There was a point in my life where I knew I had no experience doing anything, but I had a lot of time to get experienced with anything. I also knew the time would be reducing at some point.
When I was younger, I had an older friend, Michael. I remember telling Michael that, “right now, I’m just learning anything I want to or experimenting with whatever I can. If it goes well, cool. If it doesn’t, I learned something. And a time would come when I would be needed for those things, and then the cost to provide those experiences would be my time.” I didn’t watch for Michael’s reaction, I wasn’t waiting for one, but he agreed with what I said. And this has become true for the most part as I grew up. Most of what I learned in those years and a few years after are what keeps me employed mostly, or I could say, makes me valuable to others.
Within those years I took everything as an opportunity to learn something, anything at all, except anything criminal, of course. One thing I noticed is the cost to learn all of that is time, for a few reasons:
- Taking the time to learn or get experienced with anything burns it away.
- You would have to relearn things along the way because you adapt and would need to improve with changes around you.
- Some people would waste your time because they notice you are taking any opportunity as learning.
- Time isn’t something you have control of whether you use it or not; it’s spent.
But here’s the twist: when someone needs you, or you need yourself for the knowledge & experience you spent time to gain, in order to execute something, the cost is going to be “your time.” Surprising, right? Let me explain with the list of reasons from before:
- Working on anything at all involves time as a cost.
- You would be spending time picking what to invest your knowledge and experience in, based on your preferences: finding what is going to be executed interesting, financial gain, or simply seeing it through.
- Some people would waste your time on poor execution, planning, or similar issues in what they want to execute (or simply enjoy wasting other people’s time :-|). Some people would see their time as more valuable than yours. They are busy; you’re not. They’ll ask for a “quick call” that turns into three hours of back-and-forth, expect you to drop everything when they finally have time, or take days to respond while expecting immediate replies from you.
- Just an extra: you would have to relearn, or learn new ways and things, as you execute what you choose to invest your time in.
- Time would still be spent whether you get into executing something with your knowledge & experience or not.
Your question might be: is there a point at all, then?
My answer to this would be: it depends on who you are, your values and what you see yourself doing, your preferences, etc.
Some people would enjoy the financial gains in executing something with their knowledge and experience; others enjoy the process; others all of it; and others for other reasons.
In all of this, time is the cost for anything, even for patience. It’s the only thing that we have minimal control over. And from my short time on earth, I’ve noticed it gets more precious because you have less to spend, and people create frameworks and tools and processes and etc. just to help them pick the right places to spend their time.
So in all, the point is that you like whatever you are spending your time on, it’s not harming you in any way, and you pick the right things to spend your time on.
Maybe time isn’t real, but we don’t have it to check if it is. We don’t know what it is, but we can count it. Maybe it’s just the sun rises and sun sets. We keep building and being helpful to the society around us because no matter how brutal some can be, we are built to adapt and to improve things in ways within our power and learn those not in our power. They could get within our power if we spend the time on them also.
Thank you for reading this or getting to this point if you skipped. I couldn’t make it any shorter 🥲. If you don’t know me yet, I’m Aikins, and I love to build stuff.