The value of an investment

Whenever we think of investment, we think of investing some money into some mutual fund or some company. Which basically means that whenever we think of an investment, only monetary investments come to our mind. In my article a sometime ago, I discussed the relation of an investment with innovation. There are many investors around the globe who have investments making them one of the richest people of the world.

But, what if I told you, we all have invested, or we all are investors of our own. Yes, we are. Because though we haven’t invested millions of monetary currencies into some talented individuals’ companies, but we all have invested our time into learning something useful. Learning how to write, or learning how to speak, or playing the guitar, anything; but we have invested our time.

If I were to give you a choice, would you choose money or time? In other words, my question is that if two choices were given to you and you were asked to take only one—time or money; then what would you choose. Surprisingly, the rich people, who are rich on their own, would choose time, and the poor people would choose money. If you ask the same question to say, Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk, they will choose time and not money.

And there is a reason why would they choose time over money. They would choose time over money because they know that time is limited, money isn’t. What? Money isn’t unlimited? If that would be the case then nobody would have to work at all! Of course, I do believe money is not physically unlimited, but if someone has the potential, then yes, money is also unlimited.

To understand how money is unlimited, or can be unlimited, we need to delve deeply into the history of mankind. Let’s go back to the barter system. In this system, you had to give something to get something, i.e., people exchanged goods for goods. Then, the concept of money was invented by humans, and people started paying money, in whatever form, to get what they wanted.

Slowly, as civilisation advanced further, people started to work together as a group. The leader of the group used to hire others and this made both the work faster and the monetary revenue faster and increased it to humungous amounts.

And now, we have many billionaires in the whole world, who have proved that they are now financially free. Now let me ask you, if money didn’t have the potential to be increased, how come that people have reached such extraordinary heights of wealth? Of course, it depends upon the person, how capable he is. If he is capable then even if he starts from zero, he will reach a height that is recognized in the whole wide world, and if someone doesn’t have the capability, then no matter how much money he already has, he is only going to go into deeper debt or atleast not able to grow financially.

So, now you might have understood that yes, money can be grown as much we want, but, if we have the potential. If you have the potential to make millions, billions or even trillions from nothing, and if you also have the potential to keep those huge amounts, only then you will understand that yes, money is truly dependent upon potential of the person.

But, this isn’t what this topic is. I was just giving you a glimpse of the monetary world. This is how money works. But this isn’t how time works. We all have limited time. It is a universal truth. We all are born, we all live for a certain period of time, and we all have to eventually die. This is true for anything in the universe, be it something as minuscule as an atom, or as massive as the whole universe, or perhaps even the multiverse. There is no escape to time.

But there is one commonality that money has with time. Both can be invested. You can invest your money into something that is growing rapidly to get a share of its income. But, if you invest your time, you can do a lot, lot more than you could have ever imagined.

Let me give you an example. Say someone wants to learn how to play a guitar. He has a busy working schedule and he has long hours of tiring work. But still he has 8-9 hours of time left. Even if he invests just 2 hours of his everyday routine into the work, he will spend more than 730 hours, which is almost an entire month! This one month might seem small to you but it is actually much larger and much more significant than you think it is. He learns to play the guitar for 2 hours, everyday, which actually makes the whole thing, learning to play the guitar, a much more simple task to do because he will have no points left by the end of the year, anything he learns, will be totally covered.

And there are people who have played the guitar for more than 20, 30, or even 40 years, imagine how many hours would they have invested into it. And the more the hours invested, the better the outcome, or the better the guitarist’s skills are.

Now you might understand why the richest people still value time more than money. It is not that they want to show us that they are great, that even when they have so much money, they are ready to get more time, instead of more money. They want to prove that time is more important than money. Because money comes, and goes, and comes again, but once time goes, it never comes back again.

As a student, it is extremely important for one to understand the importance of time. This is because when someone is a student, especially a school student, then he is young and has time to do whatever he wants to. He has time to invest into something useful for his well-being in the future. On the other hand, when someone is old, or elder, he already has responsibilities and no time to invest. Just like when someone invests some monetary amount at age 20, versus someone who invests the same monetary amount at age 30, the gains of the 20-year-old are vastly more than the 30-year-old because he has more time, and in more time, the money would grow more. The same thing happens with time, if you learn something at a younger age, investing some amount of your time, then at an older age if you spend your time, then your proficiency and progress, will be vastly more than your future self because you will have invested more time.