F-U Money at the Caballo Blanco
An original blog by Ray Brimble, posted September, 21, 2018
During the summer of 1982, I had the good fortune of doing a project in El Puerto de Santa María, a wonderfully shabby port city in the south of Spain, best known as the disembarkation point for Christopher Columbus on his way to the New World.
Evenings spent lazing around the pool at the Hotel Caballo Blanco, snacking on green olives and drinking dry Jerez sherry out of small glasses, yielded excellent trash talk. One such topic has stuck with me all of these years: “F- you money.”
The question is, “how much money is F-U money to you?” I hesitate to define the question—part of it’s charm is it’s ambiguity. Nevertheless, it should be obvious that at least part of the ask is about how much money you think you need not just to get by, but to defiantly do what the hell you want.
I have asked this interesting question to dozens of people of the 30+ years since I first heard it. Predictably, the answers wildly vary, as does the diversity of the people who have graced me with their replies. The first guy who answered the question for me, at the Caballo Blanca in Spain, gave the smallest number I ever heard: $200,000.
Amazingly, I don’t recall anyone not giving me a number. Everybody seems to have a number. The F-U number may be more of a window into your soul than into your pocketbook.
Imagine the question is, “How much can you eat at that buffet? What if people answered, “more than I could even digest. I will eat everything I can see, imagine, stuff into my mouth, carry away in my pockets.” Most people don’t envision buffets like that unless they are gluttons—or starving. Yet answers to the F-U question are consistently along these lines.
You should never feel guilty for being ambitious, but you must remember that there is always a price to pay. I recently posed the question to two very sharp and ambitious young entrepreneurs who had just launched their businesses. I believe in both of them and have invested in their firms. However, I was shocked at how high their F-U number was—well beyond any amount they would ever need to live on. So, what was their need? It seems to me it was about having something to prove. There is absolutely nothing wrong with a slight chip on one’s shoulder. I have lived with a pretty good-sized one on mine for all of my life. However, these chips should serve, not counterweigh. Shoulder chips work well as motivation, not revenge Finding the right F-U number is finding the balance between.
Back at the Caballo Blanco, I ridiculed my friend because I felt that his reply was too modest—who could ever settle for $200,000, when the question implies that the sky is the limit? Yet over the years I have realized that he was answering the question differently than most who have come forward since. His reply was to the question “what do I think I need,” versus “what do I want,” or what “would satisfy my ego.”
Nevertheless, answering the question as an expression of need may be as much of a stretch as answering it as an expression of revenge. The question gets to the heart of things because it helps us to understand that our paths are often the result of the balance of our expectations, including our fears and our desires. More of one, and less of another is not always helpful. Balancing expectations is.
We are more than the sum of the parts of our psyche which might bubble up with a question such as F-U money. Then again, we end up getting what we think we are supposed to get, not what we fear, deserve, or even aspire to. The object of the game is to find a happy medium between our survival urges, our pipe dreams, and the price of admission for everything in between.
This is the window to your soul I was talking about.