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I want to talk about a word most people have never heard. A word that at first glance, appears to be the opposite of humility.
The word is magnanimity.
It comes from the Latin magna anima — literally, "great soul." It's the same idea behind the title India gave Gandhi, Mahatma, which means the same thing. Great soul.
Part of my master’s degree in philosophy, other than writing and defending the thesis, was to master two authors. I chose Thomas Aquinas, the Summa, as my first author. And a very modern 2nd author.
Aquinas devoted a whole section of his masterwork to this virtue of magnanimity 800 years ago. And Aquinas, being Aquinas, was standing on the shoulders of giants when he wrote the Summa: the Gospels on one side and the Greeks, especially Aristotle, on the other, one foot planted on each.
Here's his definition, and it's worth reading slowly. Magnanimity, he wrote, is "a stretching forth of the mind to great things."
A stretching forth toward great things. Not shrinking. Not playing small. Stretching.
Now here's why this matters for you and me.
A lot of us were raised, often by good and faithful people, with a belief that humility means making yourself small. Don't stand out. Don't want too much. Don't reach. There's something a little unseemly, we were taught, about ambition, about building wealth, about wanting to be great at something. The virtuous thing is to keep your head down and not stand out too much.
Aquinas says that's wrong. And more than wrong, he says it's actually a vice.
He gives it a name. The failure to reach for the great things you're capable of isn't humility. It's pusillanimity. Smallness of soul. It's the vice of the person who has real gifts and buries them, who could do something significant and chooses to shrink instead, and then dresses that shrinking up as modesty.
Read that one more time, because it's important. Playing small is not a virtue. Aquinas considered it a failure.
And here's the part that surprised me when I dug into it. He didn't see magnanimity and humility as opposites at all. He saw them as partners. Humility keeps you from reaching for things out of pride, for the wrong reasons. Magnanimity keeps you from the opposite error, from underreaching, from failing to use what you were given. One guards against too much. The other guards against too little. You need both.
The magnanimous person, he wrote, takes honest stock of the gifts God gave him and then works to use them as fully as he possibly can. To the maximum of what one can become.
I don't think Aquinas was writing a personal finance letter. But I've read this over and over the past week, and I cannot stop seeing your situation in it.
You have gifts. You've spent decades developing them. You earn well because you're genuinely good at something. And a lot of you, I'd bet, carry a sort of guilt about wanting more than that, about building real wealth, about stretching toward something great in the second half of your life. As if being content with the paycheck were the humble, decent thing to do.
Aquinas would call that what it is. Not humility. Pusillanimity. Smallness of soul.
Now, an honest word of caution, because Aquinas is careful here and I want to be too.
He did not mean go chase money for its own sake. He was clear that the great soul "despises external goods" in one specific sense: that it won't do anything low or unbecoming to get them, and it never mistakes the money for the point. But he also said plainly that wealth and resources are useful instruments. They let a person accomplish great things, in his words, "more expeditiously." Money is not the goal. It's a tool that lets you act on your gifts, provide for the people you love, be generous on a scale you otherwise couldn't, and build something that outlasts you.
That reframes this whole project, doesn't it?
Going from earner to owner isn't greed. It isn't vanity. Done for the right reasons, it's magnanimity. It's taking the gifts and the earning years you were given and refusing to let them stay small. It's stretching forth toward the great thing instead of burying the talent and calling it modest.
You were not made to play small.
You made the money. Now make it count.
Jim
About Asset Accelerator
I'm Jim Duffy. For 25 years I've sat across the closing table from families who looked successful on paper but just weren't building anything that would last. I started Asset Accelerator to change that, one reader at a time. My wife Lisa and I are walking this same road ourselves, from earning to owning, and every week I share what actually works. No hype, no gurus, just real numbers and the belief that it's never too late to start. Let's build something that pays you for life.
