What is money? If I do something for you, you owe me something. Let's call it an IOU (I owe you). That's how we can share skills and services. If you have money, you can, for example, buy services and skills. It's the thing that guarantees something else in the future. We can transfer these IOU's around. Money is a way to transfer wealth.

And what is wealth? Wealth is a bunch of assets that earn money while you sleep.

Examples: the factory that produces at night, the software that runs while you sleep, a webshop, a house you rent out, investments in stocks.

Wealth buys your freedom. When you have ownership of assets that make you money, you can wake up and sleep when you want. Not when you have to because of someone else. Having wealth is not about acting like a rich person and buying things rich people tend to show off with. That is status.

Status and status-games

Status is a very old game you would like to avoid playing. Status is your ranking in the social hierarchy. There are winners and losers. In the hunter and gatherers time, status would equal high power and survival. Wealth did not exist. Examples of current time are politics and sports.

To win with status, you have to put someone else down. This means that adding all scores would end up in zero. Thus status is a sum-zero game.

Wealth creation

With wealth creation, everyone can become wealthy. If someone has a house, it doesn't take away the ability for you to have a house. Actually, the more houses we have, the easier (and thus cheaper) it will be to create new houses.

Wealth, therefore, is a positive-sum game for society.

This doesn't mean that the wealth-game has no competition. Others will try to steal your ideas or copy your products. But if you create value for society and can stand out, society will reward you immensely.

People creating wealth will always be attacked by people playing status games

Naval