TIME

Time is the ultimate equalizer. We all have 24 hours in the day, but the difference lies in how you choose to use that time. Are you investing it in activities that are moving you towards your vision, or are you spending it on things that aren’t adding any real value to your life? Everywhere you look you’re exposed to thousands of potential distractions just waiting to disrupt the entire course of your day if you let them. So I have to ask…

How are you using your time?

The overwhelmingly consistent answer I hear from people is, “I don’t have any time…”

If you recall, this is what I call an FUE, or frequently used excuse. Yes, there are a finite number of hours in the day, but that number is the same for everyone. Yes, there are a finite number of hours in your life, but there is no way for you to know what that number is. YOU have to decide how many precious hours you’re going to invest being intentional about what you want for your life, versus how many you’re going to waste.

Thanks to the unbelievable technology that’s been developed, we literally have entire industries made up of highly paid individuals – a.k.a. distraction brokers – whose only job is to steal your time and energy away from your dreams. In fact, a more fitting title may be success assassins, because the reality is, they’re out to consume all your time and destroy your success in the process.

Take social media for example… All those shocking headlines, cute puppy pics, ridiculous dance videos… they’re all carefully crafted to capture your attention and suck you down the rabbit hole of feel-good dopamine hits you get by scrolling through your feed. They’re designed to be addictive in order to keep you on the platform, but it always comes at the cost of your precious time.

It’s obvious the world doesn’t want you to win based on their efforts to steal your attention away from your dreams and force you to focus on whatever it is they want you to see and believe about the world. If you want to “make it” in today’s economic system, you’re going to have to be extremely intentional with your time, and that starts with understanding what’s fueling your success versus distracting you from it, and then learning to manage your time more efficiently.

I’m a hardcore believer in living with intention, which means defining the things you want for your life as opposed to the things that were forced upon you by someone else. While time is certainly your most valuable resource, it's equally as important to understand the role or your other three resources, as well.

MONEY

Money is talked about in a lot of ways, but in terms of money as a resource, it’s simply a tool that creates options. The more money you have, the more options you have. When you don’t have a lot of money available, it’s critical to understand how to leverage your other resources in a way that generates money because of how expensive it is to cover your basic needs in the United States. Fortunately, the free enterprise economic model in the U.S. provides tremendous opportunities for you to develop your own personal financial freedom by leveraging your resources and exchanging value in a marketplace. This book is going to teach you how to take advantage of those opportunities.

We’ll cover this concept of “leverage” more thoroughly later in the book, but understand that your focus should never be on the resource you’re lacking, it should be on utilizing your other resources to generate more of the resource you’re lacking. Meaning, you have to retrain your mind to replace the FUE’s with more abundance-minded questions:

I don’t have money → How can I use my other resources to generate more money?

In most cases, it doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about time, money, people, or ideas… Building your resource base always boils down to an exchange of value.

For example, after my daughter graduated from college in 2019, she had a lot of time on her hands, and had developed skill sets in writing and graphic design. Part of her vision is moving into her own place near the mountains with her own puppy, but she didn’t quite have the cash flow to facilitate that right out of school. Around the same time, I was in need of someone to help fulfill my own dream of writing my first book, Your Life Is Not Your Fault, as well as the book you’re reading now. Since sitting in front of a computer trying to write is not one of my strong suits, she was able to leverage her time and skills to provide valuable writing and graphic design services to me in exchange for income. This exchange of value helped grow both of our resource bases: for me, outsourcing the work saved tremendous time, and the book increased my ideas/intellectual property base, and for her, she was able to continue refining her skills while earning income in the process.

PEOPLE

This example with my daughter also demonstrates the importance of human capital. Your Life Is Not Your Fault was a passion project of mine for 10+ years before it was ever published… TEN YEARS that content sat locked in my head and digital recorder archives because I could never seem to get it right in writing. I’d start, stop, throw it away, and start over, draft after draft, because I knew I had a powerful message that could impact so many lives if I could just get the thing to a point worthy of being shared. Needless to say, the traditional book-writing process was painfully frustrating for me. Sitting at a computer trying to formulate and write clear thoughts while that flashing cursor taunts you on a blank screen is not exactly my happy place…

Maybe my ideas just aren’t that interesting?

Maybe my content really isn’t that important?

Maybe I’m crazy to think I could ever write a book?

As much as I wanted to stick a fork in my good eye after several unsuccessful years of the traditional approach, I realized that it wasn’t my ideas or an unattainable dream that were the problem… It was that I kept forcing myself to grind through a set of activities that don’t align with my own unique abilities. I had the right goal, but I was taking the wrong approach based on how I’m wired.

I’m not a writer in the “sit-and-type-at-a-computer-all-day” sense, but I can talk, solve problems, and tell stories all day long. When I discovered how powerful the digital recorder could be in helping me finally get all these ideas out of my head, everything changed. Only problem was, I still needed to turn those audio recordings into a written book format… and that’s where my daughter came in.

If you’ve ever heard the phrase “who not how”, this is a perfect example. I had invested all this time and energy grinding through a painfully frustrating process trying to figure out how to write a book on my own, when all I needed were the right whos to help fill the gaps in my skill sets.

If you want to save yourself significant time and energy in everything you do, you have to understand when it makes sense to invest in learning things yourself, and when you’d be better off tapping into your human capital resource base. Remember, your network will ultimately define your net worth… I can promise you’ll achieve far greater results when you stick to applying your unique abilities in areas you’re really excited about, and then outsource the things you don’t enjoy or aren’t good at.

IDEAS

When you’ve developed expertise in a set of skills that align with your unique abilities and address a real need in a market, people will pay you for your ideas and solutions. This is where understanding the value in your own genius is critical because you now have the ability to leverage your ideas, as opposed to your money.

If I have extra cash that I put into a series of investments, ideally I’ll earn a return on those investments with no effort on my part, but it requires me to tie up substantial capital for a period of time. In this case, I’m not exchanging my time to generate more income, I’m using my income to generate more income.

However, if I have all these great ideas that I know can change a lot of lives, and I turn those ideas into a book, I can now leverage my own IP through the sales of that book. Aside from the initial time and money investment to actually create it, I’m not exchanging my time to generate income, and I’m not tying up substantial capital in traditional interest-bearing investments… I’m using my own ideas to generate income, which is a very powerful position to be in.