Chapter 9: Connecting The Dots
“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and has made all the difference in my life.” – Steve Jobs
The benefits of Time Wealth are endless. The possibilities are literally only bound by your imagination. When you have Time Wealth, and are truly time rich, you have the ability to do what you want, when you want, with whom you want.
With a traditional career and a traditional mindset, you’re giving your time and energy to others. With a committed approach to living an intentional life through ownership of your career, and then a balanced allocation of the free time afforded through your career ownership, you not only become time rich, but you massively increase your Emotional Wealth.
Ownership of your time allows you to spend time with the people you want. You’re able to increase your network and your support system through intentional relationship building.
In your personal life, you can put time and resources during the day normally used for your 9-5, toward building your personal relationships. In your professional life, since you have full ownership of your career, it’s up to you who you work with. You decide who you employ, you decide who you partner with, and you also decide who your clients are, and more importantly, who they aren’t.
If you’re the average of the five people you spend the most time with, and are somewhat influenced by everyone you interact with, having this level of control over who enters your life drastically increases your Emotional Wealth.
With your ownership of time, you get to structure your days, weeks, and months, in ways that provide you with the most value. You don’t have to answer to a boss, you don’t have a limited amount of vacation days, and you don’t need to worry about how many hours you were in the office.
You get to decide how you spend your time. If you want to answer to a boss (or demanding clients), want to take minimal vacation days, or want to worry about logging office hours, then you can! But if you don’t want to, then you don’t have to!
It’s up to you to determine how you want to spend your time. If you’re spending it wisely, and extracting the most value from it, then you’re naturally increasing your Emotional Wealth. It could be through new experiences, it could be through a focus on increasing your knowledge, it could be through an expansion of your network, or it could even be by following a traditional career path, but if you’re extracting the most personal value from your time, then it naturally means you’re extracting the most Emotional Wealth.
In this sense, everything you do, and every principle of wealth you maximize, is connected.
Your Emotional Wealth increases your knowledge and stability, which gives you the emotional wherewithal to achieve Time Wealth. Your Time Wealth, in turn, through a balanced and intentional approach to life, further increases your Emotional Wealth through time well spent, which starts the process over, further increasing your Time Wealth.
Your Time Wealth, as you grow increasingly time rich, allows you to live, work, and play wherever you want, whenever you want. Not only does this send your Emotional Wealth into orbit, but it helps you achieve the third principle of Wealth: Location Wealth.