What would you do?

In 1991 I was 21 and working in broadcasting when a colleague won Lotto. Back then there was no Powerball, and the big prize was $1.1 million. It took him about three seconds to hand in his resignation and drive straight to the Ferrari dealership. Yes, his second car in life was a Ferrari, just like Magnum PI. The man had range.

Every once in a while, working a Saturday night shift, he'd show up with a different beautiful woman on his arm, jewellery catching the light, grinning like someone who'd figured something out. Nine months later it was all gone, and look, let's be honest about this, it looked like a genuinely fun nine months, quite awesome in fact. At the end of it, all he had was a house. The one decision that probably felt the least exciting at the time.

I've been thinking about that guy a lot lately.

Last month, the average Fonterra shareholder received around $400,000, a number that would take most New Zealanders the better part of a decade to save, landing in a single season. I know a guy who sells European cars, we spoke last week about the record month that was on the way. He didn't need to explain why.

Here's the thing about unexpected money. It doesn't reveal opportunity. It reveals character, and in my experience, what it reveals isn't always something people would choose to put on a billboard.

The hard years do something useful to people. They sharpen you in ways the good years don't, because when every dollar costs something, you spend it like it costs something. You get creative out of necessity, you solve problems with what you've got, and you find out pretty quickly what actually matters. Then the good season arrives and that sharpness quietly goes. The creative problem-solver becomes a cheque-writer, the discipline that built the business gets traded for the comfort that easy money makes possible, and it all happens gradually enough that nobody really notices until it's done.

That's how windfalls hollow out businesses. Not dramatically. Quietly.

So what would I actually do with $400,000? Most of it, I'd leave alone, long enough for it to stop feeling like $400,000 and start feeling like a decision, because that transition takes longer than most people allow. Then, before I spent a dollar of it, I'd ask one question.

Does this make us more capable of doing more?

Not more comfortable, not more impressive, not easier to manage. More capable.

There's a real difference between money that looks like an investment and money that actually increases what your business can do, and it's worth being honest with yourself about which one you're making. Equipment that multiplies output, training that compounds over years, a person who can do something you currently can't, infrastructure that removes a ceiling you've been quietly bumping against for years. That's capability. Everything else is lifestyle with a business case stapled to it.

The operators I'd back over the next decade aren't the ones who celebrate loudest or spend fastest. They're the ones who get quietly harder to compete with, who use the good season to build something the bad season can't touch.

The easiest thing in the world is to take easy money and spend it the easy way.

So, what would you do?