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The most important and biggest asset in the world

Reading time: 8-11 minutes (2.140 words)

What is the most important and biggest asset of all? What can you never have enough of? What is limited and beyond your control? There is nothing more important on this earth than time. Time is the same for everyone. No matter your age, IQ, race or anything. There are 24 hours in a day. No one has 21 or 28. When your time is up, you are dead. So time is literally a matter of life and death.

When you start seeing time as the most important factor and investment in your life you will soon come to the conclusion that you have been wasting time:

  • Watching television / Netflix every night
  • Working for someone else
  • Gaming
  • Being stuck in traffic
  • etc.

Isn't it true that people always run out of time or don’t “have” time but in the meantime they spend their free time on useless things? If you only had two months to live, would you still sit in front of the television every night? Play games? Work for someone else? Probably not.

You often hear from people who had a near-death experience that they live their lives very differently than they did before. This is because these people have realised that life can end just like that. Time has become an important factor for these people. They spend their time doing the things they always wanted to do before it is too late.

In our current society, everyone is running out of time. We recharge on the weekend to face the hectic work week again. Friday is the best day of the week for 99% off people because it is the last day before the weekend. On the weekend you can determine how to spend your time instead of your boss. The whole society lives this way and you can see it everywhere:

  • Important sport events are almost always on the weekend (fri-sun)
  • Entertainment venues have more visitors at the weekend
  • Television programs often have their main program in the weekend
  • People go away for the weekend instead of during the week
  • At many restaurants you pay more in the weekend
  • Etc.

The only reason is because people don't have free time during the week. They have to work for their money. Or to put it in a different perspective, they trade free time for money. The free time that’s left over is spent on "useless" things as mentioned earlier.

I too "wasted" a lot of time watching television and gaming. At that time I had no idea that I was wasting my time. I enjoyed doing it and I still do. However, my mindset has changed and I realise that there are other things that require my attention. The things I have always wanted: To make my dreams come true!

At some point (a few years ago) I got the realisation that there must be more to life. This realisation came after watching Robert Kiyosaki: Get Rich in 60 Minutes and reading Rich Dad, Poor Dad. Not that my life is boring but I was missing something. There has to be more to life than working forty hours every week for my money till I can retire, right? I'm already happy if I make it to seventy in a healthy way. One out of three people get cancer these days. In addition, I have experienced several times that colleagues did not make it to sixty or died just before they could retire.

Time is limited so you better use this time to make your dreams come true. The big problem for many people is making time and taking action. How many people do you know who make up a different excuse every time?

  • "I don't have time to exercise"
  • "I'm tired of working"
  • "I don't know how"
  • "I start on January first"
  • "But I already work forty hours a week.."
  • “I have children..”

Then they end up back in the same habits and wonder why other people are lucky. Instead, they buy a ticket in the lottery and hope they become a millionaire. The fact is, hundreds of millions of people buy lottery tickets all over the world. So there is a common goal, people desperately want to win a lot of money. But why are they not willing to put in the time to make it happen? The chances to win a million in the lottery are literally zero.

People spend their time in the wrong way. Watching television is fun but you learn pretty little from it. Besides, most programs you can watch on the television are fake. It’s better to use your time to make your dreams come true. Everyone would like to make millions. But in reality they remain stuck in the "rat race" all their lives: 

Penke

Work, spend money, work even more, spend more money.

But if you like working for someone else, don’t need a lot of money to live a happy life and retire when you're seventy then that’s ok too! You can spend your time however you want (only not in your boss’s time). Also, investing your free time does not mean you need to give up your television or gaming hours. Just do the important stuff first before you turn on the TV or start up a game.

Time is an asset, invest wisely

Every day when you go to work you pay with your free time. you basically made your work a time liability. You exchange time for money. We hardly have any time left to enjoy our lives because:

  • We don’t have enough time
  • We have no money if we don't spend time working

This is a vicious cycle. We all want the free time but we also need the money. And the only way to get money is to exchange it for free time. At Least that is what most people think. There is a reason why 99% of the people are employees and not investors or business owners.

But this vicious cycle can be broken. And the only thing you need is more money. Because with enough money, you can buy free time! If you own enough assets (machines) that will generate money for you, you don’t have to exchange free time working for money. You can still go to work but you don’t have to.

Of course you can still enjoy life when you are seventy but how many people can actually do this? The chances are pretty big that you can't do certain things anymore at that age. Your life energy decreases year by year, and so does the power of your dreams. Why wait to live your dream? Let's go over how much time we actually spend working for someone else:

How much free time are you currently trading for money?

  • Of the seven days in the week, you work five and have two days off (based on a forty hour work week).
  • You work 70% of the week for 30% time off. And most people do this almost every week their entire lives until they are seventy years old and can retire.
  • A negative return of 70%

Would you invest in stocks if it gave you a negative return of 70%? Then why are you doing this with your free time which is more important than any stock?

Your time consists of:

  • Your free time
  • The time you have to exchange for money (work time)

No matter what, everyone has to exchange free time for money at some point in their life. The business owner spends way more free time than any employee. Also, the investor also invests free time to find and create assets. The difference is, the business owner and investor don’t exchange free time for money. The business owner does not get paid when he starts a business, he’s not selling anything yet. The investor first needs to spend time looking and finding new assets to invest in. He does not get paid for doing so. They get results after the hard work is done. But that result might also be negative.

You can determine how long you are willing to exchange free time for money. If you really enjoy your job, then exchanging free time for money is not a bad thing. But it certainly is if you hate your job. One simple question that will determine how much you love your job would be:

“If you received your monthly paycheck without working for it for the rest of your life, would you still work the same amount of hours you do now?”

Most people would work less or stop entirely. The only reason people work till their seventies is because they need the money to become creditworthy and to buy stuff they want. Not necessarily because they love working all day. It’s just something everybody does and they teach you this way of life at school. This is called conformity. We basically follow everybody else. You already know how you’ll end up when you retire. You just have to look at all the people that are already retired:

  • Broke
  • Rely on their pension or government payments for income
  • Health issues sooner or later
  • Etc

The difference between an employee and business owner is that the business owner leverages his free time to earn millions. Every business owner that just started a company does not earn any money yet. They first need to produce a product or service. Think about a writer who is creating their own book. Does the writer get paid while he is writing? No. He invests hundreds or thousands of hours of free time in writing the book without getting paid. But this free time is not wasted because once he’s done writing, he can start selling the book. The potential earnings of the book depend on a few factors:

  • What age has the target audience
  • What is the genre

This is just a simplification but let’s say the target audience are 18-30 year old english readers. From the audience range, about 50% is reading the genre the book is about. In the U.S. alone, there are about 40 million people between age 18-30. The writer targets 50% which is about 20 million potential customers. The book costs $14,99. 

  • $14,99 * 20 million customers = $300 million

Even if only 1% of the 20 million potential customers buys the book he still earns:

  • 0.01 * 20 million = 200,000 * $14,99 = $3 million

If you are a good writer you can write a book within one or two years or even sooner. But the writer does not only need to write a book. He also needs to find a publisher. Maybe he also wants to sell his book on his own website. So there are more things to do then just writing.

The beauty of this asset is that the writers earns money long after he finished writing. He can still sell the same book after twenty years. Just look at your own book collection if you have one. What is the oldest book you bought? Did you ever buy a book that was over ten years old? So your potential income not only relies on the current amount of people between 18-30 but also customers in the future. You might have little children now, what are the chances they will see a movie or read a book about Harry Potter in their lifetime? For example, I bought the book "The Richest Man in Babylon" a few years ago. The original was written in 1926. Can you imagine that.. A book written almost 100 years ago still making money!

Of course the negative free time ratio 70% - 30% is not quite correct because you also have "free" time in the evening. But many people use this time to rest from a long day of work through:

  • Watching television
  • Gaming
  • Exercising (and then being too tired to do anything else)
  • Etc.

Nothing wrong with that of course, at least if you want to work for your money until you are seventy.

As long as your ratio remains 70% - 30%, you're constantly behind. It also doesn't matter how much money you earn because you spend it just as fast. What if you could reverse the ratio? 70% free time and 30% work time? Five days of weekends and two days of work. That sounds a lot better already! You still have to work for your money but two days are manageable.

In reality, 99% of the people don’t invest their free time building assets. Instead they spend all the money they earn on liabilities like fancy cars and big houses. And they invest their free time mostly in entertainment. Just look at time as the most important and biggest asset in the world. Look at how you are spending your time right now. And most importantly, what do you want?

Penke

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