Daily Dose of Positivity: Time Vs Money

If we see someone throwing money away, we call that person crazy. Money has value. Wasting it seems nuts. And yet we see others—and ourselves—throw away something far more valuable every day: Time.

Unlike the predictable reaction we have to someone throwing away money (they’re crazy), we often fail to think of the person who wastes time as crazy. Yet time is a finite resource. While the amount of time we get is uncertain, we know it’s limited. We can’t make any more of it when it runs out.

 

“A man who dares to waste an hour of time has not discovered the value of his life.” — Charles Darwin

 

The Roman philosopher Seneca said it well in a letter to Paulinus: It is not that we have a short space of time, but that we waste much of it. Life is long enough, and it has been given in sufficiently generous measure to allow the accomplishment of the very greatest things if the whole of it is well invested. But when it is squandered in luxury and carelessness, when it is devoted to no good end, forced at last by the ultimate necessity we perceive that it has passed away before we were aware that it was passing. So it is—

 

the life we receive is not short, but we make it so, nor do we have any lack of it, but are wasteful of it.

 

When you think about the reason most of us want to get wealthy, you will see it’s not for the money it’s for the time. We want a clean schedule. We want other people to do the things we don’t want to do. We want to spend money to buy time.

 

You will never be wealthy as long as you are spending time to create money. Wealth is best expressed by spending money to create time.

-          https://fs.blog/2017/03/seneca-on-the-shortness-of-time/