you're a billionaire
1 billion seconds = 31.7 years
“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
- Mary Oliver
If someone handed you $1,000,000,000 today, how differently would you live? What if that person gave you a choice, between one billion dollars, and one billion seconds?
You are already a multi-billionaire — maybe not in dollars (and maybe not just yet), but in time. This concept of a time billionaire, which Graham Duncan introduced on the Time Ferriss Show in 2019 [here], profoundly shifted the way I see and value wealth.
If you are anything like me, I’ve spent my early career in a rather unimaginative way, spending the better part of the last 20 years focused singularly on trading present value for future value. And in a more literal sense, trading as much time as possible for as much money as possible. This is what smart, responsible people who invest and plan for the future “do”. Right?
Do you ever have those dreams where you are still “you”, but observing the actual “you” from a third-person POV? I increasingly wonder why I don’t question the universal rule of wake up, go to work, make money, invest some, spend some, repeat repeat repeat… who’s game am I spending billions (of seconds) playing?
Unlike money, time can’t be earned back. Every second spent is an irreversible withdrawal from a finite balance. When you realize you’re richer than Bezos in the most precious currency there is, you pay more attention to where it’s going.
Average human lifespan: (79 years) * (31,536,000 seconds / year) = 2,207,520,000 seconds
The currency we forget we have
Consider the following allocation of your billions of “time net worth” based on the average American (or “how to go bankrupt”):
12% of time net worth: ten years doom-scrolling on a phone
8% of total time net worth: six years on social media
5% of total time net worth: four years watching TV we don’t even like
= 25% of total time net worth: twenty years of life
I’ve now quantified the tax you pay for not budgeting. Trade these distractions that barely register in our memory for what you truly value, whatever that may be. Steward your time capital, as you would your dollar capital. You can’t make more, nor can you know how much you have left (another tangent for another time).
Warren Buffet is 94 years old and worth $150B. Would you trade places with him, for all the money in the world? Conversely, there is probably no amount of money he wouldn’t pay to be in his 20s or 30s again (but he can’t). You are richer today than you will ever be, in time.
But, by far the scariest part of this was when I started really counting: understanding my lifespan in seconds, visualizing it, breaking it into easier components (weeks, months)… and realizing how short that actually is.
Spend like a billionaire
Play exponential games: You have a lifetime to compound, what’s the best that can happen?
Exit bad deals: Toxic relationships, bad work culture, boring career, doom-scrolling
Splurge on experiences with loved ones: Experiences with family, friends, and children pay a memory dividend (thank you, Bill Perkins [here]) forever. There are also only finite (and unknowable) seconds of your life you can choose to spend time with certain people, especially parents. No one remembers the 47th package they ordered on Amazon
Go “all-in” on your life partner: This is the only person in your entire life that you will pour more of your time, energy and love into than anyone else. Your life partner is the constant across a lifespan where most things will come and go, and the one relationship in which time spent increases with age
Do it now: “You may delay, but time will not” — Ben Franklin
