“The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.” — Henry David Thoreau
“An inch of time is an inch of gold but you can’t buy that inch of time with an inch of gold. (一寸光陰一寸金，寸金難買寸光陰)” — Chinese Proverb
“Spend your money on the things money can buy. Spend your time on the things money can’t buy.” — Haruki Murakami
“Determine never to be idle. No person will have occasion to complain of the want of time who never loses any.” — Thomas Jefferson
Time is…
- the most incredible lever for growth.
- the most precious non-renewable resource.
- often considered as a scarce commodity.
Be selfish with your time
- If you don’t prioritize your life, someone else will.
- If you don’t guard your time, people will steal it from you.
- Make the day; don’t let the day make you. Make sure you are setting your schedule, not just responding to invitations from others.
Nothing will make you more productive than owning your time. Nothing will make you less productive than selling it.
Are you willing to trade your life with Warren Buffett?
Skills get you to a million, character takes you to 100 million, and time brings you to a billion.
The rich invest in time. The poor invest in money.
- 多數人都是擔心會把錢用完，而不是害怕浪費生命。
- We often treat our time generously and our money sparingly, but it should be the other way around. It’s easy to notice when you’ve spent money, but the loss of time often goes unnoticed until it’s too late. Make sure you’re making intentional trades — you can always make more money, but you can never make more time. Being cheap with your time and generous with your money allows you to focus on what truly matters and achieve greater freedom in the long run.
You can choose to either invest, spend, or waste your time.
Time flies, but only flies back to us as a memory.
Time Billionaire
In a 2019 episode of The Tim Ferriss Show podcast, investor Graham Duncan introduced the concept of a Time Billionaire—someone with over one billion seconds left to live:
“We’re so obsessed, as a culture, with money. And we deify dollar billionaires in a way that […] And I was thinking of time billionaires that when I see, sometimes, 20-year-olds – the thought I had was they probably have two billion seconds left. But they aren’t relating to themselves as time billionaires.”
When you’re young, you are rich in time—a true Time Billionaire.
To put it in perspective:
- A million seconds is roughly 10 days.
- A billion seconds? About 30 years.
At age 20, you likely have around two billion seconds remaining (assuming you live to 80). By 50, that number drops to just one billion.