Whenever I used to hear the saying ‘time is the most precious commodity you have’ I used to dismiss this as something only a poor person would say, as in my eyes money (was) the most precious commodity you have.
Once I started my ‘self-help’ phase, reading all the classic books by the greats such as Napoleon Hill, Dale Carnegie etc. I continued to see that phrase popping up all over the place… ‘time is the most precious commodity you have’.
I was around 19 years of age at the time and was working three jobs straight out of high school – I was working in a pet food factory on both Saturdays and Sundays, I worked as a horticulturist (plant weeder) from 9 – 5 during the week and filled at least two or three of my evenings stacking shelves at a local supermarket after hours.
I was convinced I was on the road to riches; I was getting paid for working 70~ hours a week.
It didn’t take long for me to get burnt out and realize that the quality of life in essentially all other areas e.g. relationships with friends and family, my fitness and my sanity were beginning to decline at a reasonably rapid rate.
When I started my first online business selling gym singlets online the ‘time is the most precious commodity we have’ started to click.
I could leverage the massive marketplace that is Amazon/eBay in order to get my product out there infront of customers 24 hours a day while I could focus my own time on doing other things. Over time I figured out what worked and what didn’t work and was able to resign from all three of those soul sucking jobs.
It’s at this point that I realized money can be made in many, many ways – it is your time (i.e. the year I spent literally working around the clock) that can never been re-lived or bought back, regardless of how large your fortune may be.
Look at any successful person, whether they be a professional bodybuilder, the CEO of a fortune 500 company, a professional blogger or other – a trend I quickly noticed (and I’m sure you will have to when you think about it) among these people is they’re a lot more selfish and conscious of the way they spend their time then the way they spend their money.
Don’t get me wrong, the majority of these success, financially free individuals got into these positions BECAUSE they knew how to manage their money… yet now that their time is far more valuable they are a lot more conscious of how their time is spent (in terms of both who it is spent with and what it is spent doing) than how they spend their money.
An average joe does not care about how he spends his days or how time is allocated, they’ll spend large amounts of time focusing on things of little or no importance and ironically will brush over the big decisions. A wealthy individual will respect your time as they understand how valuable it is. The average joe will waste your time frivolously if you let him.
I do not want to be rich to surround myself with material objects. I want to be rich so I can utilize the most precious commodity I have, my time however I please without being a slave to the clock for a petty allowance from the ‘boss man’.
As cliché as it sounds, be selfish with your time. You can never buy it back.
What’re your thoughts on the importance of the time we have? Let me know your take in the comments below!