Working Smarter Not Longer
No more money in the mattress: Get on with livin’!
It’s easy to end up with the money in the mattress concept where you’re making it, but it’s not compounding. When you put your money in a mattress, it will take stuffing in $2,084/monthly for 480 months (40 years) to become a millionaire.
On the other hand, if that money was being deposited into investments that average 7% interest, it would take less than half that time; 19 years.
A saying that is not healthy for the human psyche is; “Work smarter, not harder.” When you interview the world’s most successful and famous, they always say the key to success is hard work. However, at some point, “long work” should become unnecessary.
With the right strategic planning, gap analysis between current and ideal, and a regular breakdown of statistics and the performance of the plan – we should be working less and getting better results.
At any given moment, we need to put in the hours it takes to move forward. On the other hand, I work in my businesses and with my clients to build infrastructure, so accountabilities move away from the owner and towards the team.
THE OPPORTUNITY COST DANGERS TO TIME AND MONEY
In the 4 Hour Work Week, Tim Ferris shares the critical element of “Opportunity cost.” He discovered that investing time, money, and energy into underperforming customers and parts of his business was causing him to work longer and taking time away from investing in the areas and people that were high performing. He totally cut the ineffective parts and consumers out and focused fully on the effective ones. The result was profoundly more profits in radically less time.
The book indicates that people who work long are lazy. They’re not taking the time and energy to create a superior strategy that can cut as much as 90% of their work hours out of the schedule.
One of my greatest life mentors was Dr. Tom Owen. He told his son Tom (and I grabbed it for me too), “Get on with livin’!”
Stuffing money in the mattress takes two times longer to get you to your dream than doing it smarter. Work hard, but not long. Get rich, but don’t die tryin’.
Have fun saving the world,
Dr. Ben Lerner
