The younger man may have imagined wealth as escape from the choices poverty removed. The professional man learned that money also purchases time, status and the presumption that a person is worth hearing. The older man has begun to suspect that the richest use of money would be to return choice, time and voice to other people. That may be what the song has been waiting for me to understand.
There is a particular kind of wealth that exists for a few days between buying a Powerball ticket and discovering that the numbers have once again shown no respect for my financial planning. During that interval, I can be worth forty million dollars without having to pay tax on the interest, answer questions from distant relatives or decide whether the person suddenly calling me “mate” remembers where we met. The ticket costs little enough to be classified as entertainment and carries enough imagination to finance an entirely different life. Like many people who buy one most weeks, I am not purchasing a statistical investment so much as a temporary licence to ask what I would do if money suddenly stopped saying no.
The jackpot in my head is never one of the modest ones. Five million dollars would be extremely welcome and I would make a determined effort not to send it back, but it still feels like a sum requiring sensible management. The dream becomes properly interesting somewhere beyond forty million, where ordinary caution can no longer pretend that every dollar must be preserved for fear of an uncertain electricity bill in 2047. That is the point at which the fantasy ceases to be about improving our circumstances and becomes a test of what I believe money is for.
My first instinct is not to build a mansion, acquire a collection of cars or purchase a boat large enough to require its own accountant. I would probably enjoy some comforts, and I will not insult the intelligence of the reader by pretending that forty million dollars would leave my material life completely untouched. Yet the recurring picture is that roughly half of it would be given away to the family almost immediately, not tossed into the air in a moment of undisciplined excitement but deliberately placed where it could release lives. The money would not be a prize I had earned, so I cannot see why I should behave as though I alone had acquired a moral right to every consequence of it.
That dream is the doorway through which “If I Were a Rich Man”¹ now enters this chapter. Tevye imagines a grander house, a busier household, respect from important men and the time to think about matters beyond the next demand of poverty. He is entertaining because the fantasy is extravagant, but he is moving because the extravagance is built over genuine deprivation. Beneath the noisy dream is a very quiet wish to stop having every possibility decided by the absence of money.
That part of the song has always made sense to me. Money in my early life was not an abstract idea discussed by economists with coloured graphs behind them, because it determined which choices were available and which disappeared before they could become serious. University was not rejected after a careful assessment of my intellectual appetite and career preferences. The family finances had their own vote, and it was cast without the need for further debate.
Perhaps that is why my lottery fantasy begins with release. I do not imagine money primarily as a means of surrounding myself with things, although I would not object to replacing a few things that have reached the stage of being held together by habit. I imagine what it could remove from the people I love: the need to remain in employment purely because the wage arrives, the pressure of a mortgage, the fear that one wrong turn could take years to repair and the narrowing of life around financial necessity. Wealth, in that picture, is not an enlarged pile. It is a collection of locked doors suddenly discovering they have keys.
Giving half away sounds generous when described quickly, but it is not entirely selfless. There would be enormous pleasure in watching the children receive the kind of freedom that was never offered to me at their stage of life. I would enjoy seeing the surprise, the disbelief and perhaps the suspicion that their father had attached an eighty-seven-page agreement requiring quarterly reporting. More seriously, I would be purchasing the opportunity to watch what they might become when the immediate obligation to earn a living no longer dictated so much of their time.
That last sentence requires care because it can become a disguised form of control. A gift intended to release somebody can easily become a set of golden handcuffs if the giver expects obedience, gratitude or a starring role in every later decision. I have spent too many years around family money, business structures and the complications of help to believe that generosity automatically remains generous after the cheque clears. If I gave the children a substantial share, the money would need to belong to them in reality and not merely in a legal structure that allowed me to continue behaving like the chairman of their lives.
The accountant in me would still want sensible protection. I would think about tax consequences, asset protection, relationship risks, long-term security and the danger of a sudden fortune being treated as an invitation to immediate stupidity. Those thoughts are not evidence that I distrust the children, because sensible structures exist precisely because life can become complicated without anybody being foolish. Yet the human part of me would need to remember that protection is not ownership and advice is not permission to interfere indefinitely.
The dream is not limited to giving money away. Somewhere in the remaining half sits a foundation centred on the simple act of helping, although “simple” may be the most dangerous word in that sentence. Helping sounds easy until committees, compliance, eligibility rules, governance, public expectations and human complexity arrive with clipboards. I would nevertheless want to build something capable of finding a genuine need and responding without first requiring the person in difficulty to become an expert in forms.
I have spent a great deal of my life seeing needs and attempting to fill them. That instinct has sometimes been service, sometimes responsibility and occasionally an inability to leave a problem alone when somebody else had not solved it to my satisfaction. A foundation would therefore have to be more than a larger vehicle for Jeff to intervene in everything. It would need to help people without turning their lives into evidence of my wisdom, because there is a thin line between assistance and the satisfaction of becoming indispensable.
The appeal of the foundation is not the possibility of my name appearing above a door. In truth, a building with my name on it would probably cause me to spend the opening ceremony looking for a spelling error or wondering whether the sign was level. What attracts me is the ability to respond where systems have become too slow, too narrow or too occupied with protecting themselves. There are people whose lives could change because somebody acted before the problem grew large enough to qualify for official attention.
I can imagine practical help rather than grand statements. It might be support for education, a hand through a period of illness, assistance to a family caught by circumstances, backing for a community idea that is too small for institutions and too important to abandon, or a pathway for somebody whose ability has been hidden beneath disadvantage. The exact form would need to grow from what was genuinely needed rather than from my desire to arrive with a pre-written answer. The foundation would be built around listening first, which is an excellent principle and one I have not always practised with the consistency it deserves.
My sons and my son-in-law occupy an important part of this dream. I imagine offering them the opportunity to walk away from employment and build something special with me, not as unpaid assistants to their father’s final grand project but as properly rewarded partners whose incomes could rise far beyond their present levels. The money would remove the requirement that they gamble their families’ security to join the venture. It would allow ability, energy and purpose to come together without the usual instruction that the rent must be paid before the vision is permitted to breathe.
That picture carries some of the old business excitement without the old business desperation. We would be able to create without every decision being distorted by the question of whether this month’s revenue would cover next month’s wages. We could build systems properly, employ the right people, measure outcomes and correct mistakes without one poor decision threatening the entire enterprise. For somebody who has spent a lifetime advising businesses formed with courage, hope and inadequate working capital, there is deep attraction in beginning with enough fuel to reach the destination.
The work would still need to be real. I would not want to create highly paid positions whose principal qualification was appearing in the correct family photograph, because that would diminish the very people I hoped to release. Each of them would need responsibility, authority and room to shape the foundation according to their strengths. Their incomes could be generous because the work was valuable and the resources allowed it, but the purpose would not be to hide family gifts inside impressive job titles.
I also know that my dream of building something special with them may be more mine than theirs. They have their own lives, loyalties, ambitions and definitions of worthwhile work, and the arrival of forty million dollars would not turn my vision into their obligation. The offer would need to contain a genuine right to refuse without becoming the child who disappointed Dad after he won Powerball. A family foundation created through emotional conscription would soon require a separate foundation to repair the family.
Still, I enjoy imagining the conversations. I can see us sitting around a table with the rare luxury of asking what would make the greatest difference rather than what would produce the quickest commercial return. We could bring together practical intelligence, lived experience and the impatience required to challenge processes that have forgotten the people they were designed to serve. We would disagree, because a family that agrees on everything has either stopped thinking or decided not to speak, but the disagreement might help keep the work honest.
Part of the pleasure would come from seeing the younger men earn more than their current employment can reasonably offer. That is not because their present work lacks dignity or because income is the only measure of worth. It is because employment often places a ceiling over capability and then persuades the person beneath it that the ceiling is the sky. The lottery money could remove that ceiling long enough for them to discover what they might build when effort, judgement and reward were allowed to meet more fairly.
There is, of course, a revealing arrogance inside my assumption that working with me would produce that result. I have confidence in what I can create, and false modesty would be dishonest, but confidence can quietly appoint itself as destiny. The dream flatters me as founder, adviser, father and provider all at once. It gives me a central role in the liberation of the family, which is exactly why it must be questioned rather than merely admired.
Would I be helping them, or would I be constructing the final version of being needed? Retirement has already begun asking what remains when the invoices, deadlines and client emergencies no longer provide daily proof of usefulness. A forty-million-dollar foundation would answer that question very conveniently by giving me a new organisation, a new mission and several people whose salaries depended upon the continuation of my ideas. Even generosity can become a sophisticated hiding place when the person giving has not learned how to exist without a problem to solve.
This does not make the dream false. Motives are rarely pure enough to be displayed under museum lighting, and waiting for complete purity would prevent most good things from ever beginning. I can want to help, want to remain useful, want to work with the family and want the pleasure of seeing lives changed at the same time. The responsibility lies in recognising the mixture and building enough governance around myself that no single motive becomes king.
Tevye’s fantasy contains a similar mixture. He wants comfort, status, time, knowledge and the respect that money appears to purchase, and the song does not require him to choose only the morally approved desire. His imagined wealth would change how others heard him even if his intelligence remained exactly the same. That remains one of the most accurate and irritating observations in the song.
I have spent a lifetime watching ideas alter in value according to the person delivering them. Advice dismissed from somebody without recognised status can become wisdom when repeated by a person with a larger office, a better title or the kind of bank balance that makes every hesitation look profound. A poor man is complaining, while a wealthy man is identifying structural risk. Society likes to pretend it respects intelligence, but it often waits for money to certify that the intelligence is genuine.
Not Your Ordinary Accountant was partly my refusal to accept that arrangement. I wanted to speak in language people could understand, challenge stupidity when it had acquired official stationery and offer advice before compliance became rescue. Yet the brand was also an attempt to construct the authority that merit alone had not reliably supplied. If the world insisted upon packaging before it listened to the contents, I was prepared to design a better package.
A Powerball fortune would amplify that authority immediately. People who had previously regarded my ideas as interesting might suddenly discover that I was visionary, and invitations would arrive from rooms that had managed perfectly well without me the week before. The same sentences would weigh more because forty million dollars had been placed behind them. That prospect is amusing until I remember how easily being heard can be mistaken for being right.
A foundation would therefore need people willing to tell me when I was talking nonsense. Family may be especially useful in that regard because they have seen too many ordinary versions of me to be fully impressed by the title of founder. They know that the person developing a grand social initiative is also capable of losing something placed carefully in a safe location or becoming annoyed by a piece of technology that has followed its instructions too literally. Wealth may buy authority, but family retains the audit file.
The children are already the clearest evidence that richness cannot be contained by money. Their achievements, relationships, resilience and unfolding lives have supplied more reason to look forward than any balance ever could. I have often said, at least within myself, that they made me hang around to see what extraordinary thing they might do next. That is not a burden I place upon them but an acknowledgement that curiosity about their futures has kept my own future open.
There have been times when life felt like responsibility continuing after enthusiasm had left the room. Depression can reduce tomorrow to a slightly altered version of today and make grand statements about purpose sound like motivational posters written by somebody who has never met the Black Dog. The children did not cure that, and it would be unfair to make them responsible for doing so. They simply kept providing evidence that something worth witnessing might still be ahead.
Kirsten’s achievements in astrophysics and science communication have taken her into places beyond anything I could have mapped for her. Her work encouraging women and Indigenous students towards science reflects values I recognise while expressing them in a form that belongs entirely to her. I can take pride in the person she has become without pretending I designed the outcome. The richer part is not being able to say that my daughter has done impressive things; it is being allowed to watch her continue doing them.
My sons have followed lives shaped by their own work, relationships, pressures and decisions. Their paths are not lesser because they have unfolded away from public recognition, and their worth is not waiting for a headline. Adulthood is built through persistence, loyalty, judgement, responsibility and the choices made when applause is not available. A lottery fortune might change the range of choices before them, but it would not create the qualities that would determine what they did with those choices.
My son-in-law belongs in the dream because family is not restricted to the people whose arrival I witnessed from the beginning. Marriage enlarges the circle and asks whether the welcome is genuine or merely ceremonial. Offering him the same opportunity would be part of saying that the foundation was not a private Banks inheritance disguised as public good. It would also acknowledge that people who join a family bring abilities, histories and perspectives that the original members could not have manufactured among themselves.
When I imagine giving half the prize away, I am not imagining the children becoming idle. I am imagining them gaining the freedom to choose work for its meaning, build something of their own, reduce pressures that have no moral value and perhaps make mistakes that do not destroy the next decade. Money cannot guarantee wisdom, happiness or family harmony, but it can create room in which those things have a better chance to grow. The gift would not be exemption from life; it would be release from some of the narrower cages placed around it.
That distinction matters because unearned wealth carries its own danger. A person can lose direction when every external necessity disappears, just as retirement can unsettle somebody whose identity was tied to being required. The discipline once imposed by employment must be replaced by chosen purpose, and chosen purpose is harder because nobody arrives each morning to insist upon it. A large gift may remove pressure while also removing the structure that helped a life remain upright.
The foundation is attractive partly because it would provide that structure. It could turn a windfall into sustained usefulness rather than a collection of diminishing purchases and entertaining stories about people who suddenly discovered us after the draw. It could allow the family to create income, develop expertise and contribute to something larger than itself. Yet the structure would need to remain a means of serving people, not a monument designed to preserve our relevance.
I can imagine the first principles more readily than the final programs. We would help where help could produce genuine movement, listen before deciding, avoid making recipients perform helplessness for our approval and measure whether our assistance changed anything beyond our own emotions. We would seek the overlooked person with capacity, the family struck by circumstance, the community initiative lacking access and the practical gap that everybody recognised but nobody owned. We would also accept that some needs cannot be solved by writing a cheque, even one with an unusually satisfying number of zeros.
The accountant in me would insist upon governance, evidence and safeguards. That part of me has watched too many good intentions become poor management and too many organisations treat virtue as an exemption from accountability. The human part would insist that the safeguards not become a maze designed to protect the foundation from the inconvenience of helping. The two might argue regularly, but that argument could become one of the organisation’s greatest strengths if neither side was permitted to silence the other.
There would also be joy in the work. Serious subjects do not require every meeting to resemble a funeral, and people receiving help should not be forced to participate in a solemn ceremony celebrating the generosity of those providing it. We could build humour, dignity and ordinary human conversation into the way assistance was offered. The foundation should leave people feeling strengthened rather than studied.
The weekly Powerball ticket therefore buys me more than a chance at money. It buys a rehearsal for values because the fantasy forces me to decide what I would preserve, release, share and build if cost stopped dominating the answer. The numbers almost never oblige, which is their established pattern, but the question remains after the ticket has become waste paper. What does it reveal that my richest dream is not to stop doing anything, but to do something different with people I love?
Perhaps it reveals that I still struggle to imagine a life without usefulness. Even in the fantasy of complete freedom, I create a foundation, recruit a family team and give myself another complex organisation to think about before dawn. My version of leisure appears to involve governance meetings, impact assessments and a debate about whether the application process has become too bureaucratic. Some men dream of a tropical island; I apparently dream of a properly administered benevolent entity.
There is humour in that, but there is also truth. I do not want wealth merely to remove activity from my life, because inactivity has never felt like freedom for very long. I want it to remove compulsory activity so that chosen work can take its place. Rich would mean being able to ask what matters before asking what pays.
That question returns me to enough. Forty million dollars is clearly more than Robyn and I need, even allowing for inflation, health, longevity and my professional tendency to imagine every risk in triplicate. Keeping all of it would turn prudence into hoarding dressed in respectable language. Giving half away and placing another substantial portion into a foundation would be my attempt to prevent abundance from becoming merely a larger version of fear.
Robyn might approach the exercise with more caution, and she would be right to do so. A fortune does not abolish the need for judgement simply because it makes poor judgement slower to notice. She has always carried a strong instinct for security and tomorrow, while I can become captivated by the possibility of what might be built today. Somewhere between us would probably sit the sensible version of generosity, although I expect the first meeting would still require a calculator and several deep breaths.
The dream also exposes my old relationship with provision. I understood love through doing, funding, solving and protecting more readily than through simple emotional expression. Winning a fortune would allow that language to become spectacular, which is both its attraction and its risk. It would be easy to hand over millions and feel that I had finally said everything a father should say, when the children may have needed other words at entirely different times.
Money cannot retroactively attend an event, soften an explosion of anger or replace a conversation that work once pushed aside. It cannot make the younger father more present by allowing the older father to become more generous. A gift may acknowledge love, but it cannot be used as a receipt proving that love was always expressed well. The lottery dream must therefore sit beside inadequacy rather than erase it.
I see the success of the children and sometimes wonder what part we played in it. There is an old idea that as we sow, so shall we reap, but parenthood refuses to behave like controlled agriculture. Children arrive with their own soil, weather, temperament and direction, and the harvest frequently contains things the parents neither planted nor understood. We may have encouraged some qualities, failed to recognise others and occasionally provided the exact obstacle against which a strength was formed.
Their achievements are therefore not our dividend. Robyn and I were blessed with the opportunity to watch them grow, struggle, choose, recover and become adults whose lives belong to them. Pride is legitimate, but ownership is not. The lottery gift would need to honour that distinction by expanding their choices without claiming their outcomes.
The same principle applies to the foundation. If my sons and son-in-law joined me, the work could become one of the richest experiences of my later life, but it could not remain my stage with them employed as supporting characters. They would need space to disagree, lead, change direction and eventually build beyond whatever I first imagined. The truest success might be the moment the organisation no longer required me at its centre.
That thought is more difficult than it appears. I have spent a lifetime becoming useful enough that people sought my judgement, and irrelevance has often felt less like rest than disappearance. Building something important and then allowing others to carry it would test whether I wanted the work to succeed or wanted to remain necessary to its success. Money could fund the organisation, but it could not answer that question on my behalf.
Tevye imagines that wealth will bring him the time to think and the status to be heard. My fantasy contains those things, but it also contains the opportunity to distribute both. I would want the family to have time that employment currently owns and authority that ordinary wages often fail to confer. I would want people receiving assistance to recover enough stability that their voices ceased to be dismissed as merely the noise of difficulty.
Perhaps rich means possessing the capacity to make room. Money can make room in a week, in a home, in a career, in a relationship and in the mind of somebody who has spent years calculating which necessity will be disappointed next. A foundation could make room for people to recover or begin, and a family gift could make room for the children to choose without every choice being priced first. Room is less decorative than wealth, but it may be the more honest measure.
The Powerball fantasy also allows a little harmless extravagance. I would like to gather the family, tell them what had happened and watch disbelief travel around the room before suspicion settled upon the accountant’s explanation of how the money would be divided. There would be tears, laughter and probably immediate disagreement about whether I was serious. I hope there would also be the recognition that the prize had not made us rich at that moment so much as revealed how rich the room already was.
That is a sentimental conclusion only if it is allowed to ignore reality. Families carry tensions, differences, old hurts and competing needs, and money can magnify each of them with frightening efficiency. A large windfall does not create harmony; it simply gives existing relationships more expensive ways to express themselves. The dream would require conversations, boundaries and the willingness to accept that fairness does not always mean identical outcomes.
Still, the risk of complication is not an argument for keeping everything. Wealth protected from every possible human difficulty becomes wealth protected from human purpose. I would rather face the hard questions attached to generosity than spend the rest of my life guarding a number vastly beyond my needs. The challenge would be to give wisely without allowing wisdom to become an excuse for never giving at all.
When the draw arrives and my ticket again declines to alter history, I return to the life already in front of me. The family remains, the desire to help remains and the question of how to use the resources and time I already possess remains. Forty million dollars would enlarge the possibilities, but it would not invent the values. The jackpot dream matters because it shows me, in exaggerated form, what I believe enough should eventually permit.
Rich would mean giving the children freedom without purchasing their allegiance. It would mean inviting my sons and son-in-law to build something special while accepting that their answer might not match my dream. It would mean creating a foundation that helps people stand rather than requiring them to kneel gratefully before the people doing the helping. It would mean earning less of my identity from being needed and more of my satisfaction from seeing others become capable of proceeding without me.
The younger man may have imagined wealth as escape from the choices poverty removed. The professional man learned that money also purchases time, status and the presumption that a person is worth hearing. The older man has begun to suspect that the richest use of money would be to return choice, time and voice to other people. That may be what the song has been waiting for me to understand.
So, what would rich really mean if the numbers finally came up and forty million dollars landed where a weekly dream had been sitting? It would mean that roughly half could pass into the family and become possibility rather than possession, while another part could build a place where helping was practical, respectful and sustained. It would mean working beside people I love without forcing them to become extensions of me, and watching the children continue to do extraordinary things with lives that remain entirely their own. Most of all, it would mean discovering whether I could use abundance to release others without turning their freedom into another monument to my usefulness.
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