#252. Dad, tell me about time?

Time is incredibly precious. Waste it wisely.

Dad, you’ve often said that time is money, but what is the real value of time? 

Well, time is really all you’ve got.  If you have both time and good health, you’ve really got something valuable!  Good health is something everybody wants because life is way more enjoyable with it, but without time, you cannot enjoy good health.

Unlike almost anything else you can name, time is something you cannot hang onto. 

Just as gold has more lasting value than paper money, time has much more value than money, because money is simply representative of the time spent acquiring it.  Money is humans’ best attempt at storing something so fleeting, for use later on.

The sad fact is that money really does not represent time well.  Just as a photograph does not come close to having the value of the real person, so money does not come close to adequately representing the value of time.  That’s why it’s so tragic when people are willing to trade their time for the highest hourly wage they can find, even if it’s doing something they hate.

You can’t replace the time you spend doing something you hate, no matter how much you’re being paid for it!  That time is gone.  If you do that, you’re like the old blues song, “spending your life in sin and misery, because being miserable for money IS a sin”.

Time is much too valuable to be wasted.  You only have each minute once, and then it’s gone forever.

Furthermore, going for the highest possible hourly pay in trade for your time is not even leveraging your time.  Time is so valuable.  You should be looking for ways to create recurring or passive income so that the time you spend now continues to pay you in the future.  That’s what investing is all about. 

Many people think of investing as something you do with your money when you have enough of it, but when you begin to realize that investing is something you do with your time, it gives you a whole new perspective.  You are spending (investing) every second of your time in something.  You can never recover the time that has already passed.

However, if you spend your time wisely so that it will pay you in the future in the form of time freed up to do things you enjoy, rather than feeling forced to spend time at the office, you have invested your time wisely!

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