You Can Sell Your Time, But You Can Never Buy It Back

Caveat Venditor 🔮

Time is precious. Stupid people are plentiful. The following are some guidelines that have served well over the years. Some lessons are harder to learn, others even harder. Thankfully we get to repeat them until we get it right. Either way, here are ten pearls for your consumption; maybe you identify with some and some, maybe not.

Wherever you are along your journey, it all starts with the first step:

No.
Best thing to learn to say. No one likes a yes man. See what I did there :) Have a spine and some integrity, FFS. Learn to value your efforts instead of the dollar value. The cost of opportunity decreases exponentially when you learn to say no. Watch what happens. Be picky, it saves a truck ton of time in the long run. Saying no along the way will create more opportunities than saying yes, but eventually, you need to get the big yes. Don’t lose sight of the end game.
Delegate.
Your index finger is your second best weapon. Learn to point people in the right direction. Find the efficiencies from delegating and create an assembly line. If there are gaps, find the best resources to fill them. You don’t have to do everything, there’s always someone who loves doing it more than you and is better at it than you as well. Utilize their skills instead of muffling them with your control issues. Spend your time keeping ahead of the curve and have sharp people feeding you the intel.
Lazy People.
“I will always choose a lazy person to do a difficult job, because, they will find an easy way to do it.”
-Bill Gates
Rest my case. Lazy people value time.
Non-Stupid People.
Surround yourself around them. Your brain is like a muscle and needs constant flexing. You’re not going to get that talking about the weather. Fuck the weather. Let’s talk about objectives, plans and the craziest ideas imaginable! Nothing stopping you from doing any of them, well, except one; you. Keep in the company of smart people and you’ll keep that brain fully flexed and open to create and produce what ever you desire. Smart people are steroids. Get big.
Stupid People.
An Economics professor from Berkeley, Carlo M. Cipolla, wrote The Five Basic Laws of Stupidity. Pure genius. You can find it in Allegro ma non troppo, a collection of satirical tongue-in-cheek essays. One may not be able to use these laws in any serious works, however, in human nature where everything exists in dualities, this is stupendously applicable. Can’t say I didn’t think of a specific person after I read each rule. Was going to say, “You know who you are”, but you’re too stupid to even realize it.
The Basic Laws of Stupidity
1. Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.
2. The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.
3. The Golden Law of Human Stupidity: A stupid person is a person who caused losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.
4. Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be costly mistake.
5. A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person.
The Gambler.
No one ever got anywhere important without risking something big. Everyone knows the bigger the risk, the bigger the payoff. Calculate them well and strategize like you were playing chess in Central Park, make mistakes until you’re well seasoned to risk well. Find some #greyhairs who have been successful in your area of interest and find the ones who live big. Pull up a stool and begin the schoolin’. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, and sometimes you win big.
Start Before You’re Ready.
Best thing I’ve ever heard. Push forward, especially when you’re scared. That’s the best time to do so. You’re scared because you’ve done your calculations in your head, carried the one, and come to the realization that you’re risking something big and we’re trained to think that there is loss attached. What if, and maybe I’m crazy here, we switched the meaning? What if, when you felt scared and vulnerable and about to risk the world for something you believe in, that that feeling is actually the green light to speed down the two-lane blacktop into the sunset. There are always indicators along the way that let you know you’re supported. Always look at the signs while flying down the road by the seat of your pants. Buckle up.
Embrace Failure.
Fall to your knees and surrender. You don’t have to fall on your sword; you’ll get up from this. Fall down seven times, get up eight. Failure only means you’re on the right path. With every failure you recognize a new pattern with which you can traverse your new endeavors. We live in a society that doesn’t reward defeat. There are always exceptions, as the case is with Thomas Edison. A reporter once asked, “How did it feel to fail a 1,000 times?” Edison responds with, “I didn’t fail a 1,000 times. The light bulb was an invention with 1,000 steps.” It all starts with the initial iteration. Continue through iteration after iteration and scope refines and defines.
Be Bold.
Bold, but not stupid. There’s a very fine line there. If you’re asking what being bold is, go back to No.1, do not pass go and most definitely do not collect $200.
Yes.
Now you can finally start to say yes. Yes! You’re done. #hifive! Pretty sure some dude said that a journey started off with taking the first step or something like that — he knew what he was talking about. Now it’s time for another first step, a new journey, another iteration. If orange is the new black, then No is the new Yes. If it took a thousand steps for Edison to invent the light bulb, start counting. Take notes along the way.