Quote of the Day: Aristotle Onassis on Wealth & Money

Early September has a particular energy: the air sharpens, routines reassemble, and ambitions that drifted in summer suddenly want structure. It’s a season that invites a quieter question beneath the hustle, what are you really chasing when you chase “more”? Aristotle Onassis put it plainly: “After a certain point, money is meaningless. It ceases to be the goal. The game is what counts.”

Money is a powerful tool when it buys safety, options, and breathing room. It can fund education, protect your family, and create time to do better work. But once needs are met and most wants are satisfied, money becomes less like nourishment and more like a number on a screen, useful, yet oddly hollow if it’s your only scoreboard.

Onassis’s line isn’t permission to become obsessed with winning; it’s a prompt to choose a better game. The “game” that sustains you is the craft you’re improving, the problems you’re learning to solve, the relationships you’re building, and the values you refuse to trade away. Make your metrics reflect that: measure consistency, skill, health, and contribution, not just income. If you want success, fall in love with the system that produces it. If you want freedom, design rules that keep you in control when temptation shows up disguised as opportunity.

Aristotle Onassis didn’t theorize from the sidelines, he built a global shipping empire through bold bets, relentless negotiation, and a keen understanding of leverage, competition, and timing.

Today, pick one arena that matters, your work, your body, or your home, and define a “game worth playing” in a single sentence, then take one concrete action that proves it: ship the draft, make the call, take the walk, close the loop. May your wins be measured in what you become, not merely what you accumulate.