“The Happiest Place on Earth”
I took my eight-year-old son, Eli, to Disneyland last week. Just the two of us for three days, no agenda beyond being together. I had planned the surprise quietly for weeks. I wanted to do something great that belonged only to him during a season of life that has asked more of him than an eight-year-old should have to give.
His parents’ divorce has meant new houses, new routines, new versions of normal that he didn’t choose and is still learning to hold. I wanted three days that asked nothing of him. No adjusting. No sharing. Just his dad, and Disneyland
I have spent my career helping people through financial planning. With my TCI Wealth Advisors clients, I know how to talk about growth rates and time horizons and the quiet compounding math that aims to help turn discipline into freedom. What I did not expect from this trip was that a theme park would give me the clearest illustration I’ve ever had of why that work really matters.
Illusion vs Reality
I told myself the trip was a gift I was giving Eli. But, somewhere around the second time he grabbed my hand mid-sprint toward Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance, I understood that I had it backwards.
I wasn’t simply taking my son to Disneyland. I was experiencing Eli experience Disneyland. And nothing in that park — not the fireworks, the rides, or the sheer engineered wonder of the place came anywhere close to competing with the quieter magic of watching my son feel pure, unguarded joy.
There is a particular stillness that settles over you when you stop participating in your child’s happiness and start witnessing it. You are standing right beside them but seeing something they can’t see themselves — the totality of their unselfconscious delight. Eli wasn’t performing or managing his joy for whoever he thought was watching. He was simply in it. And I don’t know that I have ever felt more at peace, more entirely there, than I did standing a few feet back watching him be that happy.
Two Moments I Keep Replaying
One afternoon we had a reservation for something easy to miss on a map. A small, private workshop is tucked into a corner of Galaxy’s Edge where a handful of families at a time are led through building their own lightsaber, guided by actual Jedi who staff the experience. It isn’t just a show. The Jedi look the kids in the eye, explain that they are recruiting, ask each child why they are there, and treat every answer as though it genuinely matters.
Eli took it more seriously than I have ever seen him take anything. He listened to every instruction without fidgeting once. He turned each component over in his hands before choosing it, deliberate, like the wrong piece might mean something. When the Jedi leaning over his workbench told him he had built well, Eli didn’t grin his usual easy grin. He went quiet and stood up a little straighter, holding a saber he made with his own hands, somewhere between pride and pure awe of the Jedi who had praised his work. I have never seen him hold himself quite like that, and I will not ever forget it.
The other moment happened on Guardians of the Galaxy. Eli had been working up the nerve to go on the ride all morning, and by the time we were strapped in I could feel his hands locked on the restraint, his breathing quick and shallow. I leaned over and told him we could still get off if he needed to. Before he could answer, the ride lurched into motion and the first big drop hit in total darkness. His hand clamped onto my arm with everything he had, and for one full second I thought, oh no, I’ve made a mistake.
Then, at the bottom of the drop, a door blew open and light poured across his face. I watched in real time as his eyes went from wide with fear to wide with something else entirely, like a switch had been thrown. He never let go of my arm for the rest of the ride, but it wasn’t fear holding on anymore. It was pure happiness. The second we stepped off, he was already pulling me back toward the line, chasing that exact feeling through every ride that came after.
The Thing Money Was Always For
At some point on day two, watching him run ahead of me toward Fantasyland, here is what struck me: every financial plan I have ever built for a client, every plan I have ever built for myself, has been in service of moments exactly like this one. Not the vacation. The presence.
We talk about financial planning in the language of numbers because numbers are what we can measure. Savings rates. Portfolio balances. Time horizons. But underneath the spreadsheets, what people (and I) are investing in is the ability to be somewhere fully — like my three days in Anaheim with my son happy and my phone barely touched. To not be pulled sideways by an inbox or a deadline or the cost of something. The real yield of a financial plan isn’t a number on a statement. It is an uninterrupted afternoon with your kid at a place you chose because you wanted to see his face when the parade came by and when we finally tracked down and met Luke Skywalker and stood up to Darth Vader.
I think I had always known this in some abstract, professional sense. But I had never felt it as plainly as I did watching Eli that week. Financial security is not the destination. It is what may help buy back your attention. It’s the mechanism that lets a father clear his calendar for three days and give his son something no line item can quite capture: his undivided self.
Presence and Stillness as the Actual Return
It would have been easy to make this trip about logistics like FastPasses, the ride order, the character meet-and-greets. We did all of that, and none of it was the point. The point was three days where the only thing on my calendar was Eli. No competing obligations. No one else to think about. Just him.
Children don’t always remember the specifics of what you did with them. They remember how it felt. For a boy learning that two households and a family that looks different than it used to, I don’t think the rides were what mattered most. What mattered was three days of knowing, with total certainty, that he had his father’s full attention — earned not by chance, but by years of decisions that made this kind of presence possible. But presence alone isn’t the whole return. There is the stillness underneath it, that quiet I felt watching Eli from a few feet back, no longer needing anything from the moment except to witness it.
The point of financial planning is not just the ability to be somewhere. It‘s the ability to stop bracing. To not be doing math in the back of your mind about what the day costs or what is waiting for you when you get home. That stillness is its own kind of dividend, separate from presence but inseparable from it. You can be physically present and still be far from still. It took years of planning to earn both at once.
That, I think, is the case for financial planning that no chart has ever made for me as well as watching my son ride Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance twice in a row. Every dollar saved, every plan built with discipline instead of impulse, is really an investment in future presence AND stillness. The ability to say yes to three unhurried days with the people you love, and to actually be present enough inside them to notice.
What I’m Carrying Home
If there’s a lesson from this trip that I want to hold onto longer than the tan lines and the park map still folded in my glove compartment, it’s this: the reason that we plan for the future is because it eventually asks us to show up for someone, fully, in the present. The elaborate parts of the trip fade. The simpler, unexpected ones don’t.
Eli will grow up, and the details of this week will soften the way childhood memories do. But during a season when so much has felt decided around him instead of with him, I hope the deeper feeling of being fully seen, fully chosen, and held in his father’s attention remains.
I went to Disneyland thinking I was giving my son three special days. I came home with a renewed appreciation for something I have seen in so many client stories over the years: that the greatest return on financial planning isn’t what is seen on a statement, but in the moments it makes possible.
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