Time Is Your Most Valuable Asset

Your life is but a fleeting moment in history. If there are any doubts in your mind, take a Sunday drive through your local cemetery to observe people who also thought they had a lot of time left. An inscription on the floor within a Crypt of the Capuchin Monks, next to a pile of bones, is insightful, “What you are, they once were. What they are, you will be.”

As human beings, we really only need to focus on three days in our lives: yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Yesterday comprises all the days that have gone before today and cannot be changed. Today is the only day that you have to really live. Tomorrow is a potential day in your future but is not guaranteed. Ernest Hemingway wrote, ““There is nothing else than now. There is neither yesterday, certainly, nor is there any tomorrow. How old must you be before you know that? There is only now… And if you stop complaining and asking for what you never will get, you will have a good life. A good life is not measured by any biblical span.”

In the end, each of us as ONLY 86,400 seconds each day (60 seconds in a minute x 60 minutes in an hour x 24 hours in a day = 86,400 seconds). How we use those seconds causes there to be over 7 billion personal stories on our one planet.

So why is time so precious? First, you only have the present to create the life that you want. Planning for tomorrow is wise but none of us is guaranteed a tomorrow. Second, unlike other assets in your net worth statement, such as a car, home, commercial real estate, business, stocks, bonds, mutual funds, cash, etc., once you spend your time, it can never be replaced. If you doubt how short your life really is in history, I recommend that you buy enough marbles to place into a bowl to represent your potential remaining weekends according to standard life expectancy tables. Every weekend, throw away one marble to reflect one less weekend in your life. This simple exercise will keep you focused on three things: 1) how fast your life is passing you by, especially if you do not take care of your health, 2) the need to make every weekend count with your loved ones; and 3) the motivation to fulfill your life purpose, and your bucket list, quickly. 

The bible also describes that there are different periods of time in everyone’s life. Ecclesiastes 3, King James Version (KJV), states: 

3 To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:

2 A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;

3 A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;

4 A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;

5 A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;

6 A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away;

7 A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;

8 A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace. 

Rick Warren describes time in his book, The Purpose Driven Life, as follows: 

“Time is your most precious gift because you only have a set amount of it. You can make more money, but you can’t make more time. When you give someone your time, you are giving them a portion of your life that you’ll never get back. Your time is your life. That is why the greatest gift you can give someone is your time.

It is not enough to just say relationships are important; we must prove it by investing time in them… Relationships take time and effort, and the best way to spell love is “T-I-M-E.”

So if everyone has only 24 hours in a day, then why do some people seem to achieve so much more with their time than others? The greatest secret about time that I have learned from the wealthy is the concept of “leveraged time.”

By utilizing the talents of other people, organizing processes, effectively using technology, and wisely investing money, it is possible to get multiple tasks done simultaneously in the same 24 hours per day. For example, let’s assume that the only day that you have available to clean your home, go shopping, do laundry, cut the grass, etc. is Saturday. I would venture to say that by the end of your Saturday you will be exhausted. In fact, you probably will have accomplished little more than those specific tasks during that day. Now let’s imagine that you have enough money to pay for other people to do all these tasks for you on Saturday. This would free up your time on Saturday to go to the gym in the early morning, play a round of golf before lunch, spend the afternoon at the spa or working in the office, and maybe even have a dinner party for your closest friends that evening. It is easy to see that by leveraging time, you are actually creating extra time per day to do other things that you love PLUS get the required tasks done for that day. I constantly see this leveraged time model used by successful businesses and wealthy families to exponentially leverage time to accomplish multiple goals, and often in different geographical locations as well.