Time is not Money – part 1

I have a great deal of respect and deference for our writing class teacher. Tonight’s class was hard to describe, but part of it was about getting your bum in the chair and doing the one-two with the fingers over the keyboard. Writing. You know. The best way to learn to run is to get up and start running.

The chairs in class are a little uncomfortable, a fact that I instantly forgot when I started the actual writing part of class, a piece I called: “I was a red-headed step-child”. One nugget that our venerable teacher let forth was that “time is money”. And that got me riled up, partly as some of my red-headed step child scribble was about the discussion of an escape from the rat race.

Hence, “Time is not Money.”

Why people think time is money

If you read Sir Ken Robinson‘s book The Element, you’ll see a description of the prevailing education system which is a product of the industrial age. Train people for jobs in the industrial economy – to be cogs in a giant machine. Sinister eh? I think the old parable of the school for animals goes something like this:

The animal school teaches all of the animals to be average at everything. The eagle gets forced to go to remedial swimming lessons. The turtle is held back a year as his climbing skills aren’t up to par. You get the picture. The eagle isn’t allowed to soar, and the turtle is allowed to focus on whatever it is that turtles are good at. Besides surviving abuse by demented children.

So schools rarely pander to entrepreneurs, to artists, to dancers. They stifle creativity, says Sir K-Rob in his TED talk. Students are judged to succeed if they can do their reading, writing and maths, and follow a pre-defined curriculum of generic skills. Instead of turning out business owners and auteurs, they turn out working units designed to fit into the economy. Units of production who trade time for money. Wage slaves of a type.

I recall getting out of universities and after riding around the Sahara for a bit, trading savings for adventure, I got a few jobs. In them I figured out what I was paid an hour, and sometimes how much I would get paid to write a particular word if I had a documentation project. As wages increased, my production value went up, and I could trade the same amount of my time for more money, though I never had the option to choose the same amount of money for less time.

So yes, in my post-academic world, time was money.

What is time?

In my lack of abundance mentality, it’s that fleeting thing that is running our fast before we expire. Time travel is possible – we travel into our future all the time, but for the most part, people who aren’t Michael J Fox don’t go back in time. Except in their memory. So I guess remembering is a kind of backwards time mind travel. But that’s not where I’m going with this.

Time is the way we measure our progress from birth to death.

What is money?

“If I had a dollar for every time someone asked me what money is”, said the famous economist Adam Smith, “I’d be able to afford a nice glove to cover my invisible hand.”

Money is a consensual hallucination, an intertemporal store of value. It’s a medium for exchange, and most people do exchange their time for something (maybe cookies, a big screen TV, or a web site) and money is a convenient intermediate in the process. That way I don’t have to go and clock an hour at the cookie factory, 100 hours at the TV factory and 200 hours at the web site factory.

Why people are wrong

Simply put, most of us have time and choice. It wasn’t until I started reading some of Robert Kiyosaki’s books that explain that there are other ways to move through life than allotting a value to your time and exchanging that time for money. In his book about My Two Dads – the Rich One and The Other One, he describes the rat race – a cycle in which time equals money. Until you can generate income to exceed your living expenses, you are destined to be in the rat race. He describes escape as building passive income to the point where all your bills are paid. At that point you are free.

Of course the other way to hasten your escape from the rat race is to reduce your bills.  An approach described in the Millionaire Next Door. (I imagine – I’ve only read the synopsis) Luckily my house cost roughly half of the home to either side of mine, so I feel good. I could be that millionaire next door, though in fact I get excited when my kids’ blog generates $12.88 over 18 months.

Why I am always right

I think I learned this the other day. It’s important to some people to always be right – not necessarily to have the best outcome in their day to day lives. So if you think time is money, then that mindset might be ideal for you. It doesn’t really work for me any more. And in a funny way, I’m incapable of working for anyone any more.

However, if you want me to exchange words for money, that’s another thing. Contact me at the

Since brevity is the soul of wit, I summarize this in Time is not Money – part 2.