We each live 8760 hours each year. Every fourth year we get a bonus of another 24 hours. Your biblical lifetime in hours is 613200. (Your three score and ten…)
Into that we fit our childhood, our teenage years, about 50 years of work, and that’s the biblical bundle.
Lets look at those work years. Assume 48 5-day working weeks for each of those 50 years. And assume a working day of 10 hours, including one hour each way in traffic. (48 * 5 * 50 * 10 = 120,000 hours.)
The entire basis of our schooling & university is to learn skills we can sell. These are skills the workplacemight need. (We each invest about 14,000 hours in school, and some of us go on to invest about 5000 hours at university)
None of that education looks at your financial future. There is no training to start a business. Nor to manage money. Nor to invest it. Nor to apply for a job. And yet money, no matter how you feel about it, is the key to life in this capitalist economy.
Education, all of it, prepares you to trade your hours for an hourly. (Your hourly wage is your salary divided by the number of hours worked each month. So R50,000/month divided by 200 hours (40/week at your desk and 10/week commuting) is about R250/month.)
There is a problem with selling hours. We can sell each hour once only. Most of us sell all our hours to a single client. We call that single client Boss. We often sign a contract which prohibits us from selling any free hours to anyone else.
Most of us get chewed up by the process and spat out at the end. We age until we cannot compete any longer.
Most of this selling of ourselves happens with zero training. It’s happenstance. Like finding that first job.
Imagine how your future would change if you invest a few hours learning how to sell yourself. And yet, we don’t. Selling seems to have as much integrity as graverobbing.
How much would change if we treated ourselves as a business? For instance, Peter (Pty) Ltd.
What if we mapped our careers like a business owner plans a business.
I ask myself this as I read through hundreds of articles I’ve written since I went online from Australia in 1999..
During those years I’ve written everything I’ve done. I have a timeline that I can go back to and I see how every rough time was the fertiliser for the next wonderful time. You can’t stop the rough times. They’re seasonal, like winter. But they’re the inspiration for summer.
No matter where you are right now, business-wise, it is the seedbed for where you will go next. It might need some change to the soil in your pot. That’s never comfortable. Until it becomes your new, new.
Go for it.