What is your most valuable asset? 🤔
Hint: It’s not money
Every time it gets easier to tell when we are falling into their trap.
We could think of money as the ultimate success token. We go through our whole lifetime trying to have more of it, working for years to keep the $$$ flow going on.
Companies practically exist for you to spend it on them. There’s even this idea stating that how much of it you have is in a way a measure of how things are going on your life. That in order to be successful you need to have a good care of your finances, because once you do that everything will just fall into place.
However, I think that notion is flawed (there’s something missing) and there is another step prior to achieving greatness in this world.
What’s the real issue here?
I mean, yes, companies try to make us buy things all of the time. There are innumerable marketing techniques, events, strategies and more to place us into a buy this position. They make us buy flowers for Valentine’s Day, they make us buy presents for Christmas Day, they make us buy toys for Children’s Day, and so on.
However one thing that is present throughout that whole process and that we, quite frequently, don’t perceive as so valuable is our attention. Yeah, the will we have to focus on certain stimuli, to regard certain things as important (and at times, ignore others completely). In the end, that is what companies want from us, that is what makes you watch that series or buy that watch, it caught your attention, somehow now you can’t stop thinking about it. You want it. You need it. You buy it. And later, the cycle repeats itself over and over again.
Attention. I believe that is the real asset that we should keep in check.
What are you doing with your time?
Picture this: It’s a Sunday afternoon, you just had lunch with your friends and now you’re on your way home. What are you going to do for the rest of the day? Perhaps catching up on that episode of Black Mirror you didn’t finish? Or emptying that watch later playlist on Youtube? Of course if you choose any of those you will probably, at one time or another, be scrolling on Facebook or Instagram to keep yourself updated on important matters, right?
Media is consuming our time (and sometimes we don’t even realize this). I recently saw this infographic on Reddit that stated how much time we really have in life in average, after discounting the time for sleeping, eating, working, etc. Here it is actually:
In average we have around 223 months during a 79 year lifespan to do “something” other than what’s expected from us. A little bit more than 18.5 years. And by how things are going, I wouldn’t think it impossible that our generation will spend a large portion of those years in Social Media or watching content that offers no real value outside mere amusement.
So perhaps the next time you are thinking about sitting for 2 hours to watch an episode of something you will probably forget in a few years, or to spend more of your valuable free time scrolling and scrolling on any app of your preference, maybe you can rethink it and focus your time on something that, in the long run, could possibly create some sort of value for you.
And maybe (just maybe) once you do that, you will have control of your time. And then, anything that you can think of will be become a real possibility.
Yeah, that’s something to think about…
