Your net worth settles at your financial IQ
This is the least comfortable idea on this site and I think it is the most important one.
"You have to constantly boost your family office IQ, your business IQ, for multiple reasons. If you don't, your net worth will come down to wherever your financial IQ is. After you make a lot of money, you might have a high income and then you're overpaying for things all around you. You might have an exit and then you lose it from two bad investments."
Net worth is not a level you reach. It is a level you can hold.
A liquidity event moves the number instantly. It does not move your ability to evaluate what happens to the number next. And the gap between those two things is where the money goes, usually quietly and usually within five years.
The two ways it leaks, and neither one feels like a mistake
The slow way: you overpay for everything around you. Once there is real money, every service provider you touch prices to the balance sheet rather than the work. Nobody defrauds you. You just pay 40% more than the work costs, across a dozen relationships, for a decade. It never shows up as a loss anywhere, which is exactly why it runs so long.
The fast way: two bad investments. Not twenty. Two. After a sale, the checks are larger and the sample is smaller and the flow is worse than it was when you were operating. Two of those in the first three years takes a number down in a way that twenty years of operating never did.
The part that argues for playing offense, not just defense
"If there's a hockey puck flying by 70 miles an hour in front of your face, you need to know how to catch that without breaking your fingers and then create an opportunity out of that. And if you don't have the strategy, the deal structure, the method to do that, then you won't be able to. Even if you're off balance and you're busy doing something else, if something happens and you notice that that is a pattern in front of you that equals opportunity, then that is something you just have to run with."
Opportunities do not arrive when you are ready for them. They arrive at 70 miles an hour while you are busy with something else, and you get one motion to either catch it or break your fingers.
What decides which one happens is whether you already knew the structure. Not whether you are smart, and not whether you are diligent. Whether the method was already in your hands before the thing came at you.
Somebody calls and says their partner wants out and they need an answer in nine days. If you already understand seller financing, a royalty, a minority recap, and what a personal guarantee actually does to you, you have a real conversation in nine days. If you have to learn all four while the clock runs, you pass on it, and passing feels like prudence.
Most of what looks like bad luck in this category is actually just unfamiliar structure arriving on a short timeline.
What raising it actually looks like
It is unglamorous. It is being in rooms where people describe deals that already closed, including the parts that did not work. It is learning six or seven structures well enough to sketch them on a napkin. It is knowing what questions your own CPA cannot answer.
And it is a fixable gap, which is the good news buried in an uncomfortable idea. It is not talent. Nobody is born knowing what a working capital peg is.