Money

Since 2011, each Black Friday, that secular feast-day of money when people physically fight with each other in stores to buy things cheaply, you can buy a book called The Cold Hard Truth on Men, Women, and Money. This is Kevin O’Leary’s first book — yes, that Kevin O’Leary, famous investment guru and star of Shark Tank. Kevin’s longstanding views on the importance of money are no secret:

Working 24 hours a day isn’t enough anymore. You have to be willing to sacrifice everything to be successful, including your personal life, your family life, maybe more. If people think it’s any less, they’re wrong, and they will fail.” Kevin O’Leary

To make money, Kevin is willing to be fierce:

Business is war. I go out there, I want to kill the competitors. I want to make their lives miserable. I want to steal their market share. I want them to fear me and I want everyone on my team thinking we’re going to win. Kevin O’Leary

I’m not trying to make friends, I’m just trying to make money. Kevin O’Leary

But why?

You may lose your wife, you may lose your dog, your mother may hate you. None of those things matter. What matters is that you achieve success and become free. Then you can do whatever you like. Kevin O’Leary

But Kevin himself knows that money is not forever:

When I turned 50, something clicked in my head and I said, ‘I’m not going to live to 100. I’m half-cooked already.’ I set the family down and I said, ‘Listen everybody, we’re now entering the decade of Daddy. We’re going to start doing things that I want to do.’ Kevin O’Leary

Jesus puts his finger on the real problem:

….this night your life will be demanded of you; and the things you have prepared, to whom will they belong?” Luke 12:20

Instead of sacrificing friendship for money, Jesus tells us it should be the other way around:

I tell you, make friends for yourselves with dishonest wealth, so that when it fails you will be welcomed into eternal dwellings. Luke 16:9

Jesus’ advice is very different than Kevin’s:

Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and decay destroy, and thieves break in and steal. But store up treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor decay destroys, nor thieves break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there also will your heart be. Matthew 6:19-21

Kevin O’Leary’s “decade of Daddy”, when he does what he wants with his money, is not going to last, and he knows it. So why work for money at the expense of all else? Let us take Jesus’ advice rather than Kevin’s: Jesus will not make us rich, but he will make us good, and in the end, the treasure he gives will last forever, the gift of eternal life.