The Worry Money Never Retired
Richer Soul Podcast • Episode 518 • Kevin Roth
The Modern Problem
There is a particular kind of tired that only shows up after the goal is reached. Kevin Roth knows it well. As a young musician he wrote down what he wanted: a TV show, a major record deal, a book deal, more than a million dollars. He got every one of them. He signed with Folkways Records at sixteen, started his own label, and sang the theme to PBS’s Shining Time Station, a song millions of children heard.
Then one day he looked at his stock portfolio, saw all those zeros, and asked himself a question he could not answer: why don’t I feel any happier?
The Hidden Pattern
Kevin’s father came from a Hungarian immigrant family where every penny mattered. His rule was simple. As long as you have money in your pocket and in the bank, everything is going to be okay. Kevin calls it a half-truth, and he is careful about which half. Money is real. It buys options. His father was also the one who told him to start his own label, a move that took Kevin from about a dollar a unit to about ten.
But the rule carried something else with it. Kevin says he worried about money even when he had a lot of it, all the way into his mid-fifties. This is one of the oldest patterns there is. A belief formed in scarcity does not update when the scarcity ends. It keeps asking for proof of safety, and no balance is ever large enough to answer it, because the belief was never measuring the balance. It was measuring fear.
The Assumption We Carry
Most of us assume the problem is the goal. Set better goals, reach them, and the feeling will follow. Kevin reached his goals. The feeling did not follow, because the goals were never his. They were the American dream as he was handed it, the shape success was supposed to take.
It took a pileup to break the assumption open. His father died at ninety. A nine-year relationship ended. A store he owned was failing. He went to stay with his sister in Kansas to regroup, and a routine dermatology visit turned up a tiny freckle on his nose. It was stage three melanoma. Four oncologists told him there was a 70 percent chance he would be dead within two years.
The Clearer Lens
What Kevin did next is the part worth keeping. He asked himself three questions: what is important, why is it important, and what am I going to do about it. Then he moved to San Diego to live, in his words, like a bohemian. If he was going to die, he said, he would die on the beach in San Diego, not in Kansas in the winter. He is honest that he does not know how he recovered. He only knows he stopped buying into the story he had been handed.
When he later became a coach, he turned that experience into a single question. He does not start by asking clients what they want. He asks what they don’t want in their life anymore. What is eating at them. Most people hesitate. Then the truth comes out: the debt, the relationship, the obligation they have been assuming they cannot refuse.
Subtraction is more honest than ambition. Ask people what they want and they will often recite what they were told to want. Ask what they no longer want and you get something nobody else wrote for them.
When Kevin talked about getting older, I told him I think of it less as lifespan and more as health span. At some point people diverge. One group keeps sliding, and when you trace it back, the cause is choices they made twenty years earlier. Another group keeps getting better, and it is the same math running the other direction. Kevin’s version of that is “from role to soul.” The roles fall away whether we plan for it or not. What is left is whatever we invested in ourselves while the roles were still loud.
The Implication for Life
Kevin’s father was not wrong. Money in the bank does make some things okay. It just cannot make the worry okay, because the worry was never about the bank. Kevin had to stop chasing a definition of success he never wrote and start with the smaller, harder question of what he was done carrying.
He now lives near the beach with his dog, drives a Kia Soul with no payment, and says he could afford more and simply does not want it. That is not a vow of poverty. It is what it looks like when someone finally defines enough for himself.
One Question to Sit With
What don’t you want in your life anymore, and who told you that you had to keep it?
About Kevin Roth
Kevin Roth is a renowned dulcimer artist, singer, author, and songwriter. He has recorded 65 albums, won numerous awards, and sang the theme to the hit PBS TV show Shining Time Station.
His life was transformed in 2015 when he was told he had stage-three melanoma and only a couple of years to live, he had a choice: get busy living or accept dying. Somehow, despite an amazing music career, Kevin had always found it difficult to simply be happy. He’d had a wake-up call, and he decided to do something about it. He envisioned a new, fun, and fulfilling life and set about making the necessary changes. Now, he wants to help you do the same.
Links
Website: https://kevinroth.org/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kevinrothmusic
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kevin_rothsandiego/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@KevinRothMusician/videos
Watch the full episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@richersoul
Richer Soul Life Beyond Money. You got rich, now what? Let’s talk about your journey to purposeful, intentional, amazing life. Where are you going to go and how are you going to get there? Let’s figure that out together. At the core is the financial well being to be able to do what you want, when you want, how you want. It’s about personal freedom!
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