conversation away from guilt and toward creation.

Instead of feeling guilty about wanting to make more money, you begin thinking about what greater financial capacity could allow you to do.

Instead of viewing wealth as the reward at the end of your career, you begin seeing it as a tool you can use along the way.

But wealth is only useful if you know what "enough" means

There is an important caveat here.

If getting rich becomes the entire objective, there is a very real possibility that you will never feel rich.

There will always be another number to reach, another house to buy, another investment to make, another milestone to achieve, another person to compare yourself to. The finish line keeps moving because the goal was never actually defined.

That is the trap of accumulation without intention.

I don't think the answer is to stop wanting more. I think the answer is to become more thoughtful about why you want it.

What does enough look like for you?

What kind of life are you trying to create?

What would financial freedom allow you to do that you cannot do now?

Who would benefit if you had more resources?

What would you fund?

Who would you help?

What would you be able to walk away from?

What would you finally have the freedom to pursue?

Those questions make the pursuit of wealth much more interesting because they force you to connect money to something beyond consumption.

Build wealth, but make it mean something

I don't think we should romanticize scarcity.

Having less does not automatically make someone more virtuous, more grateful, or more generous. Financial struggle can build resilience, but it can also create stress, limit opportunity, and force people to spend enormous amounts of energy simply trying to stay afloat.

If you have the ability to build wealth, I don't think you should feel guilty about doing so.

Build the career.

Build the business.

Learn how to invest.

Create assets.

Develop expertise that people are willing to pay for.

Find ways to make your income less dependent on the number of hours you personally work.

Create something valuable enough that it can grow beyond you.

And as that capacity grows, let your definition of wealth grow with it.

Because perhaps the most interesting question about becoming rich isn't how much you can accumulate.

It is what becomes possible because you accumulated it.

Can you create opportunities for other people?

Can you give without fear?

Can you support your family without sacrificing yourself?

Can you invest in something you believe should exist?

Can you create jobs?

Can you fund education?

Can you make someone's difficult season a little easier?

Can you use your resources to solve a problem that matters to you?

That, to me, is where wealth becomes genuinely interesting.

Not when it allows you to buy more things, but when it gives you the capacity to do more of what matters.

Maybe that is the real argument behind the provocative statement that started this whole thought:

The most philanthropic thing you can do may, in fact, be to get rich.

Not because wealth makes you better.

Not because everyone should want the same version of success.

And certainly not because money is the measure of a meaningful life.

But because when you have enough, your ability to help is no longer limited entirely by what you can spare.

You have capacity.

And capacity gives you choices.

Perhaps the goal, then, isn't simply to become wealthy.

Perhaps the goal is to become wealthy enough that what you have can extend beyond you.

That is a version of getting rich I can get behind.