Before you continue reading, read these two posts first Why We Fail and How to Succeed. These posts are important to your future. Whether you fail or succeed at achieving your dreams, you will always pay a price. The question you have to answer is this. Is the price too high?
The price of success
Success to realize any dream boils down to two factors: money and time.
There are basically four scenarios that describe your current position
1. You have lots of money, but no time. This isn’t usually a good thing unless you just love figuring out ways to make money. Then making money is your dream. However, if you choose this dream, you will pay the price of not having the time to spend with your loved ones or experiencing much of what life has to offer.
2. You have lots of time, but no money. This also isn’t a good thing because you spend much of your time figuring out ways to get more money to pay the bills. This isn’t too much different than the person with lots of money and no time. Both individuals spend their waking hours figuring out ways to make more money.
3. You have no time and no money. Your job doesn’t pay enough to support your lifestyle which is meager at best. If this describes you, you are in the unenviable position of being classed the working poor.
4. You have plenty of money and plenty of time. This is the ideal in western culture. In this instance you make enough money to hire people to take care of those tasks you don’t want to take care of or lack the skills to do so while having enough left over to spend on what you enjoy and highly value.
Let’s take a look at one example to see how the price of success works.
Say your dream is to have a beautiful garden full of lovely flowers. You know the flower beds desperately need to be weeded, but a friend calls you up and invites you to an all day event. The event will be fun and you want to go with her, what will you choose? Will you weed the flower beds or will you have a day of fun with your friend?
On another day, a family member calls and asks you to give him a ride to the doctor for an important medical test. Let’s assume you feel you have no choice here, the well being of a loved one definitely takes precedence over the flowers.
Money, but no time
If you have lots of money and no time, you don’t concern yourself with the weeding because you have a yard crew that takes care of that. However, you politely decline going out with your friend as that would interfere with your money making activities. However, you drive your relative to the doctor, but the whole time you’re away, you’re anxious and thinking about all the things you should be doing to make more money. You might also feel a little resentful that your relative asked you to drive him. After all, he knows how busy you are.
Time, but no money
If you have lots of time and no money, the weeding is going to be up to you to do. You don’t have the money to hire it done. Going with your friend interferes with weeding the flowers. You will choose on the basis of cost and value. How much will the event cost and how important you think the weeding task is relative to spending a day with your friend.
You will drive your relative to the doctor, but you may worry about spending the gas money to do so and hope you will have enough gas to get you to and from your minimum wage job until the next payday.
No Time and not enough money
Your job and responsibilities make it impossible for you to go with your friend. You may take a day off work to take your relative to the doctor, but you may not depending on whether you fear that you will lose your job.
Enough time and enough money
If you have plenty of time and money, you may decide to hire someone to weed your garden so the job gets done and so you can spend the day with your friend. You will also drive your relative to the doctor and spend time supporting and comforting him with no resentment or worry over the cost of doing so.
When looking at these examples, you may think weeding a flower garden is a trivial job because that task would cause you no problems in deciding whether to go with your friend or drive your relative to the doctor. If this is the case, substitute the weeding task for any task you feel is very important. Maybe it’s to study for an exam or order inventory for your business or write another chapter in your book.
Now, let’s examine the elements we are working with: Time and Money.
Time: Time is your most valuable resource and you can’t make more of it. No matter who you are or how rich or poor you are, time is a limited resource. Every second you choose to spend doing one thing is time you can’t spend doing another. To achieve your dreams, whatever they may, will require you to devote time to them. How much time, of course depends on your dream.
Money: Money is simply a resource you have invested time to acquire. It’s a resource you can exchange for time to do the things you would like to do. You can exchange it for help in doing things you don’t like or have the skills to do. And you can exchange it for stuff you want to buy.
The price you pay
If today you find yourself with lots of money, but no time. The price for all that money may be very steep. At the end of your life, how will you answer this one important question? Did I matter? What did I do with my life? What price did the people I love have to pay for my quest for money at the expense of time I could have spent with them?
If today you find you have enough money and enough time. Congratulations. You have paid the price to get yourself in that position. Maybe you’ve invested years to get a good education or invested the time and money to get a business off the ground and make a success of it. You have enough money to live comfortably and enough time to spend with the people who mean the most to you and enough time to devote to projects of importance to you.
Unfortunately, many of you find yourselves in the situation where you have neither time nor money and that’s a big problem. If this describes you, now is the time to sit your butt in a chair and think about why you are where you are. Were you unwilling to invest the time in getting a good education? Maybe it interfered too much with other activities that seemed more important to you. If so, it’s time to invest your time getting the necessary education and or skills that will make you a valuable person for a company to hire or to start a business.
Maybe you have the skills and education, but lost your job. Are you willing to invest the time to learn what you need to do to make you an invaluable employee? There are tons of ways to do this which I’ll cover in other posts. Maybe the loss of your job is a blessing in disguise in that it opens up other doors of opportunity for a better job or starting a business. Just remember when opportunity knocks and you open the door, work will be standing there to greet you.
Let’s say you have a good job, but it doesn’t pay enough to support your chosen lifestyle? If this is your situation, you have two choices. You can change your lifestyle or spend more time doing things that will earn you more money. The choice is yours, but either way you will pay a price. Weigh your options carefully.
Today, I’m happy to say there’s a trend to change lifestyle. Many of my kids out there are choosing to live within their means. They’re choosing to ignore the constant yammer of marketers telling them to buy more, have more and get more. They’re the ones that are moving from lots of money and no time and lots of time and no money and no money and no time to plenty of money and plenty of time. Three cheers for them.
To do this they’re paying a price. It might be the fancy house or new car. It might mean moving from a large home to a small one or even a tiny one. It could also mean a stop to accumulating stuff. Whatever it is, they’re willing to pay that price to regain the one thing they can never regain once lost; their time. They’re willing to pay the price to have enough money to spend on those things that they need and the time for the things that really matter to them.
This reminds me of a story I heard in the news some time back. It was about a couple who had lost their home to a foreclosure. They were so sad that this had happened and the news piece was all about how horrible life was for people who had lost their homes in this way.
The couple had moved from their home to renting a space in a mobile home park. However, there was one thing that the husband said that struck me as the most important in this story. “Well, at least now that we don’t have the mortgage payments to make, I’ve been able to afford to have my teeth fixed,” he said.
That was a wow moment for me. It was a moment of realization about how screwed up our priorities can become. If the bills are so high we can’t afford to take care of ourselves, get rid of the bills. We need to do whatever it takes to set ourselves up so we have enough money to take care of the most important things in our lives. We need food, shelter and our health. With those things taken care of, our dreams are ours to have. That is, if we’re willing to pay the price.
No matter what you choose to do, there’s always a price. Choose wisely.
