Time is Flying

Chris Tanke (00:00)
All my possessions for a moment of time, There it is. The great exchange. Time for money.

Welcome back to Navigating Abundance. I’m Chris Tankey, and today we’re going to be talking about the fact that time flies, the Latin tempus fugit. So this is a time management conversation again. And I know that these things can appear somewhat preachy at times. I just want you to know that as I review this and the things that I’m going to be discussing, it also struck according to me that maybe I need to be thinking about this.

little bit more myself. So we’re all in the same boat together. If you’re a human being, ⁓ you’re not always using your time as effectively or as opportunistically as you should. So I just want to encourage you a little bit and encourage myself as we talk about the fact that time is flying, Tempest Fugit. If you go to our website, navigatingbutt com, in our prologomena section, you’ll see four different principles that drives ⁓ our movement.

One of those is Tempest Fugit Time Flies. And I’ve decided that I’m going to read it to you if you haven’t read it yourself, because I think it’s it’s it’s pretty well put together and I think it describes where we’re going today. And again, you can go on the website and download this you want yourself. That’s fine. But Tempest Fugit, as we say, is one of the primary pillars of what we’re doing, the concept of that. And I’ll read.

Just like magic, abundance ushers in a new form of currency into our lives. This new currency quickly becomes far more valuable to us than the dollars and cents that we’re used to managing. In fact, we actively pursue opportunities to spend our dollars and our cents so as to acquire more of this currency. To facilitate this exchange, endless service industries have been created and have become so necessary to modern life that they often represent one of the larger sectors.

Contributors to a country’s GDP. Mark it down. The pursuit of this new and precious currency is serious business. As her life was nearing an end, Queen Elizabeth I was reported to have said something rather vulnerable. And here it is quote All my possessions for a moment of time, end quote. There it is. The great exchange. Right? Time for money.

While this story may well be apocryphal, the truly wise will consider it instructional. Money is infinite, time is finite. We can arrange our lives never to run out of money, but we cannot arrange our lives to never run out of time. When our numbers called, our numbers called. Money remains. We must fly. Now, this is heavy stuff for sure.

Coming to the realization that we’re all but dust in the wind can certainly induce a panic attack or two, but it can also serve to motivate us to strive out into the world every day with a little more urgency in our step. We hope that you share in our belief that total family wealth is a most critical mission. It is, without a doubt, to be the greatest quest of your life, which is why you’re here at all. And in that respect, there is no time to waste. Tempest Fugit.

So

I I just thought I’d put together some thoughts of how we can ⁓ maybe encourage one another to think more soberly about how we’re spending our our days, our hours, our minutes. And again, I don’t mean to be preachy. what I do mean to do is to just maybe quicken a little better understanding or appreciation of what we’re up against when it comes to the fact that

Time flies, money remains. So there are three things that I just want to bring to focus here. as we talk about, I guess, time management or or actually investing your life as effectively as you can with the time that you have, maybe a better way to say it. And the first is this we all need to face the fact that we’re living on borrowed time. We’ve heard that before. I’m living on borrowed time. Now, that terminology borrowed time, if you were to ⁓

Look it up in the dictionary or Wikipedia. It basically speaks of the fact that the inevitable is being postponed. That’s borrowed time. You can’t change the inevitable, but at least we’re postponing it. We’re pushing it off borrowed time. And of course, for our illustration here, the inevitable is pushing up daisies. That’s where we’re all headed. And so that means that there’s a window of opportunity between now and then.

And by very virtue of understanding that, we want to make sure that we don’t waste the time that we have. So I think the first thing we need to come to realization is or to remind ourselves, maybe even every day, hey, I’m on borrowed time. you know, how am I gonna be using my time today? Because I can’t recycle it. Once it’s gone, it’s gone. I think the other thing that’s

Kind of interesting about the term of Bowered Time. It presumes the fact that time is not ours in the first place. We are borrowing it. Someday we will give it back. Again, I think this does a great job to, I think, motivate us to stewarding the precious time that we have. We’re not the originator of time, we are the recipients of time. We didn’t earn it, but we are blessed by it.

I think that’s a different posture to strike out into your day with that understanding, right? If we can remind ourselves, and we we know all this to be true, but if we can continually maybe remind ourselves of this, I think it might make a us more effectual in what we’re doing in our day. If time is so priceless and so temporal, and both of those things is true, then let’s spend it on what matters. Let’s invest the time that we have wisely, because we are on.

Borrowed time. The second thing you might want to consider is this. We need to be honest about the opportunity cost of our decisions. Honest about the opportunity cost of our decisions. Life is not about both and. That’s a fib. It’s a lie. You can’t have both and. Life is all about either or. That’s opportunity cost.

Opportunity cost in economic terms is the value of the next best alternative that’s voluntarily surrendered when you make a decision. Right? We learned this maybe when you were kids. Mom said, okay, we’ve got three different desserts. Pick one. That’s opportunity cost, right? If you pick the cake, right? You can’t have the pie and the cookies as well. You voluntarily gave something up.

And you recognize that there was a loss in doing it, but it was worth it because what you gained, the cake, was your number one choice. That is being honest about opportunity cost. There are trade-offs in life. and and when you gain something, you always lose something else that you could have had. I think that’s a really valuable way to look at the decisions that we make. I have some property up north that I

dearly love. we hunt it, we we fish it, got a cabin up there. actually it’s a pole barn. But it’s really nice on the inside. And and we we enjoy it immensely. A lot of projects you’re really never done. I love to run up there and get away, put the wood burning stove on, you know, mow some grass, clear some trails, work on tree stands, you know, fell some trees,

And split those logs. I I like all that stuff. It’s fantastic. It is really, really good for me. But you know what? I cannot be always with my grandchildren and up north at the same time. Now, we’re wise enough, I am anyway, to figure out that, hey, well, let’s figure out how to get those kids in love with that land so we can, well, pass along the traditions of the love of the outdoors and spend a lot of precious time with each other. That’s fabulous. That’s great. But oftentimes that’s not the case with the pace of their life and mine.

That’s an opportunity cost question. You face it in business. You buy one piece of equipment, which is great. You made that decision, but that meant that you couldn’t hire three other people that you also need right now. You had to make a decision. That’s opportunity cost. You’re using your opportunities wisely. and you know, we can go on and on. If you marry one gal, you gave up another gal that was really nice. It’s an opportunity cost question. That’s how it works.

So let’s be honest that we live in not a both and world. We live in an either or world. And what that means is it won’t add more time for you, but it’ll help you gather some of that fleeing time and make sure that the way you’re applying it, right, is the most effectual, positive, virtuous way that you can. Right? So think in terms of all right.

I can do two good things or three good things. what am I giving up if I go this direction? Is that really what I should do? And if the answer is yes, that’s a great use of your time. So you can’t make more of it, but you can apply it better. You could be a steward better of it. The third would be ⁓ try to think of the who before you think of the how when it comes to accomplishing something. Try to think more of who.

Rather than how when you’re trying to accomplish something. In a previous podcast, we talked about Dan Sullivan and Benjamin Heine’s book, ⁓ Not Who but How, which I encourage you to get. It’s really good. But I also mentioned that you could read the cover of the book, the foreword in that book, and save yourself $11.95 or whatever, because you understand the whole concept of the book. And the idea is that sure, you can learn how to do something, but is that a good use of your time?

Perhaps you should look for somebody or a who that can do it well already. Right? Now, there is a lot of joy that can be found. fulfillment can be found in learning new skills. Not against that, but they even have that is an opportunity cost question. If you learn how to, I don’t know, change your your own oil and lube up your tractor on your own, that’s fine.

You might have to give out the manual, spend a little more time. If you had somebody come in that was good at that and show up at the farm and just do all that for you, I think that ⁓ there’s a really good chance it’ll be done faster and maybe even, dare we say, better, because that is their area. You could, well, face this on your own and try to learn how to do this, but maybe you should be finding the who, not understanding the how.

at our firm here, Strategic Financial Group, we’re a registered investment advisor, which means we are under significant compliance restraint from the SEC and FINRO and from the state. It is ⁓ close to being unreasonable, really, really close to being unreasonable. And the laws are changing all the time. and it is

Very, very burdensome. so there you can you can tell my angst in this and and every RIA firm will share that concern. but it has to be done. And I’s have to be, you know, dotted and T’s have to be crossed. If I was not an independent firm and working with a national firm, they would have a compliance team and all sorts of schedules to keep us on track and and whatnot to make sure that’s done, but we don’t.

So that means we’re on our own when a regulator comes in and wants to have a cup of coffee with us. How do we handle that? Well, we could learn how to do it, and some smaller firms do ⁓ spend time doing that. But I gotta tell you, I want to know the right people to do it, the who’s that we should bring on that knows this the these requirements and and the schedules we need to keep and the things that we need to ⁓

Codify and file and report and all of that stuff. So we spend a significant amount of money every year bringing in third parties that oversee our compliance and prod us to do the right things and remind us to do this or will do filings for us. That’s the who. Is it expensive? It really, really is expensive. Is it worth it? For us, it really, really is worth it. That’s a who versus a

How discussion. So think about what you you face in your life. Maybe you’re like us. You know, we’re not techie people. And at home, when we’re trying to set things up or we have problems with a computer or whatever, we’re on a subscription with a tech firm that we can call in or call up and they can talk us through stuff. And it costs, you know, a noticeable amount of money. That’s fine. Maybe we could figure it out someday. That would be the how should we do it?

But I gotta tell ya, that’s money well spent if I’m looking for time redemption to hire somebody with the who to do that knowledgeable task for us. Right? So you can’t make more time, I guess. I in I’m I may may well

You can ins in some ways you can use your money to manufacture some more time if you look at it that way by having somebody else do it so you can go spend time with the grandchildren or whatever the case might be. Yeah, yeah, you can do that in that sense. And I guess that’s what I’m saying. You might want to consider that. So yeah, time is fleeing. ⁓ we only have so much. Our days are numbered. we can’t add any span to that. ⁓ but if we can remember that we’re on borrowed.

Time some more, think about that some more, meditate on that a little bit, and and r use our stewardship of that borrowed time ⁓ to realize that someday I’m gonna have to give this back. It’s finite. Let’s let’s see myself in not the situation of the owner of it, but somebody’s just borrowing it. I think that could be helpful the we make decisions or spend our time. Second again.

Be honest about the opportunity cost of our decisions. What are we giving up? Have we really thought about that carefully and fairly, honestly? And that’ll help us again not make more time, but apply time more wisely, invest it more wisely. And third, think about who, not about how as your first impulse when a task needs to be done that you’re not really familiar with. All these things to come back together, to think about how do we redeem time.

How do we make the most of the time that we have? Because as we say, as the Latin said, Tempest Fugit time really is flying. So there you go. I’m with you. I’m in the same boat as you are. I haven’t solved all these things, and I’m an egregious violator of all three of these things frequently. But perhaps, you know, if we can remind ourselves a little bit more of this, you know, each day or often, that’ll change the way that we’re spending the time that we’ve been.

Gifted or loaned. This is Chris Tankey with Strategic Financial Group. I’m here with you. We’re all in the same boat rowing together, wishing you all the best. And remember, really, your family is worth it.