The one essential ingredient that is the most crucial in any wealth building pursuit is time. The only way to multiple the time we have to build wealth is to use other people’s time.
The grand irony is that every single one of us on the Earth gets exactly the same amount of time in any given day, 24 hours to be exact. However, how we spend that time is literally the difference in whether someone is going to be able to build wealth or not.
I know this sounds ridiculously simple and naïve but yet have you ever TRULY stopped and thought about this? Have you truly ever thought about the fact that Warren Buffet and Elon Musk get the exact same amount of time each day as you do?
How you spend your time determines your net worth
So if we get the same amount of time in a day that Warren Buffet and Elon Musk get each day why then aren’t we as successful as they are?
Well, among other variables how they have chosen to spend their day maximizes their time to the fullest extent possible whereby I’m willing to bet our day is not set up in the same way to optimize our time.
What am I talking about you ask? Buffet and Musk have set up their life in a way that they leverage Other People’s Time (OPT). They have done this by having set up multiple business entities that rely on the time of others to help build their wealth. From a systemized approach it looks like the following;
They have identified a vehicle to create and build wealth for themselves and they employ a number of other individuals to work that system on their behalf. Just simply doing the math it becomes obvious.
Let’s assume each of us works 8 hours a day to build wealth. Those of us that stop there only have one multiplier, 8 hours, that we can apply towards the wealth building system that we have chosen. If that ‘system’ is a job for someone else our wealth building activity ends even more abruptly.
Multiply the time you have by getting a team
However, if we were to create a business and were able to hire 5 individuals that worked 8 hours a day on OUR behalf to build wealth for our system, then we would have the equivalent of 40 hours of wealth building leverage in just one day!
Coincidentally, that would be one complete week of work that we would otherwise have to work ourselves but we had 5 of our employees spend a week’s worth of their time in just one day helping to build wealth for us! THIS is the proverbial definition of Other People’s Time or OPT!
What is so difficult for so many of us to comprehend is that even though we all have the same amount of time and we may all work the same amount of hours, or we may even work more than others, we all get paid differently because of what we spend our time on. WHAT we do with that time matters, as well as HOW we do it!
For instance, a lawyer with a good professional track record and solid reputation tends to make a pretty good living financially in comparison with other professions. However, what do you think a managing partner in that same law firm makes?
Other people’s time is a force multiplier of wealth
I’m willing to bet it’s a multiple of that individual lawyer’s salary. As a result, that one lawyer’s hourly rate might be $150 per hours but in the scheme of things, that managing partner is making tens of thousands of dollars per hour as far as gross proceeds from all the lawyers working for her/him.
This concept was always fascinating to me. They’re both lawyers but they make a significantly different wage because of HOW they each do their job.
In previous posts, I talk about this in greater detail as to the type of employment someone has will dictate the potential level of wealth building success they will enjoy.
The long and short of it is that in order to maximize the time that you have available…notice I didn’t say YOUR time but the ‘time that you have available’ which due to leverage is OPT as well…you need a profession or type of employment that provides for other individuals working on your behalf on your wealth building system.
For so many of us, it’s not that we lack time or that we lack ambition to build wealth we simply are ‘vocationally challenged’ as I like to say. We have literally picked the WRONG way to spend our time each day trying to build wealth. Sadly, many of us will spend years, perhaps decades, putting more hours in and working harder to try to ‘force it’ to happen.
I am going to let you in on a big secret that I wished someone had told me BEFORE I set off on my own career; if part of your objective is to build wealth as a result of spending all the hours that you work, you need to be in the right employment in order for that to happen within an otherwise reasonable time frame. As maintained in this post, that employment needs to be something whereby you can leverage OPT.
Conclusion
Although I now see how obvious all of this is, I wished I had a mentor 30 years ago that could have got me to this conclusion back then! It would have saved me a TON of frustration, financial and professional, and quite frankly it would have saved me a boat load of overtime hours that I essentially ‘gave away’ to my employer having worked on salary. And a low salary at that!
Understanding the concept of OPT is absolutely critical in being able to build wealth in an expedited time frame. Having someone else do your work so to speak and on your behalf is the ultimate wealth building strategy. Just ask Tom Sawyer. He got it!
