What Dolly Parton Taught Us About True Wealth
Dolly Parton spent a lifetime turning contradictions into strengths.
She grew up with very little money yet became extraordinarily wealthy. She left the mountains of East Tennessee, yet never really left them behind. She created an image that was deliberately extravagant, while underneath the rhinestones was a remarkably disciplined businesswoman.
Her life offers a powerful lesson about wealth because she accumulated two very different kinds of it.
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I define total wealth as the combination of financial wealth and wisdom wealth:
- Financial wealth includes income, investments, businesses, property and financial security.
- Wisdom wealth is harder to measure. It includes knowing yourself, understanding what matters, finding purpose, developing resilience, building meaningful relationships and having the courage to live according to your own definition of success.
Dolly Parton built an extraordinary amount of both.
Step outside your concrete box
Parton was the fourth of 12 children raised in rural Tennessee in a family with very little money. Her childhood later inspired “Coat of Many Colors,” one of her most beloved songs. The coat itself had almost no financial value, but the love with which her mother made it gave it another kind of value. Its value came from relationships, love and gratitude.
That is wisdom wealth.
But being grateful for what we have does not mean accepting every limitation we inherit. I use the term “concrete box” to describe the invisible boundaries that family, circumstances, culture, fear and our own assumptions can construct around our lives.
Over time, we can become so accustomed to those walls that we stop seeing them.
Parton saw hers. The day after graduating from high school, she left for Nashville. She did not reject where she came from. She simply refused to allow her starting point to define her destination.
That may be the first lesson in building total wealth: Know where you come from, but don’t let it tell you how far you can go.
Create income, but own assets
One of Parton’s smartest financial decisions came long before she became a global superstar.
In the 1960s, before she had even achieved a Top 10 hit as a recording artist, she established a publishing company with her uncle Bill Owens. The decision allowed her to maintain control over the copyrights to the songs she wrote.
At a time when many famous musicians surrendered ownership of their work, Parton understood its long-term value.
Years later, Elvis Presley wanted to record her song “I Will Always Love You.” It should have been a dream opportunity, until his business manager demanded half of the publishing rights.
Parton said no.
Imagine turning down Presley while you are still building your career. Yet Parton understood something every investor should understand: Income pays you today. Ownership can pay you for decades.
That decision became enormously valuable when Whitney Houston later recorded “I Will Always Love You,” and the song became a worldwide phenomenon. Because Parton retained her rights as the songwriter, she participated in its enormous financial success.
Most of us will never own a music catalog, but the principle applies to everyone:
- A paycheck creates income
- Savings can purchase investments
- Investments create ownership
- Ownership, combined with time and compounding, can create financial freedom and even generational wealth
Don’t only ask, “How much am I earning?” Also ask, “What am I owning?”
For many people, that can mean building ownership through diversified equities, real estate or a business. Starting early gives compounding more time to work.
Don’t confuse your job with your potential
Parton also understood that one source of income does not have to define the boundaries of your economic life.
In the movie 9 to 5, she famously sang about pouring herself “a cup of ambition.” She had plenty of it.
She did not remain simply a country singer. She crossed into pop music, acted in movies, wrote books, invested in businesses, licensed products and ultimately attached her name and capital to Dollywood.
Forbes valued her music catalog at about $120 million and estimated her net worth at about $450 million. Dollywood became an economic engine in the same region where she had grown up poor. A Tennessee study estimated its annual economic impact at $1.8 billion and associated it with 23,000 jobs.
There is a financial lesson here that goes beyond celebrity entrepreneurship: Diversification does not apply only to portfolios.
Your skills and career create human capital. Saving and investing can convert the income from that human capital into financial capital. With enough time and the power of compounding, your money begins working alongside you.
You do not need five businesses to follow Parton’s example. You need a growth mindset and a commitment to save, invest and own.
Failure is an event, not an identity
Looking back, it might appear that Parton’s extraordinary success was inevitable. It wasn’t.
Projects failed. Her movie Rhinestone disappointed at the box office. A costly prime-time television show was canceled after one season. Separating professionally from Porter Wagoner resulted in an expensive legal settlement.
She kept going.
This is where wisdom wealth becomes essential to financial wealth. Investors experience bear markets. Entrepreneurs have failed ventures. Employees lose jobs. Careers stall. Retirement plans change. No financial plan can eliminate uncertainty or life’s unexpected turns.
Financial wealth can give us the resources to withstand setbacks. Wisdom wealth gives us the resilience to begin again.
Sometimes wealth is the portfolio that carries you through a difficult period. Sometimes it is the mindset that prevents a difficult period from defining the rest of your life.
We need both.
Eventually, ask what money is for
Perhaps Parton’s greatest investment cannot be measured on a balance sheet.
In 1995, she launched the Imagination Library, inspired partly by her father’s inability to read and write. What began as an effort to provide books to children in her home county grew into an international literacy program that has distributed hundreds of millions of books.
Consider the circle her life completed:
- A girl grows up poor in Tennessee
- She steps outside her concrete box
- She turns talent into income
- She converts income into ownership
- Ownership creates financial wealth
- She uses that wealth to give millions of children opportunities that were unavailable to people she loved
That is total wealth creation.
We spend enormous amounts of time asking financial questions:
Those questions matter. I have spent much of my professional life helping people answer them. But eventually, we should ask a bigger question: What is all this wealth for?
If money itself becomes the destination, the finish line keeps moving. There will always be someone with a larger house, a bigger portfolio or a higher net worth.
Wisdom wealth gives you the why — financial wealth provides the how
Dolly Parton understood both sides of wealth. She knew how to make money, protect ownership and build businesses. But she also knew where she came from, what mattered to her and what she wanted her success to accomplish.
She left her rural hometown to pursue her dreams, then used much of what she built to enrich the place she came from.
Perhaps that is her greatest wealth lesson: Don’t simply build a bigger balance sheet. Build a bigger life.
Step outside your concrete box. Build financial wealth. Build wisdom wealth. Together, build total wealth.
Feroz Ansari, CFP®, is a portfolio manager at Compak Asset Management and an adjunct professor at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of The Wisdom and Wealth Solution, published by Kiplinger Books and a USA Today national bestseller.
To learn more, visit wisdomandwealthsolution.com or subscribe to The Wisdom and Wealth Solution YouTube channel.
