Abraham Lincoln said on several occasions, “In the end, it’s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years.” Unfortunately too many people fail to realize the consequences of not listening to President Lincoln’s poetic words before it’s too late.
The graph below is a prime example of a traditional deferred lifeline that few have been able to escape. The horizontal axis represents age. The vertical axis represents the percentage of time we spend doing what we love and the amount of income we’ve accumulated in terms of a percentage over our lifetime.
From ages 0-16 with the exception of a having a part time job, being forced into household chores or doing homework, we tend to have a lot of freedom to do what we want outside of school.
However, unless we have a rich Uncle Ned who handed down his family fortune to us, we’re pretty much broke and dependent on our parents or caregivers for money.
In our early twenties we then venture away from school and into the working world to start our careers. It is during this ‘career’ phase that we trade our time (the red line) for money (the blue line). We settle and hope that one day we’ll accumulate the financial means necessary to regain some of the time spent working and get to take part in all those experiences we once dreamed about as kids.
I call this living in the x-zone. Notice the large X formed by the red and blue lines in the dark grey box between ages 22-65. Instead of working in parallel in the Ultimate Life Zone, Time and Money are heading in opposite directions as life progresses.
If you look to the right of the x-zone, you can also see that from ages 65-80 time and money are also working inversely and form another X.
In both cases there seems to be a tradeoff between time and money. Traditionally when one goes up the other goes down. The letter X gets branded on our life and reinforces Donny Deutch’s Sunday-Friday reference of doing the wrong thing.
To give you another analogy, take Tiger Woods for example. Can you imagine if he had decided, at the age of 22 that he was just going to just practice hitting golf balls for the next 43 years? Then, when he turned 65 he was going to actually play the game of golf and tryout for PGA Tour.
It just doesn’t make sense to trade time for money and wait until you’re 65 to start living. What’s so special about being 65 anyway? Why has that been the psychological barrier for so many? Find out in the next post.
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(Photo: wallyg)
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Category: Dangerous Myths, The Ultimate Life
