I SPENT MY COLLEGE years working as a valet at a nice ho- tel in Los Angeles.
One frequent guest was a technology executive. He was a genius, having designed and patented a key component in Wi-Fi routers in his 20s. He had started and sold several com- panies. He was wildly successful.
He also had a relationship with money I'd describe as a mix of insecurity and childish stupidity.
He carried a stack of hundred dollar bills several inches thick. He showed it to everyone who wanted to see it and many who didn't. He bragged openly and loudly about his wealth, often while drunk and always apropos of nothing.
One day he handed one of my colleagues several thousand dollars of cash and said, “Go to the jewelry store down the street and get me a few $1,000 gold coins."
An hour later, gold coins in hand, the tech executive and his buddies gathered around by a dock overlooking the Pacific Ocean. They then proceeded to throw the coins into the sea, skipping them like rocks, cackling as they argued whose went furthest. Just for fun.
Days later he shattered a lamp in the hotel's restaurant. A manager told him it was a $500 lamp and he'd have to re- place it.
"You want five hundred dollars?" the executive asked in- credulously, while pulling a brick of cash from his pocket and handing it to the manager. "Here's five thousand dollars. Now get out of my face. And don't ever insult me like that again."
You may wonder how long this behavior could last, and the answer was "not long." I learned years later that he went broke.
The premise of this book is that doing well with money has a little to do with how smart you are and a lot to do with how you behave. And behavior is hard to teach, even to re- ally smart people.
A genius who loses control of their emotions can be a fi- nancial disaster. The opposite is also true. Ordinary folks with no financial education can be wealthy if they have a handful of behavioral skills that have nothing to do with for- mal measures of intelligence.
