If a genie from a bottle appeared to you and offered to grant you 3 wishes, but before doing so, you had to choose between being either an icon or a billionaire. If you choose to be an icon, then none of your wishes could pertain to money. If you choose to be a billionaire, then none of the wishes could include love. Which would you choose to be in order to fulfill your 3 wishes? I’ll give you my answer at the end.

Living in a big city this question pops often into my frame of mind, usually when I’m walking past one of the many exuberant luxury buildings (and we’re not talking Fifth Avenue/Central Park where the doormen are consistently friendly enough to greet you with a smile when you walk by). As The Gilded Age’s Agnes Van Rhijn would say, the new money luxury buildings, you know the type. And if I was living in that exuberant high-rise luxury building, what my life would be like. Would I have the same personality, the same friends?

Not all icons accrue financial wealth. Truth is, being upheld as an icon has nothing to do with money. And not all billionaires have done anything more remarkable to make them iconic. Then, there’s the inanimate objects, places, artistic endeavors, works of art that are praised iconography. Some cost a fortune to create, while others barely did anything out of the norm to receive such stature.

When they say that money makes the world go round, I do believe it. To me, money is fluid. You have it, you give it and keep it moving. It’s one of the constant rotations of life. Of course, I also believe in saving up for a rainy day, retirement and all that, but for the most part when I think about life, money is a blessing that comes in third place. My friend once dragged me to a meditation retreat, well she didn’t really drag me, I thought it was going to be one of those silent retreats where you don’t speak a word for two days. The most memorable takeaway was the day a Buddhist monk came to teach and he taught us that if the second you wake up in the morning is for the sake of money, you have already failed that day. There’s a lot of truth in that, because too many people place a high premium on money, rather than relationships, love, community. So in that sense, imagine a billionaire waking up every morning with the mindset and goal to have more money. It’s a set up for failure, because all the money that this one billionaire is going to take that day is not meant to benefit the greater good.

When a person, place or thing reaches icon status, it is because an over abundance of society or the world loves or respects what they stand for.

Sex and the City. The series itself is an icon. When the show debuted in the late 90’s, the world discovered that oh, this is how career-driven women live in a big city. The characters, New York included, are forever embedded as the original blueprint of women led roles that became a worldwide cultural phenomena.