Time is True Wealth
Time is True Wealth
You’ve heard the saying, “Time is money” but I say time isn’t money. Time is just, is something that’s just really special in our lives. Time allows us the freedom to go out and do the different things that we want to do with our family, pursue other business opportunities, pursue hobbies, other interests and so forth.
Time is a valuable thing to us and time is, I think of time as really value, excuse me, not value but wealth. It’s the true wealth that we have. It’s not the amount of money that we have or the amount of things that we have, but the freedom that we have to pursue the other things in life that we might enjoy besides earning a paycheck or helping our business to be more profitable.
I think about a particular story. I had a client one time that had an employee working for them, and that employee was hugely important to the business but what frustrated the owner was that employee only worked about 12 hours a week, and yet produced tremendous sales in the business and helped the business to be very profitable. The business owner came to me and said, “They’re only working 12 hours a week. How can I get them to do more?” I said, “In that 12 hours a week that person is working, are they producing at or above the standard that anybody else does in the company?”, and they said, “Yeah, they’re best. They can really get it done.”
I said, “Well, what do you care with the rest of the time? If they’re meeting your expectations and if they’re one of your very best employees and they can get their job done in 12 hours a week, go over to them and pat them on the back and say, “Good job, you’re great,” and maybe we can learn something from them.”
Those type of people really follow the Pareto Rule when you think about it. They know that 20% of their time produces 80% of their results, and so they don’t waste their time on the other 80%. If you think about a regular work-week, five days long, if you think about it, 20% of that is 1 day. Do you think that if you boiled it all down and summarized down, 1 day’s worth of effort from you produces 80% of the results you bring to a company.
Now I discounted that the first time I heard that but as I’ve measured it in my own life and in other people’s lives, it might not be exactly 20%. It might be a third of your time or whatever, but the rule stands. A smaller portion of your time produces the bulk of your results. Think about how you work and what you do, and whether you’re focused on what’s really important and whether you let go of the things that don’t bring much incremental value.
If you do, you’ll find that you have a lot more time to pursue those other things that you enjoy doing in your life, and you’ll find that you get real wealth right now in addition to the financial wealth that you’re building in your company.
