What does it truly mean to live a ‘rich life’? In this compelling episode of Healing Wounds of Wealth, we sit down with Aaron Scott Young, CEO of Laughlin Associates. Aaron’s path is far from the typical CEO profile—it is a raw, transformative journey of building businesses, facing unforeseen legal battles, and ultimately finding purpose and perspective in the unlikeliest of places.
From learning to lead with humility to redefining success beyond the balance sheet, Aaron shares his hard-earned wisdom on resilience, overcoming impossible odds, and the true meaning of an ‘elder’ in the entrepreneurial world. Join us for a deeply touching conversation about integrity, the pursuit of positive impact, and why the most important lessons are often found in the most challenging chapters of our lives.
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Redefining Success: Entrepreneurship, Adversity, And Living A Rich Life With Aaron Scott Young
Welcome once again to the show. This episode is with Aaron Young, CEO of Laughlin Associates. It is a fascinating interview as he tells about an incredible journey of his life. Which includes the very hard choice to go to prison for no crime that he committed, what he learned, how he’s grown, how he’s changed and who he is now. Please stay tuned. It’s fascinating and touching. Thank you for joining.
Welcome, Aaron Young. Thank you very much for being with us. During the intro, I reviewed, “CEO Laughlin Associates.” I’ve got to ask. How did you come up with that name for starters?
Laughlin is the name of the founder. I was 29 years old when I bought it. They had already helped well over 100,000 companies by that point. Even though the name meant nothing to me, it seemed like I better keep it. Google or Yahoo, none of those meant anything to us either when we first heard them, but they became something.
Anyways, I just noticed the name. It sounds like laughing. I was like, “Is that an intention?” Thank you very much for being with us. I appreciate that we set this up. We’ve had a few chances to talk and drop in. I reviewed with you that the emphasis of our conversation is healing wounds of wealth. Are you living a rich life? You have your share of stories.
As far as a person on the journey of being an entrepreneur, being a CEO, and helping other people. By the way, I admire that the company obviously helps a lot of smaller companies and a lot of people. I did look at it and reviews are broad. It doesn’t assume people know anything. It introduces all of the bases. and a good view for helping people expand. It appears to me an orientation of doing good in the world.
Redefining Entrepreneurial Success Through Impact
Thank you for saying so. That’s our goal. When I turned 50, all my career, I’d had these ideas of, “I want to impact a million business owners.,” You have these big numeric goals and I got to 50. By then, we’d already done a lot. I thought, “Do you know what I want to do the rest of my life? I want to help as many companies stay in business for as many years as possible making as much money as possible.” I thought about whether they’re a one-person company or an enterprise company.
If they stay in business longer and make more money, they probably will hire more people or pay for better health insurance or sponsor a little league team or do something good. It didn’t matter how much I did anymore as long as it could roll down to help as many as possible. That made my life a lot happier. When I quit worrying about hitting some number and I started looking at the outcome instead of volume. Thank you for suggesting that. The whole goal of the companies that we own is to help people achieve the goals they’re trying to achieve.
Everyone benefits when we help people become better at what they do and empower them to make a lasting impact in their communities. Share on XI appreciate this conversation because from my point of view, that is the huge pivot point. Our society very much promotes making money for the purpose of making money. A lot of people get lost along the way. A lot of people, frankly, lose themselves along the way and end up doing or being something that they didn’t plan on doing or being or let themselves become something that they don’t admire and don’t want to be. It can get very sticky and very complicated. Putting your values, you say this specifically. I can’t imagine you didn’t have these things before 50, but something at 50 you chose to reorient your priorities about helping companies for the purpose of helping people do good in the world.
I knew it could be less about me and more about what I learned up to that point and moving it forward even if the receiver never even heard of me or will never ever hear me. It sounds like I’m some big fancy guy. I’ve done a lot of things. I’ve been making a payroll for 43 years now. I’ve been an employer for a long time in a lot of companies, both private and public. There’s a lot that’s happened and some of that we’ll talk about.
It all just boiled down to me. We need everybody in the system, but companies with less than 100 employees create 86.3% of all the jobs in the country and about 83% of GDP. It’s important that small businesses have all the help they can get to survive because they’re not going to get government bailouts, typically. They’re going to have to just slug it out. It takes a certain person to keep taking those risks. Since it’s risky, they get hurt sometimes. The more we can help them avoid the pain, the pitfalls, and the problems by sharing best practices in what we’ve learned along the path. That’s good for everybody. It’s good for the business owner, the employee, and the little convenience stores where they go and buy diet coke.
It’s good for everybody if we help people be better at what they’re doing and survive longer to do more in their community. That’s my attitude but as I said, there’s risks that come along and you referenced it. I’ve told you one story which maybe we’ll get into here, but there have been things all the way along that have been big challenges. The trick is, can you overcome them? If so, who are you on the other side of the problem? What do you choose to do? You choose to be cranky and conquered or you choose to go, “We can do something with this information.”
All of the above. By the way, I got a comment. The way you’re talking, from my point of view, listening to you speaking like an elder.
Look at all the great hair.
You’ve earned it. I know that. A lot of people can get to 62 and beyond and not be owned and step into the position of being an elder. The position of being someone who has a calm, cool overview and is helping others. That’s part of the magic of eldership at a certain point. You give it away. You want to help others. It’s not about promoting ourselves first anymore. It’s about seeing the whole picture. That’s what eldership is for people who step into it and you’re speaking that way.
I like to receive that and say thank you very much.
My pleasure. You’ve spoken about how you’ve had your share of challenges. There’s one that’s quite pronounced. Would you like to tell that story? I think the readers would benefit a lot and you have others as well.
Navigating Early Career Bankruptcy And Sudden Growth
This program is designed specifically to deal with the wounds that come along, I’ll just jump in. Through a series of events that I thought were fantastic. With my second company, I was early in the cellular phone business in 1986. By 1992 or late ‘91, the big carriers wanted to utterly change how they delivered cellular service to the community. In one meeting, they pulled the rug out from under us and everything changed. That’s not the story I want to tell, but I’m going to say I’d been entrepreneurial.
I’ve ripped the rug out. I’ve got five locations that all close down in one day. I struggled and I thought I could figure it out better than everybody else. I went through a bankruptcy with my wife nine months pregnant with our second child. That was a woundy thing, but what happened after that, now I’m like, “What do I do? I don’t have a college education.” I’ve started the first recycling company in this city. I was one of the first cellular phone guys with multiple stores.
I got invited to lunch by a guy who wanted to offer me a job. I subsequently took the job. It’s a company that has 350 offices around the world. It was a financial service and they hired me at 29 to be their Vice President of Sales. I thought what a rinky-dink company would hire a guy like me to be in charge of 350 offices. I’m 29. What are you guys thinking? It turned out to be a pretty cool company. Less than a year after I came on board, we went public on NASDAQ and I made a lot of money or at least, I accumulated a lot of wealth at that moment.
At 32, I was bored with it. I went to the CEO and said, “I want to give my notice.” He said, “If you give your notice, the founder is going to call you because he’s been watching your career.” I thought that was cool, because the founder guy was super cool. He’d written a lot of books. A world traveler, archaeological and stuff. He lived in this 12,000 square foot fabulous home on 88-acres. The guy seemed like a great example to me. Sure enough, the next day after I was finished with the vice president job. My one and only time I’ve been employed and all these years, I get a call from his assistant.
Two days after I quit or after I am done with my two weeks, I’m having lunch with the founder. He tells me that he has an offshore banking license, offshore insurance company license, trust company license but no clients, no employees. No nothing. Would I write a business plan for him? Which I did. Included foreign stuff and domestic stuff separately. He said, “If I put some money up, would you start the domestic side? If you can get it going, you run that. I’ll run the offshore and you feed me clients as appropriate,” which I did and it became successful.
We ended up with many dozens of law firms that were vetting clients. We would only take business from a lawyer. Not directly from the customer. I ended up with people. I had half a floor on the 26th floor of the tallest building in Oregon. I was very snazzy. I started watching the guy and I started getting uncomfortable with him. On the last day of 1999, we severed ties. We’d gone from ‘97 to ‘99. I said, “We’re done.” I got rid of anything related to offshore and all those lawyers. We had purchased the Nevada Incorporation Service by then.
It was doing well. I picked up 2 or 3 and then, anyway. All that was going on. I ended it here. I was focusing on domestic asset protection services. December 27th, 2002, three years after I’d cut that off, while I was here at this house, I got a call that the FBI and the IRS criminal enforcement are in my office in downtown Portland, the 26th floor. I got on the phone and I said, “Special Agent, what’s going on? Is this about me or my company or anything?” He said, “No, just anything to do with that guy and his company. You’re not a person of interest. There’s nothing for you to worry about. We do want to open your safe.”
This was not long after Y2K. We had about half a million dollars in Gold and Silver in the safe. I didn’t want somebody inventorying my Golds and Silver, so I said, “Can you give me two hours? I’ll come down and I’ll open the safe.” They said sure. I came down, did that, and they’re like, “Sit in your office. We’re going to go through everything. I’m sure this is freaky, scary, but it’ll be over soon.” Whatever. I’m doing that and then this very nice special agent comes in and says, “Mr. Young, this guy’s been so slick and so hard to pin down. Would you mind answering just a couple of simple questions?” I’m sure because I thought so, too. This is the moment.
It just says it when you should have called your lawyer.
I’m an Eagle scout. I grew up in the Mormon church. I was a Mormon missionary out there with my white shirt and my little badge. I’ve been married to the same woman for 39 years. I’ve never had problems and I thought I was doing the right thing. Anyway, they were inane questions, but then I called my lawyer after they left. He’s like, “You need a criminal defense lawyer. Did you talk to them?” I said, “Only for like two hours.” They’re like, “You got to do this.” got a criminal defense lawyer. He checks in and goes, “You’re not a person of interest. You’ll be fine.”
Four months later, he calls me and he says, “Don’t freak out. You’re not going to be arrested but you are being indicted on conspiracy. They say you either knew or should have known what this other fellow and his businesses were doing.” I said, “I never conspire or defraud the IRS. We never conspired. If anything, we were like sending out all this stuff to make sure everybody followed the rules.” They said, “Whatever. They think you conspired.” I said, “I never conspired.” This is interesting and your audience needs to know this. File this one away.
They said, “Conspiracy doesn’t mean you conspired. It just means you did something to materially assist. They know you don’t know of any crime, but they believe you materially assisted by gathering these packages and sending them off from the lawyers to the trust company.” I thought that’s the stupidest thing I ever heard. How can I be in trouble for something I didn’t know about that wasn’t illegal? Anyway, three and a half years and $2 million later, we got to the point that our lawyers told us at the beginning, which was, “You can’t win. The IRS convicts 99.3% of anybody at indictment. You have to mitigate the risk.” The sentencing guidelines for the alleged number was 12 to 15 years. I was 38 when it started.
With how many kids?
Four. Plus, we had another girl that had moved in when she was in 6th grade for two weeks, but she stayed for six years till we took her to college. We put on her wedding. We had five kids, anyway.
The Devastating Three Year Legal Battle And Plea
You were 32. You’re caring for your wife from five kids. By the way, to pick up a detail. You said three and a half years and $2 million later in litigation. Who’s $2 million was that? Who paid for the litigation? To be clear. It wasn’t the company right off. It wasn’t an insurance claim or something. Your money. You paid your lawyers $2 million over three and a half years and they come to you and say, “99.3% conviction rate.” You’re looking at 12 to 15 years with a wife and five kids.
I basically said, “I’ll do a plea bargain,” and they offered me seven years. This is my business partner, too, at the same time. We both were getting similar treatment but different charges but similar. I said I’m going to go to trial. Once we’d spent the money we had, the lawyers tried to get out of having to represent us. The judge said, “You’re in it for the long haul.” They got pretty pissed off and I said, “We’re going to go to trial.” This whole time I’ve been trying to avoid a trial. Now I know they can’t get out of it and I don’t have any more money so we’re going to have to play chicken with the government.
Nobody wants to go to trial. The judge, the prosecutor, and the defense lawyers, none of the want to prep for a trial, and I just said trial. Believe me, I’m shaking in my boots the whole time. I’m freaking out that my life is over, but that was the only plan I could come up with, just keep playing chicken. They offered 7 years, 6 years, 5 years, 4 years, then they said, “Three years is it. It’s the least we’re going to offer.” I said, “I’m not going to plead guilty to conspiracy because no matter what your definition is, anybody I know will think that I was plotting to help people cheat on their taxes. I’m not going to say that because I never did that.” They said, “You can plead guilty to anything you want as long as it has a 36-month charge.”
Who’s they, by the way?
The US attorney.
US attorney for the IRS.
The DOJ represents the Internal Revenue Service. Anyway, I found something. They didn’t think it would work because it was too thin, but the judge accepted it. I think grudgingly, he literally said, “Did you own that?” No. “Did you get a commission?” No. “Did you benefit in any way for what you’re pleading guilty for?” I said no. He said, “You want to plead guilty to that?” I said yes, and literally, the Chief Justice of the Federal Court in Portland, Oregon goes like this, “Okay.” He threw his hands up. It was so cliché.
Anyway, when we got sentencing, the judge reprimanded the IRS and the DOJ and said, “I’m trying to reconcile what these two men are accused of versus everything else in their life.” That’s in the public record. I’m not making that up. You can go read the transcripts. That’s what the judge said, “Trying to reconcile this. I’m going to go ahead and dispense the sentence.” They wanted to bring some witnesses to underscore the severity and he said, “I’ve already made up my mind what we’re going to do, but if you’d like to waste the court’s time, you can call your witness.” They were like, “Never mind,” because they got to see that judge again.
It was like, “You’re done. We’re done.” Off we went to prison. We’d agreed to 36 but he cut it down to eighteen and from five years’ probation to one year of what they call the Ministry of Probation. There was no restitution or fraud or anything involved. It’s just time. Eighteen months sentence means you serve 14 months and 1 week at the facility and then you have about five weeks of halfway house. The remaining time is just probation through your one year. That’s what I did. I went off to minimum security and had quite an interesting experience.
I met a lot of people. I heard a lot of stories of people up to that point who would have crossed the street to not walk past them. Pretty interesting scary looking people. What you find out in a circumstance like that when all the societal challenges are gone, people are people. People who have done dangerous or heavily drug-related or whatever things. They’re mostly just people who are either opportunists or have lived an awful life. A horrible life and this is where they ended up.
Finding Humility And Purpose Within The Prison System
As a matter of fact, I’ll taste something. People have asked me, “What was the biggest lesson you learned from being in prison?” I said, “The latter that we all climb to the success or accomplishment ladder we talk about? I was further up the ladder than pretty much anybody I met but I don’t know if I’d made as much progress on the ladder as some of the people I met.” I came from a happy family from parents who loved me, from being surrounded by extended family and friends and church.
I had it pretty good. I was born into low-income but high support circumstances. A lot of these people had been born into families that would just as soon burn them with a cigarette for not taking the garbage out as anything. It’s pretty ugly stuff. Anyway, we did that. If you want to ask me questions about that, I can because I’m just giving you the story arc.
I appreciate it and please continue. You’re getting into what lessons did you learn. I want to give you space for that.
One of the things I learned there was how to spot which gang somebody was from and what their drug of choice was. It took me a while coming back out to lose that focus because I would notice somebody in the grocery store line and go, “That’s a nortonia or that’s a peckerwood or that person’s on cocaine. That’s a meth person or that person drinks too much.” I became super aware of that in there to try to scan and figure out what was going on with people. That was one thing.
The people that I met, by and large, when you get them out of a gang situation out of a circumstance where they’re being held down in some way. If you get a criminal record, it’s hard to get an apartment. It’s hard to get a job. It’s hard to do a lot of things. The system doesn’t let people come out very easily and get their legs under them. They become a repeat offender or they go right back into it because they don’t have a choice a lot of times.
It may sound like I’m a bleeding heart. I’m not. I was always all for the death penalty. I was always for harsher sentencing, then I got in there. I thought, “I don’t know the hell I’m talking about.” I was clueless about these people because of the world I lived in. I talked to somebody one time and he said to me, “You don’t even live in the real world, Aaron.” I said, “I live in the real world. I just live in a different world than you do.” I look at the two of us. We’re both in very favorable circumstances here and we’re talking on a show when we’re talking about the wounds of wealth. I’m like, “You can very easily not understand the plight of people that are right a few blocks away from you.”
You get into prison and you find out these people mostly have had the crumbiest life I could ever imagine. Almost worse than I can imagine for some. I learned to listen to people’s stories. Figure out where they’re coming from. Not just how they’re acting at the moment. The best salesperson I ever hired in my whole career, came in with an ill-fitting suit with a chip on his shoulder. He was a house painter and I said, “Why do you want to go into business services of sales?” He said, “I don’t want to climb up that ladder anymore. I don’t want to be up there on that ladder in the heat or in the cold. I’m just so sick of it. I’ll do anything to change my life.”
A lot of these people that are in prison, they desperately want to change their life. One of the big things about release is, “Please don’t release me back to where you picked me up. Let me go to where I’ve got an uncle or something so I don’t go back where the gang members are going to pull me right back in.” It’s like a threatening thing. You will come back. Here’s another thing I learned. Even at minimum security, I stayed safe. I didn’t know any of this stuff. I looked at people and thought, “We’re all here together.” Not, “I’m better than you.” It’s, “I’m here too.” I had to mentally say, “This is my address now. My name is 67015.” That’s who I am here.
By doing so, I quit separating myself from the rest of the guys and I started figuring out what I can do here to be helpful. The first day I was at camp, they put me in as a GED tutor. I realized within the first day, many of these people can’t read. After a few weeks, I went to the woman in charge of education and I said, “Is it possible to give me a little corner somewhere away from everybody and you pick them or they can volunteer and I’ll teach these guys to read. They’ll never be able to progress in GED if they can’t read.”
About a week later, she said, “I worked it out. You’ve got the visiting room. You’ll have somebody every 30 minutes for what would be 30-90 minutes segments of the class time. You’ll have nine people a day and you’ll work with them till they pass a certain thing, then I’ll put somebody else in their spot. I did that for the rest of the time I was there. Talking about gratifying and about great. I could start telling you stories but I don’t know if we have time for all the stories.
The thing is, people given an opportunity, for the most part, not everybody but in my life experience. Somebody who doesn’t seem to fit the mold but has a want, has a drive and is given an opportunity to at least try tends to be pretty good at changing who they are. If we all grow up watching Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykroyd in Trading Places Dan. All of a sudden, the hustler on the street gets put into Wall Street and he’s wildly successful.
People who don't fit the mold—but have the drive and are given a chance—often surprise everyone, including themselves. Share on XLikewise, the guy who was the high-end, Dan Aykroyd, really spiraled.
He sure did.
I’m loving the passion that you have for your experience. I want to summarize. I’ll summarize and you say if I’m on point. Where I’m not, please help fill it in. You choose. You could have continued fighting the IRS. In your word view of yourself and the hierarchy of reality and everything, you had nothing to go to prison about. You had nothing to hide. You did nothing wrong. Yet, there you were in this quagmire. As you said, $2 million and three and a half years later, you made a choice, “I’m going to cut the bleeding. I’m going to serve time and put this behind me and move on.”
First, let’s pause with that, because you’re so accustomed to it. For the readers, somebody’s going, “Holy Crap.” A man with five children or a wife with five children. It comes down to fourteen months plus and you choose that knowing that you have a life. It’s a choice. You have a life in front of you. Whatever you were thinking at that age, early 30s or mid-30s at that point, “What am I going to do? How do I get out?” You were self-employed and all the rest, but what a complicated formula. Being with that, that is not an average day at work.
I’ve spoken to people who faced bankruptcy. The early part of your story was that the rug was pulled at you. You were your own man. The rug was pulled out from underneath you and you spun it very quickly. You flip that script very quickly into something of finding your balance, finding your new direction. That’s a wound. That’s hard. You build it. You’re young, and then you go forward. “What company would hire me?” It sounds like Groucho Marx.
I wouldn’t want to be a member of any club that would have me.
I said that to a client once. He was living that for real. Anyways, going forward into choosing the prison thing. Now, you’re sharing because it opens up all the passion for you. There’s a couple different things that I want to name. One is it taught you a very different world view than the one you had. It taught you humility with that. With being exposed to that different worldview, you realized the privileges that you had were not specifically financial. You said you didn’t grow up like this.
Dad worked two jobs. Mom did daycare at home. I had to learn how to make money young if I was going to have anything. I was the oldest of five. I had to get clever quickly.
You were high on support, high on love and high on values and spirituality. People were there for you and you’d show up as you were and all of these things were the dead opposite. The polar opposite of the people that you were meeting in prison. You were exposed to something and it taught you humility. Especially for somebody who’s been so successful on your own. It’s being able to see. When people say the other side of the tracks, it’s not just people living in a very financially different environment.
It’s people with tremendous struggles that people on the other side of the fed can’t imagine. I heard people just be very critical of people saying, “You can pick yourself up by your bootstraps. It’s the American dream.” It doesn’t work that way for everybody. Not by far. Remember at the beginning of our conversation, I was appreciating you for orienting your businesses to ultimately either directly or indirectly do good in the world. Make the world a better place. That’s how you got through your prison time.
It’s a life attitude. It is. We’re going to be confronted throughout our life with circumstances that are just real and they’re in front of us. How we address them will determine our happiness. It will determine the path. I love the whole poem of The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost. Everybody knows the very end of it, “I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.” They don’t know the first three stanzas that basically say we’ve come to a crossroad or a fork, and we’re looking down both sides. They’re both just untouched.
They’re just waiting for us to try. That’s what the first three stanzas are. That, “And both that morning equally lay in leaves no step had trodden black.” We have to make a choice. Often, it’s not right or wrong. It’s what we are going to do with this moment. We’ll look back with a sigh as Robert Frost says, “See this weird circuitous path we took.” When we look at it in a way that is how can this be as good as circumstance for as many people as possible? Versus, how can I just get what I want at every minute?
I’m not trying to be overly philanthropic. I’m just saying, if my business is all about helping as many business owners as I possibly can to become more successful. I promise you. They will all still want to be my customers. When I was in prison, I helped as many people as I could to learn to read or to write 50 pages of their life for the drug and alcohol program. Which could remove a year from their sentence.
When I helped people do that, do you think anybody out there was going to let anything happen to me? Any gang guy that would get mad out in the yard. No. I didn’t realize later, I was fully insulated from my trouble because the people I’d been teaching and helping were like, “Leave him alone. Go mess with somebody else.” I was unaware of it for most of the time I was there.
I want to pick up on that, unawareness. That’s a theme in our conversation. You were unaware of the risks you were taking when you were just working for that guy and when you answered some questions to a cop, like, “I’ll just answer this,” and then called your lawyer and then naivete and then went on. The unawareness of how so many other people live their lives. I asked you what the lessons are. It sounds like it’s a much broader worldview or a much broader life experience than you ever would have had in your own trajectory.
Yes. I always treated people kindly and thoughtfully. I strove to do that. I can continue to strive to do it. However, there were certain people that I would sum up and go, “Worth my time. Not worth my time.” That has changed a lot to the point where it has maybe negatively impacted my financial growth, but has dramatically improved my life experience. I’ve been less about rushing for more gain and more about going, “What can we develop here? What could we do for this little group? I want to spend more time with this person.” There’s no money in it. I just want to get to know them better.
We’re going to wrap up soon. We’re running out of time and now you’re coming into different aspects of the lessons and how you changed. How it changed you and how you changed into, it sounds like somebody that you prefer being.
Realizing The Power Of Partnership And Marital Support
I do. I grew up in a time period and also within our church, the one I attended for 50 years, the LDS Church. It was very patriarchal. We had the founder of WebMD, the CFO of Intel who were both, our dear friends who both said, “I’ll look after the company with no pay. I’ll make sure it’s okay.” He said to me, “The only person I feel comfortable with is Michelle, your wife.” She was a stay-at-home mom. She was smart, tough and would do things that needed to be done. She said, “I don’t think about running your business.” I said, “The team knows how to run the business. You just need to Listen and see if you think they’re giving you the straight story and then make the final decisions on big things.”
Coming out of that and seeing how successful she was. It gave me a whole different perspective. We went from being, this a relationship to this a relationship. That now has been twenty years of that. Let me tell you. I can’t even fully express verbally how happily married I am. We’ve just had our 39th anniversary. That not only shows how well you are together or it tears you apart. Also, I saw and learned things about my team and about my spouse. That fundamentally changed how I looked at what I had to do, what I could share, where I could listen to be the student instead of always trying to be the one that was supposed to know what to do.
My whole life got better. The other interesting thing as the wounds heal, because my business did together because my team stayed together, my business partner stayed together and my marriage stayed together, it all worked where I thought my business career was over. Who’s ever going to trust this felon? Instead, it opened up all the new rooms to me. I got invited up into new echelons that I’d never even thought I could get into because people said, “We see how your life is and how you handle pressure. Come over here and work with us.”
Cultivating A Rich Life Beyond Financial Wealth
I say maybe it’s hurt me financially. I have not suffered financially. I’ve done just fine. Thank you very much. We live a beautiful, abundant, wonderful life, but it’s not driven by the relentless pursuit of money. It’s about how we relentlessly pursue doing positive things in our shows and space. That, what a shocker, has brought abundance back to us. I’ve learned to believe that if you chase money, money runs away. If you welcome it, invite it, and be willing to accept it when it shows up. That’s a better way for me.
As crummy as it was to go through all that, as much as it did impact my young children and my spouse, it impacted a lot of people that loved me and cared about me. Everybody came through it okay. The family’s doing well. We talked about hard things because we’ve been through hard things. It has created a much more adult to adult cohesive life within our family. Everybody knows that hard things do not wipe you out. With hard things, you just go through them and there’s something on the other side that’s going to be positive. It’s a huge benefit we’ve received by going through the thing that I never ever imagined I would ever have to go through.
This is amazing. If we had one time, we certainly would have more interesting things to talk about. A couple questions just to wrap up with. One, do you have any advice for other people on this subject of wounds of wealth. Are you living a rich life?
Figure out what you’re naturally great at and then do it in all circumstances. Don’t try to be everything to everybody. If you can be good at a couple of things, you can do that for business. You can do it for your family, for strangers, or for nonprofits. You can do it in prison. Not only are you living a life of integrity but odds are, you will rise up in any circumstance you’re in. You need to be true to who you are. If you’re a crummy person, you’re going to just be crummier in a bad situation. If you’re a good person, you’re probably just going to be good in a bad situation. In positive times, you’re going to do very well. Be true to yourself and live a life of integrity. Don’t be somebody different behind closed doors.
Life is rich because of the scars we carry, the battles we overcome, and the people we meet along the way. Share on XMy last question and I know the answer. I don’t need to ask about it. The readers and the viewers know the answer, but I just develop this and I enjoy it very much. Aaron, are you living a rich life?
I am living a life that I don’t even think I could have imagined when I was younger. Life is rich because of the scars, because of the overcoming, and because of the people along the path. Do a lot of people choke up when you ask that because it’s getting me? It’s been a very marvelous trail that I’ve been able to follow that has put me here in a way that I’m a happy person. I find myself surrounded by wonderful people near and at arm’s length. That’s a very rich life.
I want to share with you that you’re an inspiration as much as you have all this professional experience and the entrepreneurial and so many businesses and however much wealth and generation for yourself and others. That’s real but you’re an inspiration because if you are and who you made yourself into personally.
Richard, thanks for sharing my story and others so that people can get through hard times.
That’s the point of the show.
Good for you. Thanks for having me on.
Thank you very much to Aaron Scott Young for joining us. Thank you to the readers. This is another episode of Healing Wounds of Wealth: Are You Living A Rich Life? Thank you.
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About Aaron Scott Young
Aaron Young is the co-author of the best-selling book “Unshackled” and Chairman of Laughlin Associates.
A seasoned entrepreneur since 1983, he has built, bought, and sold numerous companies and spoken globally on business growth, asset protection, and scaling success.
Known for his dynamic insights, Aaron empowers entrepreneurs to become true unshackled owners of their businesses.