In life I’ve found we have four currencies, four things we can use, invest, manage, and exchange: our Time, our Money, our Energy, and our Ability.
Carl Richards says something very similar. The classical understanding of stewardship also is similar in defining stewardship as the management of our time, talent, and treasures.
The balances of these currencies fluctuate with life’s seasons for each of us. To give some examples, I’m going to share some personal reflections of my own currencies over the past three years.
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2017
This was the year Fident was born. I had a lot of Energy, a lot of Time, and my Abilities were relatively stable. What I didn’t have, and was burning through, was Money. Launching a fee-only advisory firm isn’t necessarily capital intensive, but it does mean pushing Reset on your income for an uncomfortable time period.
2018
Fident had a really good first year, and so while we weren’t necessarily swimming in cash, there was a bit of a tide change. What changed mostly was the Time aspect. I was feeling pretty squeezed with my calendar and responsibilities. Add in kiddo number 4 that year and any excess in Time was quickly vaporized.
2019
I still wouldn’t say Fident has arrived, but the growth is still substantial. I’ve become better with Time management, but now I find my Energy is sapped. I’m not running out of Time or running out of Money at the end of the week, but I am running out of Energy. I don’t have the mental or emotional stamina to plow through tasks and projects like I used to.
…
The three years have felt a bit like whack-a-mole. I’d identify a problem, focus some effort on fixing it, see some progress, feel good about myself, just to see another problem spring up.
What’s interesting about these currencies is that they don’t exist in a vacuum. They’re interrelated. Each one requires varying degrees of effort to manage, and each one can negatively or positively impact another.
Take my current season, and the current deficiency of Energy.
I recently spent some time reflecting on this, and I realized I probably need to allocate some of my Money currency to delegate some tasks that are depleting me of my Energy currency. I don’t necessarily want to do this, but realize I probably need to.
But.
It will then also require a new Ability – managing people. Outside of small humans, this isn’t something I’ve done before, and it’s something I’m going to have to learn.
I think you get the picture of how these things are all connected. My point is that as humans in general, and investors specifically, we’ve got a whole lot more to manage than just our Money. And it is an ongoing management plan – things change, sometimes really quickly.
If you find yourself getting stuck, it’s super helpful to step back and look at the currencies of your life and see which, if any, are running low. And then think about ways you can try and bring it back up, even if it means dipping into another currency’s present excess.
The easiest currency to focus on is Money. Money is, arguably, the most renewable of the four. It’s also the most flexible – it can be used to buy more Time, gain more Energy, and build more Abilities. And that increase in Time, Energy, and Ability can then be used to acquire more Money, if we’d like them to.
I think a reason why we talk and focus so much on Money is because it’s the most concrete, and it’s the easiest one to measure. And it’s a good starting point, but don’t stop there.
If we want to live a life that manifests our true values – our true goals and intentions – we need to pay attention to all the currencies and manage them wisely.