How Do the Wealthy Spend Their Time?

Admit it…you’ve asked yourself, if not somebody else, that question in the past.

Right?

So many of us barely have enough time to keep the repairs up around the home on the weekend.

Or get the bills paid on time, the kids scrubbed and the dogs fed.

All the little things a human does to be human, basically.

Even if you are what most people call wealthy already there are still things you want, and have not yet gotten.

If money is not the culprit, chances are time is.

I’ve been on a little bit of a “time-fixation” lately. That’s fair.

I think a huge part of success, or potential success in business has to do with the way the leader or leaders spend their time.

Time is a construct of man (and woman) -kind, by the way.

For those of us that have a pet, have you ever noticed you can leave for 5 minutes or 5 hours, and they’re the equal amount of desperately happy to have you back again upon your return?

Animals are motivated by a whole different set of stimuli and desire.

Even the most disgustingly co-dependent snuggly lap-dog is descended from the mighty wolf.

They are predators. Get the food, eat the food, rinse, repeat.

Time as a construct makes no sense to anyone but we higher-species biped types.

I like to believe that my answer to the question of why humankind got all the brains, built all the cities, invented flying in tubes in the air and cars to drive on the ground is imagination.

No one thing in the history of civilization was ever invented without having been imagined by the inventor first.

At some point in the history of civilization in the many centuries before Christ someone realized that the movement of the sun was quantifiable.

It is thought that Ancient Egypt was the first civilization to measure time, and create the first sundial. They did not enjoy the atomic accuracy we know today, simply because the days had, and still have, varying lengths depending on the season.

The day was divided into 12 equal parts. Night time was just designated less importance, but I imagine the outdoorsmen of centuries and millennia past could not help but marvel at the reverse rotation of stars around the north star.

Did you know that’s why clocks run clockwise? Picture a sundial. The shadow starts in the lower left of the circle, let’s say around 8 in a transitional season, moves clockwise around 12 to 4. We northern hemisphere types dictated clock policy for the south half of the globe, in our infinite historical arrogance.

Every man, woman, and child currently alive or in the past has received the exact same amount of time in their time bank, beginning with 12:01 a.m. Sunday every week (once the present-day calendar was adopted, of course).

168 hours.

Let’s say the average amount of sleep for humankind is 8 hours. It won’t be for many, maybe most, of my internally-driven entrepreneurs (I am at my best at 7.5, which is close), but it makes for easy math.

56 hours of sleep, 112 hours for wakefulness.

Let’s say you take two hours total for meal breaks, and another one for rejuvenation of some sort, be that exercise, meditation, reading a good book in a cozy chair.

21 hours a week, leaving 91 for the things you do.

13 hours a day.

How do you spend your time?

How do you think a person that makes 100 times more money than you spends his or her time?

Do you imagine it to be very different?

I’m going to pick on Richard Branson, the dynamic leader of the Virgin group of companies.

Caught parasailing on camera with naked women clinging to his back.

Traveling in a most exotic fashion that most of us only dream of.

If he had to sit by himself and generate his billions in wealth, do you think he’d have enough time left over for a life.

No.

The answer to my topic question, then, in simple terms, is that the wealthy BUY time.

Delegation.

Human capital, if you will.

I have been reading reams of books on the subject of wealth creation.

Joined three different awesome coaching programs over the years, with the goal of improving my business.

Built this business up from one client with a messy set of books, to a viable company with many disparate types of business leaders entrusting us with their needs.

I have learned one thing along the way.

Time is a bitch.

We crossed a nexus point at which it was no longer viable to run this business alone in late 2019, and have been striving to find the balance between a “real life” and getting the work done ever since.

Be careful what you wish for, right?

You may be sitting their thinking, “Well, you saw it coming, why didn’t you hire for it sooner?”

And you’re right. It was a growing pain, for sure.

I won’t tell the years-long story of how we ended up with the tremendous staff we have now, but suffice it to say we have been working on the time-thing for the past 2 ½ years.

It’s getting better, by the way.

But it still has a long way to go.

Time comes up lately for us because of the things we’re putting on hold around the house, little things like small improvements and décor, as well as time for a personal life and personal hobbies and endeavors.

Of course, it’s tax season, and though we have a firm grip on it this year, much better than last year, it is still time-consumptive.

If you like to read science fiction or get into physics, you’re probably aware of the concept of space-time as a continuum.