Lay Your Foundation for Significance

Each of us has 24 hours a day to do our living in. Time is the ultimate non-renewable resource. Even though the whole vista of time seems to spread out before us into infinity, the amount of time each of us has on this old Earth is finite. 

Therefore, we can’t do it all. But we can do what matters, if we avoid over-extending ourselves.

Professional over-extension manifests itself in the way we keep adding things to our plate without taking anything off it! The hidden assumption we don’t even verbalise to ourselves is that we’ll borrow time from tomorrow to get it all done. 

But like the broke old gambler who reckoned the worst thing that happened in his life was playing his first game of poker as a young man and unfortunately winning, the danger of borrowing time from tomorrow is that such a strategy works – for a while!

Before, that is, it leads to stress and ineffectual frustration. 

The only viable solution, short of cloning copies of yourself, is to ‘steal’ time from (Stephen Covey’s famously defined) Quadrants 3 and 4 and dedicate it to pure Quadrant 2 activities. 

(Note: In Covey’s book 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, he divides all tasks into four groups that fall into these quadrants):

Quadrant 1 – Things that are both urgent and important

Quadrant 2 – Things that are not urgent but important

Quadrant 3 – Things that are urgent but not important

Quadrant 4 – The ‘rubbish quadrant’ filled with things that are neither urgent nor important.)

Even though Quadrant 1 is where all urgent and important matters reside, the more time you spend on important but not yet urgent Quadrant 2 tasks, the more control you will exercise upon your future and, therefore, your destiny.

That’s because you will be heading off future crises at the pass, so to speak, and stopping them from erupting with their usual scary frequency.

PERSONAL CHOICE IN PERSONAL FINANCE

The validity of this principle of favouring what is important over what is merely urgent extends to personal finance.

What I call ‘financial hyperextension’ is rooted in the rising conviction among many of us that the future will always be better than the past. That optimism, in and of itself, is not a bad thing; indeed, it is a good thing most of the time. 

But when over-idealistic Pollyanna-type thinking results in us conning ourselves into borrowing money to buy pure consumption goods unnecessarily in anticipation of raises and bonuses that may not materialise, we have a problem. 

It used to be if we ‘could afford’ a car, it meant we had the money to pay for it in full. Nowadays, such thinking is either non-existent or ridiculed. Our modern definition of affording something means we ‘can afford’ the monthly payments!

So, I think it would be wise for us to revamp our worldview to enable us to choose what is truly important to us, perhaps achieving financial freedom or a great retirement, over what only seems urgent, like keeping up with the Joneses (or the Alis and Ah Chongs) by buying a brand-new BMW, speedboat or Rolex watch. 

In many cases, the only way to afford such pretty baubles is through time payments. And the reality is that with each instalment on a so-called ‘asset’ that loses value over time, the interest portion is also permanently lost. 

There is a popular saying containing enormous truth: We spend money we don’t have, on things we don’t want, to impress people we don’t like!

That’s the best description of lunacy I’ve come across.

So, if you are serious about laying claim to a great future, it is vital you make better time and money choices.