(The following is an excerpt from the book, Hacking Normal by John Stevenot available on Amazon.com)
Time is the one truly scarce and limited resource that we cannot get back. You only have so many seconds, minutes, hours, and days; you might as well make sure that you are using them in the best way(s) possible.
Because time is a nonrenewable resource, it is the most valuable commodity we possess. Yet, for some reason, we willingly throw it away by remaining in dead- end jobs that bring us neither feelings of personal achievement nor opportunities to experience life to the fullest. Instead, we waste away, tethered to the idea that we are sacrificing our time now for greater time in the future.
This, unfortunately, is a fallacy.
The future is not guaranteed to anyone; therefore, you cannot invest your time into the future. A man named Steve Bates, a small businessman in the Cincinnati area, opened my eyes to this reality of life when he said, “A majority of elderly people that I know, have said that the final ten years of their life [during retirement] have been underwhelming and unfulfilling.”
Steve explained to me that these people waited for their dreams to come to them, rather than seeking them out. They saw retirement as the moment when their dreams would come to fruition. Finally, when retirement did come, they found themselves unable to live a life like they had dreamed they would.
Steve explained that lots of factors kept them from achieving the high level of fulfillment they desired. The causes are too many to list, but common causes were: health problems, financial instability, lack of motivation, and fatigue.
The point is, these people waited their entire lives to do something exciting, and when it came time to pull the trigger, they couldn’t. The dream had slipped away.
Money Value of Time (MVT)
There’s a fundamental concept in finance called the time value of money (TVM). The time value of money says: money available now is worth more than the same amount in the future due to its potential earning capacity over time.
To possibly oversimplify the concept, $10 today is likely going to be worth more now than $10 in thirty years due to factors such as inflation and taxes.
Money, therefore, loses value, unless it is invested into something that can grow faster than the factors trying to subtract value.
The time value of money also assumes that our money will continue to have value indefinitely. Sure, the spending power of a dollar may rise and fall over time, but the concept of money (the ability to hold and transfer value) will always exist.
There will always be a demand for some means of transferring value, whether in paper bills, digital code, or animal furs. Thus, money has longevity and the ability to transfer value into new systems as they evolve.
Here’s where the problem comes in: you do not have the same growth and longevity capacity as money. Money will outlast your knees, your back, your mental facilities, and your desires.
Money doesn’t have an expiration date – you do.
You, an organic ball of matter, will degrade and lose capacity and value in the marketplace. You, a mere mortal, must succumb to the inevitability that your time will run out.
Yet, many of us treat our finite amount of time as if we can invest it in a “time portfolio” that will compound and grow. Because of this, we are okay with telling ourselves that we can spend 40 hours a week sitting at a desk instead of playing with our kids or riding a bike through the fall leaves as winter approaches.
We somehow believe that by spending 30 years sitting behind a desk and sacrificing our time to the gods of industry, we will get paid in scores when we reach our retirement.
Sorry, but that’s bullshit.
That’s not how time works for humans. Treating yourself like a stock portfolio that will grow by 8 percent annually is nonsensical and leads to an unhappy and unfulfilled life.
When it comes to spending or investing our scarce resource of time, we believe in a fallacy that states: “Sacrificing our time now will give us more and better time in the future.”
That’s the dream that most Baby Boomers and their progeny ascribe to, but it’s wrong. Bronnie Ware wrote a book called The Top Five Regrets of the Dying, where she cultivated and shared her census of the regrets people have while on their deathbeds.
What were the top two regrets on the list?
First, I wish I had lived a life true to myself, not what others expected of me. Second, I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.
Ding. Ding. Wake up!
The top two regrets of the dying are that they didn’t spend more time living life how they wanted to (rather than living the way society told them to live) and that they worked so hard (sacrificing all their time to the company). Yet, even with this unbelievably eye-opening book, we insist on forcing people down a normal path that so many regret when it comes to the end.