YOU ARE A BILLIONAIRE
We Work Mainly For Billionaires
I’ve lately been on a streak of podcasts around mindfulness, gratitude, and slowing life down. It’s not hard to find them, maybe that’s a sign of better things to come in our world.
I think every advisor I respect and follow has written about this already, so here I stand on the shoulders of people smarter and faster than me.
In listening to an investment podcast on a random day, I was struck by the following sentence… “How much would you pay in your 60s to go back and spend a weekend with your young children in your 30s?”.
The sentence has been replayed in the background of my mind daily for months, and it’s influenced some new decisions (DM for ideas). The chart below has been bouncing around the LinkedIn space for months and it furthers the thought for me and parents of young kids. We have more time now than we ever will again.
Sahill Bloom has a great newsletter, and great way of thinking and writing. If you’re a tweeter, he’s a worthwhile follow. He might have said the paraphrased sentence above, candidly I cannot find or remember where I actually heard it.
Sahill’s piece around being a Time Billionaire has inspired the many blogs I mentioned, the one’s that beat this one to the web. His article is itself inspired by a podcast he heard a few years back.
Check it out here – https://www.thefp.com/p/the-time-billionaires-sahil-bloom?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=260347&post_id=123988377&isFreemail=true&utm_medium=email.
In summary, life is actually not as short as we all think. Someone in their 20s has billions of seconds left to live, and billions of seconds to decide how to live them. Someone in their 50s is still likely in the billions of seconds range.
If you have children, I’d imagine you agree those seconds are best spent with your children. The “highest and best use” of our time should be a focus of life, just like it’s a focus in an MBA class or financial planning meeting.
Now think what you do when you’re not with your kids or family. You work, maybe travel, you also get some wonderful experiences you can’t have while changing diapers or coaching youth baseball or cooking dinner. That said, I suffer from the eternal paradoxical parenting cycle of missing my kids, leaving my kids, missing my kids, leaving my kids.
Does this have anything to do with money? YES, at least in the way it’s been rolling around in my head.
My team and I exist to make you money. You go to work most basically for the purpose of making money. You spend time with co-workers well beyond your time with family, all in pursuit of money. In short, we invest so much time and energy in pursuing money, perhaps we could stand to do a little less.
If you have a great advisory team working for you (www.frazierfinancial.com), let us be a freedom to you, to spend more time with others. The worry of another dollar is not really that important. The future value of more dollars is not really that important for most great moments in life.
The utility of your future wealth is hopefully the simple benefit of time with family.
I can see where the chart below plays out in the average life. Perhaps we can’t reverse the quantity trend, but perhaps with our help you can move the needle.
While in your career, the time with co-workers over family is an investment to later have time with family and not with co-workers. That said, it’s not guaranteed, and you can’t take any money with you past this life.
Think about money as a tool and think about financial advice as a benefit. It should all work to get you more time.
Some recent shared inspiration about life or other stuff: