Ming’s Wisdom

One of the most overrated techniques (in all of life really) is re-investing your time so that it can compound itself. If indeed time is money, then time can be invested and can compound annually just as money does.

I’ve recently been thinking about this, and last night was the breakthrough I needed to really understand it. I couldn’t really sleep last night, at least in part due to this realization, and finally this morning happened upon this article on Timothy Ferriss’s blog on fourhourworkweek.com. Seems like Tim Ferriss found a guy named David who has it figured out. In my opinion, this one simple idea could fuel unimaginable success. Read and prepare to have your mind blown:

[Bear with me, this is somewhat rough at the moment — my initial quandary was whether time, like currency, could be invested to produce a compounding effect. After a bit of thought, my conclusion is that the value of ones time could experience a significant gain, and perhaps a compounding effect over time, given an investment of [that present-state] time in knowledge, skill or other capacity, and a reinvestment of future gains (just like currency).

Money and currency — accumulated excess money — represent one part of your capacity to transact in the marketplace, and can be exchanged for help from others in the form of products or services, including “things” like consumables, depreciable and appreciable assets. Similarly every action you take, whether it be transaction-related or not, requires the expenditure of some amount of time, which is roughly fixed for all of us (say 10,000 working days between the ages of 22 and 62).

Much like currency can be exchanged for appreciable assets that can grow with a compounding effect over time if the gains are re-invested, my theory is that time can be thought about in a similar way, which may lead to more effective action.

To put this in terms of your thinking from your book, lets say you work 40 hours per week simply performing tasks requested by your employer, none of which produce any additional future potential for generating income for yourself.

This is the equivalent of spending your money on consumables or living expenses. It’s single use, and gives you no real future gain, aside from whatever currency you might earn in the moment. Now, you decide to outsource 50% of your tasks to India, producing the same outcomes with 50% of your time. You just doubled the value of your time compared to before (less the additional expense for the help). Now, with that free time, you get more rigorous about working out, studying, and building your networks. You increase your energy, skill, and capacity working with others and manage to produce yet the same results that were taking 50% of your time with only 30%. If you keep reinvesting some of your time in additional gains in your capacity to act, you can theoretically have a compounding effect with the value of your time (rather than time itself). Just like investing currency, the earlier you start this process, and continue to invest in your capacity, the more time your capacity has to compound, and the greater outcomes you can produce during your lifetime.]

http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2008/05/07/lifestyle-investing-compound-time-like-compound-interest/#more-346

I feel that almost everyone focusses solely on the compounding of money, but have never realized that time can be compounded as well. And of course in turn they would miss the even deeper realization that the compounding of time can itself have compounding effects on money. This is truly one of the greatest advancements in philosophy and self development of all time.

It’s been two weeks since the last time I’ve written, so what have I been up to in this time? I’ve been reading The 4-hour Workweek. It’s quickly become my favorite book of all time. I feel that the focus of the book is not solely on reducing the amount of work you do, instead this book is a philosophy to live by in order to become more effective in life, in a fun way. I would highly recommend this book to anyone who would like to become very successful in any aspect of life. If you’ve ever wondered why some people are so gifted, and are always more successful at school without much studying, can have more friends than people you’ve met in your life, run a huge corporation while still having time to hang out on the weekends, this book explains exactly how it’s done.

Some examples of techniques described in the book:

• 95% of what you’re doing currently probably doesn’t contribute to your ultimate goals, so stop doing them
• you have more stuff than you need (every one of you). they take up valuable time and mind-space, so get rid of them
• do enough to get the results you need, and stop stressing about the diminishing returns that require 5x the effort
• time is a measurement of wealth just as important as money
• giving others the power to make decisions, so that you don’t need to waste time making them

Many of the ideas introduced take much more involved explanation that I won’t go into here. I felt that some of the concepts have really shown me a new way of thinking. I recommend that everyone read the book and at least give its ideas a chance, and possibility get much more in return.

Let me know if you read it and what you thought of it!