“Earn with your mind, not with your time” – Naval Ravikant
“Wealthy people do three things. They stop trading time for money. They make the money work for them. And they give as much value to people as they can.” – Wallstreet Trapper
“Slow down and remember this: Most things make no difference. Being busy is a form of laziness — lazy thinking and indiscriminate action. Being overwhelmed is often as unproductive as doing nothing, and is far more unpleasant. Being selective — doing less — is the path of the productive. Focus on the important few and ignore the rest.” – Tim Ferris
“Dedicate your time to learning knowledge that your mind can apply to earning. You can then start a cycle where every day you’ll wake up wealthier than when you were when went to sleep the night before – and continue on that cycle for the rest of your life. ” – Someone on the internet
If we are to truly be “rich”, we must stop trading our time for money. Rich doesn’t mean to have as much money as you want, rich is having as much free time as possible. Time is our most valuable asset. If we want to be rich, we want to have time do to the things we want, when we want, and with who we want. Often times that means having a lot of money so that you can pay for others to help you take care of things and get your time back. Time is the ultimate currency. No matter if you are rich or poor, on average we all have the same amount of time, 24 hours in a day for about 70 years, and there is only so much we can buy back. We must make sure everyday we are thinking about how to better leverage our minds and abilities so that we can get more time back. Instead of trying to work a full week, we should instead make sure we are working on the most important things and moving the needle. I try to think about this on a weekly basis. I ask myself these questions:
“If I only had 4 hours to work this week, what would be the most important thing I should work on?”
“What work can I eliminate by delegating it to someone else?”
“What work am I doing that someone else would do better than me?”
“What work did I do in the past week that I did not enjoy or that I did not add real value?”
“Where do I feel like I am spinning my wheels?”
“Where did I waste my time in the past week?”
Asking these questions on a weekly basis helps me to self reflect on where I need to focus. Before I would feel guilty if I wasn’t working every hour of the week and a lot of that time would be wasted on stupid things like slack and constant emails. I love Tim Ferris’s quote because a lot of work we do is pointless, so it is essential that we are conscious of what we are doing and WHY we are doing it. Is the work we are doing really adding value?