Leading Thought: Money can be made and lost, people will come and go, but time is forever gone if it’s spent rather than invested.
Time is the only thing on this planet given to every living being - in the truest sense of the word - equally. There are 86,400 seconds in a day. You and I get the same amount, simultaneously, along with every other member of our humble, floating rock each moment we are in existence. So what happens from there? People make choices. Hundreds of billions of choices each and every second about what to do with this time. Some people choose to exchange their time for money. Others choose to exchange their money for other peoples’ time. Many choose to use it in pursuit of fulfilling endeavors such as being with friends and family, or doing an activity that brings them joy and fulfillment. Even more still choose to waste it.
Most people are probably familiar with the concept that there is a relationship between time and money, but many fail to actually apply this useful analogy when making decisions about how to use their time. Thinker and investor Naval Ravikant has pointed out many of these failings such as a high earning individual shopping for groceries when the tools exist to have someone deliver all of the same food for less cost than that individual would make in that hour of time used shopping for groceries. In Naval’s example, the high earning individual could simply use their money to unlock someone else’s time thus freeing them to spend that hour investing in something that would yield a higher return.
As I typed the above example, I could already feel the push back from the “money doesn’t buy happiness” crowd, and they would be 1000% correct. You cannot buy happiness with money. However, this does not mean that using the analogy of money to help you better value your time and, as a result, make better decisions about how to allocate it is invalid. The advantages provided by having money are obvious when trying to support this assertion. If you have money, that means you do not have to exchange your time for it in order to pay for your basic needs (food, shelter, etc.) and are free to invest that time in more desirable pursuits whether that is family, friendship, or finally becoming a scratch golfer. Yet, if you are still in a position where you are forced to decide between using your time to generate money or investing it in other pursuits, then contemplating your personal exchange rate can offer some significant clarity. In other words, what is the relationship between your monetary exchange rate with the rest of the world and your valuation of other meaningful pursuits? Are you undervaluing your own time? Are you allocating to priorities efficiently? By answering these questions, you can use the analogy of money to help you maximize what matters most.
Regardless of whether you put greater value on relationships, experiences, physical goods, or money itself, investing your time in order to grow your abundance of any of these things is logically preferable to blindly spending that time. So, the next time you are mindlessly working through a task, I would encourage you to stop yourself and ask two quick questions: 1) Am I spending or investing my time? and 2) Is there a better way to maximize my ROI?
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