Another Way to Play It

I recently read a magazine article that asked six different investment experts to weigh in on the question “Where to Invest $1 Million Right Now?” The idea was to provide timely ideas on where to deploy a big chunk of cash – if you happened to come into one, or maybe just liked to dream about it.

As one would expect, each of the experts provided a dry analysis of what they saw going on with investments like municipal bonds, blockchain technology, green energy transition, startups, etc. and then made prognoses as to where they thought the best opportunities lie.

But in an interesting twist, each expert ended their report with a short paragraph called “another way to play it.” The point was to give the experts a chance to go off script with ideas that fell outside their professional realm and to tap into a personal passion.

In every case, “another way to play it” was something unexpected that brought a different level of engagement and reflection from the experts. They talked about things like technologies designed to bring clean water to developing countries, buying a horse farm that caters to the hunter-jumper crowd, setting up a platform to connect capital and training with people who are developing their own businesses in rural Spain, investing in recovering forests in the Amazon as a way to achieve a personal net-zero emissions, or buying a dilapidated French farmhouse and fixing it up to be an Airbnb hot spot.

Besides the wide-range of unusual ideas, I was struck by how each of the experts used “another way to play it” as an opportunity to use words like love, obsessed, beauty, and phrases like, “make an impact in the lives of those in need” and “paying off down the line.” One of the experts asked “Who says an investment can’t also be good for the soul?”

I like the idea of “another way to play it.” By giving ourselves permission to use a little imagination, it shows that we can do better than the expected. Yet, I am reminded that, for most, the unchallenged expectation of what to do with $1 million dollars is to just unimaginably turn it into more money – as if that’s the only way we have to play it.

“Another way to play it” is a great interruptor. It is an exercise that makes us think about purpose and passion. It is a reminder that money, especially large amounts of money, can provide a means of bringing greater meaning to one’s life and to the lives of others. “Another way to play it” can be useful in financial and non-financial situations when we want to challenge default assumptions about value creation and break out of patterns that hold back innovation and creativity. And, like the expert said…”Who says an investment can’t be good for the soul?”