In November 2015, I booked a suite in a midtown Manhattan hotel and spent the night pacing, rehearsing my presentation in an empty room. The next morning I would host the first breakfast workshop for my new wealth advisory firm. I had left a prominent position as a director of wealth management at Morgan Stanley to build a company based on a radically different idea of wealth.
My guests included a senior partner at a private equity firm managing more than $10 billion and the head of a major firm’s wealth management division. I was about to tell them, “You’re chasing the wrong prize.” I was worried: What if they laughed when I said words like “heartfelt” and “holistic”?
But I couldn’t help myself. For years I’d privately suspected I was climbing the wrong mountain, and I’d realized it wasn’t just me.
The Wrong Measures of Success
Working on Wall Street had become an object lesson in the drawbacks of ceaseless competition. I loved my job, but there was no denying that it was an industry built on the glorification of money, privilege, and power. In finance, relentless pursuit—of richer clients, bigger accounts, and fatter fees—was a given, whatever the personal cost.
It isn’t just finance. Modern life trains all of us to pour most of our energy into our careers, even when the payoff is anxiety, exhaustion, and a nagging sense that something essential is missing. We’re overinvested in a faulty vision of success that pushes us constantly toward achievement, often at the cost of our health, our emotional well-being, and our relationships.
Despite our best intentions, so many of us are climbing the wrong mountain.
Here’s the problem. When net worth, title, and achievement are your only gauges, they can only tell you how high you’ve climbed. They can’t tell you whether you’re on the right mountain—the one that’s right for you.
I’ve learned the hard way that there is no way to win this game. There is only constant striving. The only way to “win” is to change the game completely, which means redefining wealth.
A New Definition of Wealth
Merriam-Webster defines wealth as an abundance of material possessions or resources. But the word comes from the Old English weal, meaning welfare or well-being. Somewhere along the way, we traded well-being for accumulation, and we’ve paid the price.
What I hadn’t yet realized was that I was yearning for a broader, more inclusive definition of success and wealth. My philosophical and spiritual studies pointed me to the fact that there was so much more than the limited definition I’d unconsciously adopted. Everything clicked when I read the work of Ken Wilber, whose Integral theory reveals how seemingly unrelated parts of life fit together as one vital whole. For the first time, I could see that well-being isn’t something you chase at the expense of everything else.
A Better Map for the Right Mountain
Guided by that vision, I had created a simple map that identifies four primary sources of wealth that comprise a truly rich life, which I now call The Four Quadrants of True Wealth, including:
- Mind-Body Awareness: emotions, spirituality, and inner exploration
- Work & Wealth Abundance: professional success and building net worth
- Heartfelt Community Connection: community and rich relationships
- Lifelong Learning: insight into how the world works
Most of us are well versed in one or two of these and neglect the others. That imbalance leaves us with a gnawing, ill-defined sense that something is out of whack.
After breakfast that morning at the hotel, I ushered the group into a room with a circle of chairs for the remainder of the workshop. Then I asked everyone to imagine the room divided into the four quadrants and posed a question all of us would do well to ask: Of these four dimensions of your life, where do you spend most of your time?
I invited them to walk to that corner. All eight crowded into the same one. We laughed at the sight of everyone sardined together in Work & Wealth Abundance.
Then I asked a second question: If you didn’t have to worry about money or resources, where would you like to spend your time?
The pack scattered across all four quadrants. An intellectual, Ivy League-educated investment banker headed for Lifelong Learning. Another guest, a lovable man with loads of friends and a wonderful family, walked to Mind-Body Awareness and admitted, “Honestly, Matt, I have no idea what my feelings even are!”
I would have gone to Heartfelt Community Connection. Work and inner life were strengths by then, but I’d grown lonely pursuing both.
By exploring different forms of wealth that morning, each of us found areas where we felt surprisingly poor. The room’s energy shifted, with more openness, warmth, and trust than we were used to in our business lives. Jennie Liang, a marketing consultant who was there, recalls: “Everyone arrived in suits looking very professional, but vulnerability took over. Heading back to work, it felt like putting my armor back on.”
The Four Quadrants of True Wealth: Try It Yourself
The Four Quadrants of True Wealth is a self-diagnostic tool that lets you easily see how to create balance in your life. Ask yourself the same two questions:
- Where do I spend most of my time?
- If money weren’t a worry, where would I want to spend it?
Once you see what’s missing, you can’t unsee it. Small changes in one or two neglected quadrants can bring disproportionately large benefits. This is not about juggling more. It’s about widening your perspective so you can make more skillful choices and move from constantly striving for achievement to finding fulfillment. That’s how you find the right mountain: not the one you were told to climb, but the one that’s truly yours.
Reprinted by permission of Partners Media. Excerpted/adapted from THE RIGHT MOUNTAIN: Practical Wisdom for Achieving True Wealth (with Kristin Kaye; Partners Media). Copyright 2026. All rights reserved.
