17GoalsNot Just for Motivational Posters
At 18, a good friend of mine left home to attend college with legions of bright-eyed American teenagers. He had done well enough in high school to get into an Ivy League university, and his parents sent him off proudly with all the accoutrements of an upper-middle-class collegiate experience: fresh flannel sheets for his extra-long dorm bed, a spiffy new computer, and a checkbook linked to a personal bank account to help cover his expenses.
Halfway through the semester, he wrote a check and it bounced. He called his parents in a panic.
“Hi Mom,” he said, “I think there’s something wrong with my bank account.”
“What is it, sweetie?” she responded.
“I wrote a check and it bounced. But I still have like ten more checks in the checkbook.”
“Excuse me?” she asked.
“I still have ten checks left. So there should still be money left in there.”
Silence.
“Mom?”
More silence.
“Honey, your account running out of money has nothing to do with how many checks you have left. If you wrote checks for more money than you have in your account, they won’t go through. The account is not an endless supply of money limited only by how many checks you have. What if you wrote a check for a million dollars? If you don’t have a million dollars in there, which you don’t, the check won’t clear.”
More silence.
“Oh,” he finally said.
Now in his 40s, my friend has never lived this ...
Get The Mac & Cheese Millionaire now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
