He arrived on a rainy Saturday afternoon in a beat-up old car, to give me a quote for painting my house. He looked like a painter, dressed in stained clothes, with hands that had seen a lifetime of hard work. His wife was with him, holding a pad of paper to take notes about the job. They were extremely pleasant and gave us a fair and reasonable price, so I hired them. Later that night, when I was talking to my husband about meeting “Peter,” he told me the most amazing thing:
Peter is a millionaire. A millionaire who just really loves to paint houses.
You wouldn’t know it by looking at him, and he definitely wouldn’t tell you. He is a humble man, simply doing what he loves – and that’s painting houses.
I’ve always been very comfortable financially, whether I had $1 in my wallet or $100. But that isn’t to say I don’t have fun dreaming every now and again. Dreaming of hiring a nanny to help with the kids, or paying someone to come and clean my house. I dream of vacation homes in Baja, or flying to Paris for a weekend. My life doesn’t feel any less without these things, but what would actually happen if my daydreams CAME TRUE? If I woke up one morning to find millions of dollars in my bank account?
For most of us this will never happen, and probably for good reason. The statistics of lotto winners’ lives aren’t pretty.
Why? Because overnight millionaires actually pick up and DO all of the pipe dreams they thought of their entire lives. They get a nanny, a housekeeper, and travel the world. Or they buy a million pairs of shoes, then obviously need to buy a new house just to hold all of our new shoes. Heck – if I had that money, I might even make my own rap video … just because. We would do ridiculous things, that would turn us into people we were never intended to be. And we would wind up miserable, losing ourselves in the process.
But Peter DID get the dream. He woke up a few years ago having inherited millions. And what did he do? He picked up his paint brushes, got in his old car, and went back to work.
Peter is my hero.
He taught me that it doesn’t matter if you make minimum wage, or have a six-figure salary. If you are doing what you love, what you feel passionate about, and are called to do with your life … well, that’s all the really matters. He taught me not to judge based on appearances. This man, who I thought I was “blessing” before the holidays by providing him with work — it turns out, he is blessing me.
He teaches us that all of the money in the world doesn’t matter, if you aren’t a kind and decent human being. And he teaches us that stuff is just … stuff. It doesn’t matter if you drive a Rolls Royce or a beat up Chevy, so long as you can get to where you need to go.
I think we can all learn a few things from Peter. Not that we will ever get the chance to ask him, because he’d deny it up and down, ever so humbly.