What you sow, you will harvest
“...but, in this world, nothing is certain except death and taxes.” –Benjamin Franklin
In this one:
Investing time
Cutting losses
Staying present
And an old country earworm that will never sound the same to you if you make it to the end. Let’s grow.
STORY
How are you investing your time?
Across your lifetime, you will live each day only once.
Time doesn’t wait. It is a limited resource for each of us. But unlike a bank balance, we can’t see how much time we have left.
If you only had a specific limited amount of money each day and couldn't carry forward any of what you didn’t use, how would you use it?
You’d probably spend some on the things that you absolutely cannot avoid, like sustenance and so on. But how would you think about what to do with what was left before the daily reset? Think about it for a moment.
Now, what if you applied this same thinking to your time?
Maybe more urgency. Maybe more tactfulness. Maybe your decision-making process would be permanently altered.
If you consider the concepts of time value and opportunity cost with respect to your time, you will realize that much of the theory is transferrable.
Each day, we dip into the pot of life and refill our 24-hour cup. But not knowing when that pot runs dry makes time even more valuable than money.
When you choose to do one thing over another, it is because you believe that it will offer the most return versus all the other things you could do in that span of time.
You are making an investment decision.
With money, you invest what you have in the present because if you don’t, its value erodes. When you do nothing with money, you’re actually wasting it. Even if we don’t say it.
When we are younger, ‘wasting time’ doesn’t seem like a bad idea because after all, we somewhat safely assume that we still have much left. The pot (our life expectancy) looks large compared to ourselves. Even if we can’t see through a pot to know what’s left.
With time, you know that you should do something with it, rather than nothing. When you do nothing with time, it is because you think that the pot is always half full. Even if we don’t say it.
So then:
If you only had a specific limited amount of time each day and couldn't carry forward any of what you didn’t use, how would you use it?
You know time doesn’t wait. You know you can’t hold onto time. You know the future is uncertain.
Don’t simply spend time, invest it with purpose. Don’t pour aimlessly from your cup, direct it with intention. You know the future is uncertain.
You will reap what you sow.
EXPLAINER
The sunk-cost fallacy
In economics, a sunk cost is a cost that has already been incurred and cannot be recovered.
Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Prize for Economics – as a psychologist. He and his colleague Amos Tversky identified the sunk cost fallacy as a cognitive bias that affects how people make decisions.
A cognitive bias is an error in a mode or way of thinking.
The sunk-cost fallacy is the tendency to keep investing in something even when it's no longer beneficial, because of the time, money, or effort that has already been put in.We often get stuck fighting losing battles because we feel we have already invested too much and must see a thing to its end, even when faced with the realization that we won’t get the desired outcome.
Yet sometimes, many times, we can spare ourselves lost time by conceding defeat and taking a graceful “L” & an alternate path.
In daily life, it can look like:
Finishing a terrible book or movie just because you've already started it
Staying in a job you no longer enjoy simply because of the time & effort you've already invested
Extending a bad relationship out of a sense of obligation to the past rather than a vision for the future
This fallacy often invades our thinking around money as well. Here it looks like:
Holding onto a bad investment hoping to “make back” what we’ve lost
Sticking with a low-return rental property just because you paid a high price for it
Keeping a failing business afloat with more capital instead of cutting losses
We can learn from the words of Kenny Rogers’ song, ‘The Gambler’:
You've got to know when to hold 'em
Know when to fold 'em
Know when to walk away
And know when to run
This song is a poker reference but its wisdom goes far beyond the game.
The thing about a good gambler is they understand that losses are part of the process and that chasing them only leads to greater ruin. They don’t cling onto bad hands just because they’ve already bet on them. They make clear-headed decisions based on what’s in front of them, not what’s already gone.
Of course, investing and gambling are not the same. A skilled investor, like a skilled gambler, makes decisions based on probabilities and strategy. But investing is ultimately about long-term value creation, not short-term bets.
The sunk cost fallacy keeps us emotionally tied to decisions that no longer serve us. But smart investors, like good gamblers, know when to cut their losses and move on.
Whether it’s money, time, or effort, the key is to recognize when holding on is costing you more than letting go.
NOTES
You only have now
Our actions in the present are usually intended to give our future some level of certainty. But you truly only ever have the present.
Awareness is a function of consciousness. Attention is where we direct our awareness in a moment, and therefore over time.
Our attention is an aspect of time spent that the external world fights for (and even builds around), but we don’t seem to notice this happening. And even when we know it is, we are creatures of habit.
If you want to buy yourself time, guard your attention. Because in the end, your life is time spent. And your experience of time is in what you give your attention to.
Own your time or someone else will and you won’t know it until it's too late.
You’ve probably heard it before but it never grows old:
“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” –Annie Dillard
For what else is life than the sum total of all ‘present’ moments we have spent?
Years, months, days, minutes…moments.
You will die. You don't know when. What you know is, you're here now. How you spend your days…
Direct your attention at things that matter.
Because when it ends, you will only wish for more time to the same measure as to the amount you wasted.
“If you love life, don’t waste time, for time is what life is made up of.”
—Bruce Lee
Time doesn’t wait
Life is time spent.
A good life is time spent well.
Only the present is timeless.
It is always today.
There is no tomorrow.
AG
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