Time is Precious

Time is Precious

This article originally appeared in Amalgamate: A Mix of Ideas for Your Business, Summer 2015

As humans, we understand the concept of “future.” We project ourselves into it and understand our eventual mortality. As philosopher Stephen Cave puts it, “we live with this sense of personal apocalypse,” and it drives our busyness. It drives how we choose to spend our time. How we spend that time shapes who we become.

Busyness. Great word.

In my startup life there was a constant comparison and contrast to corporate life. Two of the words that took on particular meaning were “prioritization” and “allocation.” Everything in startup life was viewed as an allocation problem. As in “not enough resources to allocate.” Including Time.

In hindsight I should have realized that time was my non-renewable resource. It demanded prioritization, not allocation.

Alan Weiss says that ironically, the harder we work to merely make money, the harder we are working to decrease our true wealth.

True wealth is self-directed time. Money is the fuel. The more we mindlessly work, travel, and respond to others, the lower our wealth regardless of how much money we’re earning.

Ozymandias

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

Help your people prioritize their non-renewable resource. Time.