Their Initials Spell Joy

My grandsons named my business. They didn't know it. Neither did I.

I had hung out a shingle as an independent wealth advisor and hadn't named the business. My daughter had worked at some well-known global brands, so I asked her what she thought. She said the word "joy" belonged in the name. Then she asked whether I'd ever noticed that my grandsons' initials spelled J-O-Y.

I hadn't. It had been true from the day the second one was born, and I'd missed it.

Three days after the first was born I cradled him, asked him to smile, and he did. The second came five years later. Together they've stirred a happiness so deep and durable that I've joked I'd have started grandparenting decades earlier if I'd known.

So the business became j.o.y. wealth partners. Their initials, and a word they brought to life for me.

Some years earlier I had picked up The Book of Joy, drawn by the two names on the cover: Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the Dalai Lama. Two Nobel Peace laureates sitting down together to talk about joy. They write that lasting happiness "cannot be found in pursuit of any goal or achievement. It does not reside in fortune or fame. It resides only in the human mind and heart."

It resides only in the human mind and heart. That bucked conventional wisdom. It also bucked my own habits. I'd spent a good part of my life chasing external rewards.

Naming the business let me name one of its beliefs. Joy is wealth. Not wealth is joy. The order is the point.

Money frequently gets in the way. Clayton Christensen, who taught at Harvard Business School, observed that we over-invest in our careers, where the returns are fast and easy to read, and under-invest in family and friendship, where they are neither. He framed it as a matter of resource allocation. It is also a description of how people can end up rich and lonely.

So am I a joy advisor? By my credentials, no. That said, I am a meditation student and meditation teacher, and one of the foundational teachings is that joy already lives in us, innate, waiting to be uncovered again and again. This closely matches what the Archbishop and the Dalai Lama wrote.

A client said to me not long ago, "I want my life to be as meaningful as an empty-nester as it is now."

Nothing in that sentence is about money. The money was already fine. That was never the question.

It came to me anyway. More of my clients bring me some version of it, and we spend more time on meaning than on markets.

Wealth management is going to keep moving that way. I doubt I'm the only advisor hearing it.

When I was young, a rock tune called "Joy to the World" was all over the radio. It opened with a bullfrog named Jeremiah and made no particular sense. The chorus ended, "Joy to you and me." I sang along for years without thinking about it.

I'm a wealth advisor. I've cradled j.o.y., and joy resides in you and me.

What else is in front of me that I haven't noticed? What am I still clinging to? And who, right now, am I under-investing in?