Here is a sample chapter of my new book, “Life Leverage: How to get more done in less time, outsource everything & create a mobile lifestyle”
Time Currency
Time is the real, universal currency. Before money was exchanged in a ‘fiat’ system, and even before coins and precious metals when governments didn’t control the monetary system, someone would exchange their time to create a product [a cobbler or smith, for example] or service that someone else perceived to have value. If they didn’t, they likely died. They would exchange their own product or service that they had exchanged their own time and passion to create, and these would be exchanged for each other.
When there was no universal monetary system to regulate fair exchange, you had the manifestation of your time invested as your one and only currency.
The value of that currency was directly related to the value of the time invested. And the value to the recipient of that time invested was their perception of that value, NOT yours. So time as a currency is, in fact, how recipients of your manifested time investment perceive the value of it to them/their life. They will then exchange something they value in return for it.
This is known as ‘fair exchange.’ Fair exchange is the natural and agreed right balance between buyer and seller, giver and recipient, sale and purchase where a transaction happens.
Currency literally means ‘flow.’ So currency is an always-moving value exchange of time investment. Money is the end result, but currency is the continual flow of time between interconnected people. Just like money flows from one person to another to another very quickly, so can, and does, your time. You make more money by creating more currency, also known as economy, enterprise or GDP; all of which are the flow of time in monetary form.
If fair exchanged doesn’t take place, or the balance is at either extreme or the spectrum in favour of the buyer or seller, one party feels like they’re not valued highly enough, or ripped off. In this instance time as currency loses it’s value and circulation, where the buyer who feels ripped off looks for compensation and tells others of their experience, or the seller who feels undervalued can’t sustain funding free time or can’t make profit with high enough prices/fair exchange.
The irony of Time
The irony of time is that most people can’t/don’t measure it, and therefore can’t place real value on it. You can’t master what you don’t measure. Instead they place value on material items or financial mechanisms, spending or wasting all their time to get a very physical remuneration.
Society raises and forces you down a route convincing you the right way to live is to work hard your whole working life, exchanging all your time for a small amount of money to just get by and just pay your bills, taking overtime and sacrificing free time, so that you can save up/buy free time later in life, to do what you always wanted to do.
But when you get to your later years, you start running out of time, and the money you thought you’d saved for retirement is less and doesn’t last. So you have to work longer and harder, never getting those years back. Then when you finally can retire to do the things you love to do, you die.
Society in the industrial age sets up 3 stages of ‘life’ related to work: learning, earning and yearning years. Learning years are 0-18, earning years are 18 – 65+ [used to be 50], and yearning years 65 – end. You’re sausage machined into going to school and learning to get a job/career, and work most of your life to set up some free time right at the end, IF you get there.
WARNING: this is an out-dated model. This is the antithesis of Life Leverage. This is the way most of the world understand and are forced down, but it is NOT the only way.
The Life Leverage way means that you can earn in the learning years. You can teach your kids about business and money from 4 years old. You can put audios on in the car, get them watching educational YouTube videos on the iPad at a young age, and they can start setting up online businesses and earning money at 11 or 13 years old.
The Life Leverage way means you can keep learning in the earning stage of life. Don’t stop learning just because you’ve finished school. Continually invest in your education and knowledge, and continually get a return on your time and increasing financial reward.
The Life Leverage way means you don’t have to wait to your yearning years to ‘retire.’ You can do what you love and love what you do, make your passion your profession and your vocation your vacation.
Work doesn’t have to be work, and you can take ‘mini-retirements’ every week or every month, you can ‘front-load,’ rather than ‘rear-load,’ or delay your retirement. I ‘retired,’ twice in 2007 and 2009; never again, it was so boring.
I lasted no more than a month before I needed a purpose. I didn’t want to start my slow decay. But I had just defined ‘retirement,’ wrong, I had defined retirement the way society defines it, and not how it really should be for someone who controls their own life and time.
You can now ‘work,’ remotely and mobile, anywhere in the world, while on vacation. You can mix business with pleasure, and social with operational. You can merge passion and profession. You can redefine both. Work doesn’t have to be work anymore.
Life Leverage means you don’t have to wither and die in your yearning years. You don’t have to reminisce or wish you’d seen your kids grow up or you’d done more with your life, or not worked as hard.
Here are the 5 biggest regrets of the dying:
1. I wish I hadn’t worked so hard
2. I wish I had the courage to life a life true to myself, not the lifeothers expect of me
3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings
4. I wish I’d stayed in touch with my friends
5. I wish I’d let myself be happier
With the Life Leverage philosophy, you don’t have anything to ‘retire,’ from. You don’t have the shock of total boredom and lack of purpose. Your vocation and vacation are already merged, so you keep living your life with equal balance between work and play, and you live longer and happier. You’re not reliant on a financial or governmental system that has wasted your retirement fund.
Life Leverage merges your learning and earning years and removes your yearning years completely, other than the fact that you’d want another life to live your life again. You can write the rules of your life. You don’t have to delay everything you want to do until your time runs out.
As you will learn later win the book, there are leverage models [Tw Ts Ti, RoTI, TOC, L1 M2 DL] to maximise time while minimising wastage. There are universal laws of time that if you obey and leverage, you can get the maximum benefit.
You can do, be and have more in less ‘spent,’ time through the Life Leverage Philosophy.
When you master the Art of leverage and outsourcing then you will be wealthy beyond all of your expectations, plans, goals [and quite possibly dreams].
I’ll leave you with this one last thought.
“You’re either leveraging other people’s time towards your vision or being leveraged by someone else, working to their vision”
