The Millionaire Fastlane (29 page)

Chapter Summary: Fastlane Distinctions

• The natural gravity of society is not to be exceptional, but average.
  
• Toxic relationships drain energy and detract from your goals to be extraordinary.
  
• The people in your life are like your comrades in a battle platoon. They can save you, help you, or destroy you.
  
• Good relationships are accelerative to your process, while bad relationships are treasonous.
  

CHAPTER 26: YOUR PRIMORDIAL FUEL: TIME

Time isn't a commodity, something you pass around like a cake. Time is the substance of life. When anyone asks you to give your time, they're really asking for a chunk of your life.
~Antoinette Bosco

The $6 Bucket of Chicken

Why will most people never get rich? Look no further than a $6 bucket of chicken. It made big news: A major fast-food restaurant offered a free bucket of chicken to anyone who had an Internet coupon. People flocked to restaurant locations and waited for hours, all for a free $6 bucket of chicken. Know anyone who would stand in line for hours just to get something free?

Are you one of them?

These stories are common, and yet my reaction is the same: What the hell is wrong with people? I'll tell you:
These people value their time at zero
. It's free. Like the air we breathe, they're convinced that time is abundant and in endless supply. They live as if they were immortal. They are certain that time, the fuel of their life, never runs empty.

I wonder if these people had three weeks left to live, would they be standing in line for a bucket of chicken? What if they had three months? Three years? At what level of mortality would they rule that standing in line for three hours for free chicken is not good use of time? The greasy chicken truth:
Value your time poorly and you will be poor
. When time is wasted as a lifestyle choice you will be stranded in places you don't want to be.

Take a look around. How do your friends, family, and peers value their time? Are they standing in line to save four bucks? Are they driving 40 minutes to save 10 dollars? Are they parked on the sofa anxiously waiting to see who wins
Dancing With the Stars
?

The average American watches more than four hours of TV each day. In a 65-year life, that person will have spent nine years glued to the tube. Why? Simple. Life sucks. Life needs an escape. Life is no good.

Show me someone who spends hours online playing Mafia Wars or Farmville, and I'll show you someone who probably isn't very successful. When life sucks, escapes are sought. I don't need television because I invested my time into a real life worth living, not a fictitious escape that airs every Tuesday night at 8 p.m.

Again, majority thinking yields mediocrity, and for that majority, time is an asset that is undervalued and mindlessly squandered.

The Titanic: How Fast Is Your Ship Sinking?

People standing in line to save money ought to hold a picket sign announcing to the world, “I value money more than my life.” That choice is a primal mistake. A great example to time's reigning dominance over money comes from the 1997 movie, Titanic.

As the ship sinks and few lifeboats remain, Caleden Hockley, a wealthy steel industrialist played by Billy Zane, bargains for his life with a ship's officer and offers cash in exchange for a lifeboat seat. The officer rebukes the tycoon's proposition with a stiff certainty: “Your money can't save you anymore than it can save me.”

Reflect on that for a moment. Your money can't save you anymore than it can save me. Powerful. In those eight seconds, the true value of time is exposed and we intersect with the certainty to our own ticking death-clock. You see, once your time is gone, you're dead. And when your clock ceases to tick, no amount of cash will save you from the end.

Fastlaners understand that time is the gas tank of life. When the gas tank runs dry, life ends. Time is the greatest asset you own, not money, not the 1969 restored Mustang, not grandpa's old coin collection. Time. The fact is all of us are on a sinking ship. Is your time treated as such? Is it treated fairly or carelessly? Or is your primordial fuel squandered as if the tank will never run empty?

You Were Born Rich and Will Die Broke

Time is the great equalizer. You were born with a full tank of gas. There are no refilling stations, and your one fill-up occurred the moment you took your first breath. Time can't be created outside of your mortal limits. Sure, we might be able to stretch a 76-year lifespan to 82 with good health and diet, but within mortality, time is transformed from infinite to finite. The greatest theft of all humanity is to act as if our time on this Earth is infinite when it isn't.

The reality is that
time is deathly scarce, while money is richly abundant
.

On any given day, $3 trillion is exchanged in the world currency markets.

That's $3,000,000,000,000.

To give that perspective, you can spend a million dollars a day for 8,000 years and you still wouldn't have spent $3 trillion. That's 109 lifetimes to quantify the total currency trading volume that exists for ONE DAY. Money is abundant and will be abundant as long as the world's governments print more.

Now, since you don't have 8,000 years of life, isn't it logical to conclude that money is an abundant resource while time is not? You can always acquire more money, but you cannot defy mortality. The irony of financial fortune is that no matter how much you have, you'll die flat broke. You cannot escape the continual combustion of time as your tank drips time every second. You can live in blissful happiness or in a miserable depression-time is indifferent and it just bleeds away. Since time is scarce, wouldn't it make sense not to waste 3 hours of your life for a $6 bucket of chicken?

Indentured Time Is the Ransom of Free Time

There are two types of time that will make up your lifespan: Your free time and your indentured time.

Your Lifespan = Free Time + Indentured Time

“Free time” is yours to spend as you please: TV, a jog in the park, video games, sleeping, eating, vacation. If you're like most, your free time is lumped on evenings and weekends, where time is not exchanged for money.

“Indentured time” is the opposite: It's the total time spent earning money and the consequences of that spent time. When you awake in the morning, shower, dress, drive to the train station, wait, ride to work, and then work for eight hours-this is indentured time. When you spend your entire weekend “recharging” from the workweek, this is indentured time. Indentured time is actual work and the work you must do for the work. Morning rituals, traffic, compiling reports at home, solitary “recharges”-whatever time spent earning a buck is indentured time.

If you won the lottery, you'd quit your job because indentured time is no longer required and is suddenly replaced with free time.
Money buys free time and eliminates indentured time
. However, the irony of your free time is it isn't FREE; it's bought and paid for by your indentured time. You enjoy a two-week vacation because it was paid for by a year of indentured time. You can relax with a cold beer on the couch because you paid for it earlier in the day with eight hours of indentured time.
Indentured time becomes the ransom of your free time
.

The Right Time Versus the Wrong Time

There's the right time and the wrong time. The right time is free time; indentured time is the wrong time. The Slowlane ransoms time-time at the job and time invested in the markets. Remember, five indentured days for two free days is a bad trade! A financial plan with time as the adjudicator is not a good financial plan.

If you were born into slavery, your life would be 100% indentured time with 0% free time. While total time can't be manipulated, you can manipulate your time ratio. Wouldn't it be nice to have one day of indentured time and six days of free time? If you can steal free time from the hands of indentured time, life will have more of the “right time” versus the “wrong time.”

Dump the Junk in the Trunk!

If you race cars at the drag strip, you know that every ounce of weight counts. Racers remove everything nonessential to make the car as light as possible. This increases efficiency, speed, and performance, resulting in faster finishes. Unnecessary weight forces the car to work harder. Yet on our road trip to wealth, we're guilty of adding weight. Our vehicle is burdened with junk-in-the-trunk that coerces us to work harder. And when you work harder long enough, it wears you out and breaks you down. This debilitating weight is
parasitic debt
.

Parasitic debt is everything you owe the world. It is the excrement of Lifestyle Servitude. Your shiny new Infiniti financed at 60 monthly payments, your home mortgage financed over 30 years, your fancy designer clothes four months removed from out-of-fashion, and yes, even that insidious furniture that seemed like such a good idea at the time.

All of this crap creates servitude and forces indentured time. When you're forced to work, you limit choice, and limited choices close roads. Aside from my mother's creepy doll collection, nothing is more frightening than a parasite leeched to my neck, sucking my blood. Parasitic debt is a counterweight to your road trip; it's a bloodsucker that steals free time, energy, freedom, and health-all foes to true wealth.

Parasitic Debt DEVOURS Free Time

The leading cause of indentured time is parasitic debt. Surely you've heard the phrase” thief of hearts.” When it comes to parasitic debt, it is the “thief of lives.” Parasitic debt is a gluttonous pig that gorges on free time and shits it out as indentured time. Any debt that forces you to work is reclassified from free time and shifts it to indentured time.

Debt needs a constant drip of blood, and that blood comes from your gas tank of life: time. And since time is fixed, an increase in indentured time comes from only one source: your free time.

The Cost of Parasitic Debt

The average American owes more than they are worth. Having a lifestyle built on credit creates Lifestyle Servitude in the form of indentured time. And because total time is finite, indentured time grows by pilfering from free time. Indentured time leads to the Sidewalk.

The next time you buy some fancy gadget on credit, know exactly what you are buying. You're buying parasitic debt that eats free time and excretes it into indentured time.

For example, if you buy an audio system that costs $4,000 and you make $10 per hour, what's the real price? What is the weight of the poop? That price is 400 hours of your free time, since you must work 400 hours X $10 per hour to repay the debt. Add 10% interest and your final cost stacks up to 440 hours of your free time added to your weight burden. So next time ya whip out the Visa, calculate the real cost. How much free time is this going to cost me? Everything we buy hasn't one cost, but two:

1. The actual dollar cost
   
2. The free time transformed into indentured time.
   

The Law of Chocolate Chip Cookies

When I first moved out on my own, I quickly learned the Law of Chocolate Chip Cookies: If the cookies don't get into the grocery cart, they don't get home. And if they don't get home, they don't get in my mouth. And if they don't get in my mouth, they don't transform into belly fat.

Parasitic debt follows the same law.

Control parasitic debt by controlling its source: instant gratification, a trait of the Sidewalk. The next time you feel compelled to buy some trinket at Macy's, ask yourself: Will this be obsolete in six months and land in the garage with the rest of the junk? In four months, will this stupid tribal T-shirt be relegated to that dusty side of the closet reserved for painting smocks? Again, when you purchase the next greatest fashion fad without truly being able to afford it, you open the floodgates to parasitic debt that flows downstream to the Sidewalk.

If the cost of that product doesn't make it to your credit card, it doesn't become parasitic. You become a protector of free time! Think! Will this purchase TAKE FREEDOM? Will I own this or will it own me? While some choose servitude behind iron bars, others choose servitude behind velvet walls. Both are the same. The ultimate wealth is having the free time to live how you want to live. The Fastlane is about being both lifestyle rich as well as time rich.

A Poor Valuation of “Free Time” Leads to Poorness

Rich or poor, time is equally possessed, shared, and consumed by all. Every day, you use it. I use it. Your neighbor uses it. No one gets more and no one gets less. Twenty-four hours for everybody. No one has an unfair advantage. You, me, we all have 24 hours to consume, expire, and spend. Time is the ultimate equalizer.

Then why do so few get rich while the rest wallow from paycheck to paycheck? The distinction lies in the valuation of free time, the chosen roadmap, and the acquisition of parasitic debt. Guess the behaviors-rich or poor?

• This person sleeps until noon.
  
• This person watches hours of reality TV.
  
• This person drives two hours to save $20.
  
• This person buys airline tickets with multiple layovers to save $100.
  
• This person spends hours surfing social networks and gossip blogs.
  
• This person is a Level 10 Druid in
  World of Warcraft
  .
  
• This person watches every Chicago Cubs game (just kidding, all you loyal Cubs fans).
  

Behind the tangled roots of poorness, you will find a poor valuation of free time, which breeds from bad choices. “Time losers” are poor evaluators of time. These are the people camped out at Wal-Mart at 4 a.m. waiting to grab the early bird sales. These are the people sleeping outside Best Buy hoping to score a free 32" HDTV. These are the people waiting outside IKEA hoping to get a free breakfast.