One of the things I felt I only understood relatively late in life is that most significant progress happens on a logarithmic scale, or to put it differently: orders of magnitude matter more than linear increases. This is especially true when thinking about money.
We do this intuitively already, but it's worth spelling out. As a kid, $100 in the savings account seemed like an amazing amount of money because—relative to what we wanted to buy—it was. Suddenly that accessory for our bike, or whatever it was we'd been eyeing, was within reach.
But the next step, $1,000, is qualitatively different in terms of what becomes possible. It's not just ten times better—it's a completely different category. Suddenly it's the whole bike we can afford, not just the accessory.
For many of us, "a few thousand dollars" became the implicit savings goal that lasted well into early adulthood. It constantly enabled us to get the things we wanted, roughly on the same level we always had: some furniture, a TV, a car down payment. It felt like enough because it consistently delivered that same type of purchasing power.
The important thing to eventually realize though is this: the next order of magnitude—$10,000—represents something fundamentally different. Ten thousand dollars is the first amount that matters not because of what you can buy, but because of what you can do. It's the first taste of real freedom: the freedom to quit a job you hate and have a few months of runway in your account. This is profound. For $10,000, you get a form of agency you never had before: the freedom to take a calculated risk, to make a job move from a position of choice rather than desperation. This amount is also often what's needed for a down payment on your first appreciating asset—a house, depending on where you live.
The next leap is what I now think as the most significant of all: $100,000. This is the first amount that buys the rarest form of freedom in our economy—the freedom from needing to work immediately and the freedom to start something entirely on your own. Depending on how and where you live, $100,000 buys you meaningful time—one to three years—of genuine financial independence. This is why that amount feels so profound and life-changing: it's the first sum that provides true agency in deciding what you want to do with your life, and the actual means to do it.
The cultural significance of the next milestone is obvious: $1 million. And while a million dollars isn't what it used to be, it remains significant in a way unlike any other amount on this progression. If you live reasonably, $1 million enables you to do so more or less indefinitely by living off the investment income it generates. But more than that, it enables you to shift from the "earning money" game to the "allocating assets" game. This is when you start following what you might call the capitalist playbook—your wealth building focus fundamentally changes from labor to capital.
The final order of magnitude that feels meaningful to think about is $10 million. This does much of what $1 million does, but it enables what most people picture when they think of serious wealth: a certain lifestyle, access to investment opportunities outside retail finance, exceptional financial independence, and the ability to create intergenerational wealth.
$100 million is the next step in this progression - and it’s important, for sure, but diminishing returns start to kick in. Yes, you have even more access and live a potentially even more exclusive life, but fundamentally nothing much changes. Most people at that stage think more about how to give away large amounts of their wealth, so that is certainly a profound difference. Also it buys you political and societal influence, if you are into this kind of thing. But ultimately it doesn’t make much of a difference, fundamentally. You don’t unlock more “personal freedom” at that stage. You might become more “relevant” in societal discourse, and the role you play in society changes, but ultimately it doesn’t change your life as much as any of the other milestones before.
What strikes me about this progression is how each step isn't just "more money"—each represents access to qualitatively different possibilities. The difference between having $5,000 and $50,000 isn't that you can buy ten times as much stuff. It's that you can do entirely different things with your life.
I think recognizing this changes how you think about financial goals entirely. Instead of optimizing for incremental improvements, you start thinking exponentially about breakthrough moments. The math of wealth isn't linear—and once you see that, a lot of other things start making sense too.
PS: A lot could be said about how these number still apply today, and I acknowledge that instead of a "1" as the first digit in the above progression, a "3" reflects the reality of today's price levels better: $3 million is often considered true financial independence, and $30 million is the "Ultra-High-Networth" threshold. But the general concept stays the same.
