Last summer, I almost bought a pool.
I’d come home from a swim with the kids, dialed up a contractor, and gotten a quote for the exact in-ground setup my wife wanted. It was very expensive. We could not afford it. The slightest. But in my head I was already running the numbers. I could scrounge up the cash. There was a way to make it work.
Then my wife looked at me and said, “What does our list say?”
The list didn’t say pool.
I want to talk to you about that list, because if you’re a business owner or a leader carrying the weight for a family, that list (or some version of it) might be the single most underrated tool you’ve never been told to build.
The Lie We Were Sold About Wealth
Most of us were raised on a specific picture of “made it.” MTV Cribs. Big cars. Houses with more bathrooms than people. The dinosaur eggs in the fridge.
But here’s what’s strange about that picture. The wealthiest people I’ve ever sat across the desk from don’t actually look like that. They look like the 92-year-old client I have who still carries a bruised, battered photo of his wife at 16. They look like my producer TR’s grandparents, who worked swing shifts at a glass factory for 20-plus years and ran a tax business and a rod-and-reel repair shop out of the same kitchen. They look like my dad.
Wealthy, in the real sense, looks like somebody who is smiling at the end.
“I think the short word is independence. It’s about preserving choices.”
That’s how TR put it on this week’s episode of Invest Your Time Wisely. And the older I get, the more I think he’s right. Money is just the mechanism. The thing money is supposed to buy is choice. And the most valuable choice of all is what to do with your time.
That’s why we say it on this show, in every episode, in every conversation in the office. Time is the real wealth.
Robbing Peter to Pay Paul Is a Business Owner’s Default Setting
Every entrepreneur I know has done some version of this. The month gets tight. You tell yourself, “I’m a salesman. I’ll sell my way out of this.” And usually you do. You close a deal. You catch up. You make payroll.
But you took a bad deal to do it. Or you over-promised a delivery. Or you said yes to the client you should have walked away from. Now you’re on a three-month backslide, cleaning up problems you created for your team, because you couldn’t have the harder conversation in front of you.
That conversation, by the way, isn’t usually with a contractor or a vendor. It’s the one at home. “Babe, this is a tough month. We need to cut Target budget. We need to pull back.”
That is the conversation business owners avoid. And the avoidance has a price. It usually gets paid in time. Time with your kids. Time with your spouse. Time with the parts of your life you originally said you started a business for.
Why a Document Beats a Person Every Time
Here’s the thing that took me seven years of marriage to figure out, and I’m still figuring it out.
You can’t argue your way to alignment with the person you love. You can argue, but you won’t get there. The arguments are about you. Your spending. Your decisions. Your judgment.
What you can do is point to a document.
My dad has used the same single-page document since 1982. He calls it the Master Dream List. There’s nothing fancy about it. Five lines on one side:
I want to be. I want to learn. I want to do. I want to go. I want to achieve.
The other side has a date next to each one.
I make every couple I sit down with do the exercise. Husband and wife go into separate rooms, write their own version, then come back together and merge the two into one list. That single list becomes the third voice in every future financial conversation. Not “you want this” or “I want this.” What does the list say?
The pool wasn’t on the list. The minivan was on the list. So the minivan happened and the pool didn’t, and nobody had to be the bad guy.
That’s the whole point.
Goals Are in Ink. Plans Are in Pencil.
My dad has another one. Goals are in ink. Plans are in pencil.
The reason matters. Plans change. The timeline shifts. The route bends. Goals don’t.
When you have a five-year plan and something blows up six months in, you don’t throw the plan out. You re-pencil it. The dot at the end of the line, the goal, stays where it is.
The mistake most leaders make is the opposite. They erase the goal and keep the plan. They keep grinding toward a number that no longer matches the life they actually want, because the plan to get there has too much momentum to stop.
Re-evaluate your goals every year. Then keep moving.
Reinvest the Dividend
The happiest people I’ve ever met in retirement didn’t actually retire.
They went to the volunteer board. They started coaching the grandkids. They put the same hours into the church or the community that they used to put into the business. An object in motion stays in motion.
Think of it like compound interest. When a dividend hits your account, you can take the cash or you can reinvest it. The wealthiest portfolios (and the wealthiest lives) reinvest the dividend.
In retirement, the dividend isn’t money. It’s time. The people who take that time and pour it back into the next generation, into memory-making, into mentorship, those people compound. The people who take the cash and sit down in front of the Westerns until the day they die, those people don’t.
The Test
If you binge-listened to this season of the podcast and walked away with nothing else, walk away with this. Ask yourself two questions.
Is what I’m building this quarter going to make me more independent, or less?
And is my spouse looking at the same list I am?
If the answers are “less” and “no,” you’re not behind. You’re just due for a conversation. Sit down. Write the list. Compare it. Merge it. Use it.
Time is the real wealth. The list is how you stop spending it on things you didn’t actually want.
If anything in this article landed for you, the next step is a conversation. The team at Performance Financial sits down with business owners and family leaders every week to map out exactly this. The link is in the show notes for this episode.
Transcript
TR: When you look into your future, when you look at people that you really want to be or you aspire to be when you grow up, “wealthy” is always the word we use. The older I get, what I think of wealth is very different than what I thought as a kid. I thought that at some point in my life, I was going to become an adult with infinite money to just buy houses and cars and MTV Cribs my entire life. Dinosaur eggs in the fridge, Chappelle style.
[Intro Music]
Sean: Hey everybody, welcome to the Invest Your Time Wisely podcast with Sean Kirby. I’m with my bro, my broski, my broseph, my man, my dude. His name’s TR, he’s with us today. And today we’re going to talk about how time is the real wealth and how we can’t always rob Peter to pay Paul along the way.
If you were with us last episode, you would have heard a little bit about the thought process behind the “Invest Your Time Wisely” mantra. About how you can’t be all things to all people, and how where you spend your time truly compounds.
On today’s episode, TR and I are going to riff back and forth. One of the stories TR was telling me right before we started was, when you look into your future and you look at the people that you really want to be when you grow up, “wealthy” is always the word we use. The older I get, what I think wealth means is very different than what I thought as a kid. I always thought it came in the form of money. The older I get, I think it looks like somebody who’s smiling. Because I’ve seen a lot of people who are wealthy who maybe aren’t smiling at the end. So TR, what does wealth look like to you at the end? Toward those gray hair years?
TR: I think the short word is independence. Like you, I think for a long time the movie Richie Rich came to mind. I thought that at some point in my life I was going to become an adult with infinite money to just buy houses and cars and MTV Cribs my entire life. Dinosaur eggs in the fridge, Chappelle style. But the thing that’s most important to me and my family now, business wise, is freedom of choice. Maintaining our independence. That involves wealth to a degree, right? We have to have enough monthly cash flow. We need a savings account to be able to do that. But it’s about preserving choices.
I had a mentor tell me once that money is kind of silly. It’s kind of fake. But it does give you choices. So accruing wealth in a financial sense leads to that independence to some degree.
Sean: And it’s not all at that level, right? If you can get your expenses down to the point where you don’t have a lot, then you have as much wealth as you truly need when you come back into the math.
A lot of times people think that retirement is the mountaintop. But what they realize is they missed most of the stuff along the way, and that you can extend that. You can ride that plateau for a while. It just depends on how you really set things up and how you want to spend your time.
TR: It’s interesting to juxtapose that a little bit. I come from a fairly rural Midwest Rust Belt town, and in a lot of those family situations the default is to cut expenses. There’s not a lot of ways to go make more money there. You can work overtime at the injection molding plant or the glass factory, but there aren’t a lot of blue ocean opportunities. Nobody taught them that they could go pick up a gig or find a freelance project.
So one of the challenges as a business owner is knowing those two ways of winning. The time to go earn more, and the time to manage cash flow differently. But both of those equal independence and wealth to a degree.
Sean: I’ve got a buddy that took a sabbatical last year. We’re still pretty young, and he just called it. A month. No income. Where he was at was he was going to break. He had hit that burnout stage where if he didn’t make that conscious decision of “let’s just get away, turn things off, and focus,” he was done.
I talked to him at lunch. He said he really focused a lot of his time into scripture, into reading, into time with family. The things that he found most important. Because he had accidentally let money and success become the idol. He needed that time to refocus, because he could feel it falling so close to the rails that he didn’t want to do it anymore.
That lever of more income or less expenses is what most entrepreneurs default to. Optimism says I can go make more money. I’m always really bad about “we need to cut expenses.” One of the things you and I talk about all the time is family budgets. Nobody likes the word budget.
If you back into it, you can’t rob Peter to pay Paul. I get myself into the same position a lot, where I’ll tell myself, “I’m a salesman, I’ll sell myself out of this situation.” Usually I can. But then you’re just pushing the issue instead of addressing it. And usually you take some bad deals in the process, because you have to do the next deal. Then you put yourself on a three-month backslide dealing with all the problems you’ve created for everybody on your team.
So as you go through that, what hard conversations have you had with your spouse or your business partners about trying to find the right balance between budgeting and not robbing Peter to pay Paul?
TR: It’s a lot different in the state of not being a business that relies on W-2 employees. I primarily use subcontractors and 1099s. Part of that is, we run a creative studio. Could be animation, photo, video, design. Hard to find a unicorn to hire to do all that. So it ends up being split between eight to ten contractors.
There have been multiple times where a contract goes away and I’m looking at the high-level numbers and I’m like, “Contractor A, I know last three months we did X. I don’t think it’s trending that direction. I really think it’s looking like Y. I’m not saying no work for you, but based on what I have coming in, it’s probably 10 hours a month instead of 30 hours a month based on the projects.”
That always sucks. But that’s been part of my hesitation to grow the business and care for a bunch of W-2s. I say “care for” in that way because it feels like an added responsibility. It is. I’ve avoided some of those tough Rob Peter to pay Paul moments by staying 1099, which is intentional. Money isn’t the only wealth thing. I still have freedom and independence because of that.
Sean: And we were talking about it off screen before we started. The hard thing about being a business owner is you are always the last person to get paid. Vendors get paid. Employees get paid. Everybody’s checks are guaranteed except for your own.
The spouse of the business owner, especially if maybe they’re not working because they’re raising babies, those trickle-down conversations are hard. “Babe, this is a tough month.” You think it’s hard telling a contractor you’re not going to use them for a month? Try coming home to your wife and saying, “Hey, we’re going to have to cut Target budget by a little bit. We’re going to pull back this month.”
Then it’s a spiral. “Are we going to make the house payment? For no reason?” That you get stuck in. It’s a little more emotional. It’s hard.
For anybody out there who has to deal with the ups and downs, that first 12 to 36 months in business, you are not guaranteed a paycheck. A lot of the time it’s the supportive spouse on the other end who’s able to reinvigorate you mentally, or they have to do their best to empathize, listen, and follow your lead.
So when you look at your life today, the independence, the freedom you have, what do you see? How far are you looking out? Are you 36 months? Five years?
TR: I have a document, but it’s loosely held beliefs. Any time you get into goal-chasing where this is the only thing that matters, you’re probably losing something else in the process.
I had a consultant approach me over a year ago. Looked at the business, reviewed it, gave me some tough feedback. He was like, “Hey, I don’t think it’s hard for you to get to this number. But if you’re going to get to this number, a lot’s going to have to change. Why don’t you sit down and say, in a perfect world, what would the next five years look like?”
I did that. I put that together. And I do think we’re trending towards that. But it’s not a “by any means” kind of thing. That’s where it’s a bit of a hedge. It’s a lifestyle business to a degree that I’m running, and it’s to serve that independence. Like, okay, so we should get to two million a year. For what purposes? To give up more independence? There’s definitely a goal to scale, but at what cost. Managing that as it goes. That’s the wealth of having that choice to make myself.
Sean: My dad’s always talked about it this way. You’re going to have to sacrifice something. Especially if what you want is further down the line. You’re either going to have to sacrifice family time to put in the hours to build that business, or you’re going to have to sacrifice top line if you want to spend time with the family.
TR: Control of the process. To delegate to somebody else.
Sean: Correct. You can’t rob Peter to pay Paul to debt. We all think about debt. Debt is this imaginary thing that does exist. What you’re doing, and my dad’s always said it this way, is you are buying something today at the sacrifice of what you want most. When you put something on payments, most of the time there is this big long dream further down. If I buy this today, it’s going to either slow down the process to get to where I want, or I’m going to delay that gratification to a later date.
In today’s instant gratification, hustle culture, big car, big house, fast car culture, you get stuck pulling away from where you want to be for things that you want today. That “wants needs” calculator makes things so hard.
One of the things we use in our office is our Master Dream List. I’ll send one to anybody who reaches out. Shoot me a DM or an email, whatever works best, and I’ll shoot you a copy. It is truly the easiest doc in the world. My dad has used this since 1982.
Simple doc. It’s got lines. It says: “I want to be. I want to learn. I want to do. I want to go. I want to achieve.” Five lines on one side. On the other side, you write a date of achievement for each one.
We keep them in our office and I make all my teammates do it. I give it to every young couple I meet with. Especially entrepreneurs. I try to meet with their spouses too, because I want the feedback loop of everybody knowing what the other person’s doing. When you’re married, it’s really easy to get lost in what the other person wants because there are little people that need things that you can’t control.
So I have both people fill out theirs independently in different rooms. “I want to own.” Someone’s going to put a house. Somebody’s going to put a car. Somebody’s going to put a business. “I want to go. I want to do.” All these dates of achievement.
Then they get together and read their list to each other and make one single list. As a husband and wife, as you make your one single list, that becomes your burden of proof. Should somebody say, “Let’s do this,” you go back to the paper. Is this going to delay the goal? Is this going to delay the dream? Is this something that you want versus what we said we want together and put at the top of our list?
Last year we went swimming. We don’t go swimming very often, but I came back and said, “We should get a pool.” Jason goes, “Can we afford a pool?” I was like, “I’ll make some calls.”
So I get a price on a pool, in-ground, exactly the way she would want it. Very expensive. Can’t afford it, even the slightest. But in my head I was like, “I could scrounge up the cash. There’s a way I can make this work.”
So then my wife looked at me and she goes, “What’s our list say?” And I was like, “Well, it doesn’t say pool.” She goes, “Well, then I don’t think it makes sense. We needed to buy the van. We didn’t have a choice. That was something that was on our list for that year that we had to do.”
So we reallocated capital. My wife said the fact that my barn burnt down was a sign from God not to buy the pool. Firework incident, that’s another episode. We just got a greenhouse in its place.
I will say this. Having that spouse and having those long-term goals that you are working on together, even if you’re not a budgeter and you don’t do the household budget, you can fast-math it through your head. At the end of the month maybe it doesn’t always add up. A budget doesn’t always realize to the exact dollars that you may put on a Google Doc. But as long as the goals remain constant, then as a couple or as partners, you can stay persistent.
Having that counterbalance takes away the accusation of “you” and makes it more about “us” and where we’re going. Futurize it.
TR: Which is a practice I’ve found in every aspect of my business. I try to point towards documents, not people, in all cases. We have a project we’re working on, what’s the creative strategy? Well, if we set it in a meeting but it’s not in a document, now we’re arguing about who’s right or who’s wrong instead of what the doc says.
Sean: It took me seven years of marriage to figure that part out. And I’m still figuring it out. It’s a challenge to treat home life the same as business life. It’s hard not to take it home.
But those little small pieces allow you to look at time differently. The delayed gratification. The compounding of time. The wealth of, I’m even to the point now where when I fill these out, they’re all spiritual. “I want to learn grace.” “I want to be a good dad.” At the beginning I said I want to be the best. Like, I put one year, I want to own a truck. Just boy stuff. Truck.
TR: Does lease count?
Sean: That counts in my head.
TR: The perspective shift, especially in this next generation between millennials, Gen Z, Gen X, is we’re watching our grandparents die with all the things in the world. I’m sure everyone’s dealt with this. They’ve had to clean out a home of somebody that they loved and wondered why there was so much crap in it. Some of it’s sentimental. Some of it is in this room behind us right now. At the end of the day, those treasures were coming from their Depression-level upbringings of “things are the most important.” I think we’re shifting towards memories. Photos.
Sean: Yes. Things that you can pass on. Oral stories, everything else. Stuff is stuff. My wife’s trying to teach my kids how to garden. We’re trying to raise 39 chickens. We’re trying to just grow good little human beings.
Something you hit on that’s important is you have to establish a goal, but then you have to readdress that goal. You’re going to change year to year. So you’re doing that goal setting every year. The minivan was never on the goal sheet ten years ago. So you can’t buy a minivan now. Fast forward. You reassess your goals. Now that’s the goal for this year.
When we talked about the five-year plan, like, yes, I’d love to achieve that. But something may drastically change in the next six months where I’m okay with 60 percent of that goal. We have to have a process of reevaluating our goals as well.
My dad’s always said it this way, and it’s an interesting way to look at it. Your goals are in ink. Plans are in pencil. The reason is that plans change. Goals remain the same. You may just shift where they’re at, and you may shift the timeline for those big things that are truly important to you. The plans to get there, the step by step, that’s life. We talked about it in the first episode. Control is an illusion. You’ve got to roll with the punches, baby. Get punched in the nose, stand back up, and pivot to where you really want to be.
TR: The goals thing is funny though. There’s a little bit of abstraction. A goal that I had since a child was to have my own creative studio. When I had that, it was green screen, giant room, Hollywood production. Where we are today, I own a creative studio. It just looks different than what that goal was. That’s plans versus goals.
My wife wants to own a farm. Is that a whole herd of cattle and goats and chickens, or is that we have enough acreage to just put a few chickens on and that counts? Readdress your goals as time goes on and understand that the perspective of those might change as life goes on as well.
Sean: A hundred percent. And back to the budget. At the end of the day, don’t overextend yourself to actualize a dream before you probably should. As a guy who did that recently, you’ve got to back into the budget sometimes. I bought a truck and a camper when I could barely afford the camper payment, and went across the country.
That’s the other thing about entrepreneurship. It allows you to take those risks, get run over, and then figure it out. That story led to me getting a job that got me ahead of a bunch of other people that applied to that job. So on paper, probably not the best financial choice, but paid off long-term eventually.
One of the things I saw the other day online. A guy said what he asks people in their interview is, “Do you think you’re lucky?” What he wants them to say is yes. You want lucky people on board. People who have enough optimism, enough self-belief.
None of us would be here today without luck. If I was not born into the right family, if I was not, if I was not, all the things, right? You brought some props with you today to talk about where things started versus the luck along the way that got you there. Pull out whichever prop you want first.
TR: Carrot top of the podcast.
Sean: You are Carrot Top.
TR: Who’s the guy? Gallagher? Smash a watermelon middle of the table. Let me move the Bible first.
All right, what’s this? Pittsburgh Plate Glass. People probably know PPG from their paint work at this point, but they were founded on automotive plate glass. Literally a giant furnace that melts sand and other things, turns it into long sheets of glass, then cuts and scores it, gets packed up. It used to be packed by hand.
Both my grandparents worked at this factory. They worked swing shifts. Seven days straight of 8 to 4, one day off. Seven days straight of 4 to 12, two days off. Seven days straight of midnight to 8, four days off. Repeated for 20-plus years. They both did that and retired from there. God bless.
But they all had their own entrepreneurial efforts on top of that. My grandfather ran a tax business. Fun story. It’s mostly Amish people where he’s from. He trades horse manure for his garden in exchange for doing the Amish people’s taxes. That’s where I get my bartering from. I trade headshots for dental work and stuff like that.
My grandfather on my paternal side had a rod and reel repair business. He hunted, fished, trapped, sold pelts, repaired people’s rods. A portion of the house was added on to do that.
You get the tax strategy of that side of things going on, and it’s an inspiration. You can find other ways to find a lifestyle business that allows you to make sure the kids have Christmas gifts, that the kids when they go to college can get a $50 pizza money sent to them. They were always really working hard to make sure our family wasn’t below the poverty line.
I thought about them in this conversation because, one, my grandpa does taxes, you guys do taxes. He’s always wanted me to take it over. I have no interest. He’s retired. He’s almost 70 and still does taxes. What else is he going to do?
None of that became “I need to run the biggest business so I can scale it and sell it.” It never became any of that. It was just a mode for them to be the best members of their family that they could be. To take that responsibility.
Sean: Would you consider that the real wealth?
TR: I think so. They’re the two mentors that I look up to the most.
Sean: Happy people?
TR: Yeah.
Sean: Not the wealthiest.
TR: Not the wealthiest. No inheritance was handed down to me. But I inherited some lessons.
Sean: Which I think means more than anything.
For the longest time I was nepotized at my job, making $11 an hour for my dad. It took almost four years for me to realize that it wasn’t about money in the first place. It was the fact that I was a window away listening to his little Mike-isms through the window. How he spoke to clients. How he empathized with clients. How we can take our skills. I’m not laying brick. I work in the air conditioning, and then I work in the heat, guys. You see this haircut. This is not a haircut for outside work.
TR: Taking that and shifting to where you can empathize and work with people who are out there putting their bodies on the line to feed their families every day. I got a real wind of that.
The synchronicity of all things, this ended up being my college job. When college was ending in the summers, I got to go work there for four summers and work the swing shifts. A lot more of it is automated now. It wasn’t as brutal as they had it. But it was tough.
Another lesson. A role model standing up for you. I got turned down in the interviews. They said, “No, we’re not interested in having you for our summer program.” My grandfather went in there and was like, “Both grandpas retired from here. You are not going to not hire this guy.” He had built up enough sway and loyalty from that company that I ended up getting hired. His efforts at that company paid off as an investment long term for me to be able to go there. We made a bunch of money on those $10-an-hour summers to take back to college. That wouldn’t have happened without that investment he made early on in one company.
Sean: What else you got in your bag, big dog?
TR: Grandpa Tom’s coonskin cap. There you go. Look at that. We also made some money sometimes. We would go to the creek area, kick around with hip waders till you find a hole, set a trap, catch some muskrats. Set a couple out to get the coon skins and you sell those. You make a little extra cash on the side.
Sean: I love that. I don’t think you knew it when you came up with the cover of the podcast, but this is one of the few things that have been passed down to me. My grandfather handed me down a pocket watch. It’s probably worth a couple hundred bucks, but I keep it. It’s something like you talked about. That Depression era where something was important to him that he handed down to me.
TR: Taxes. Taxes.
Sean: Time is the real wealth at the end of the day.
What a blessing it is to be surrounded by people who have invested in you. Both financially, spiritually, with their education, wisdom, stories. The wisdom we learn from those around us is so easily, especially when you’re early in life, you just let it go. It’s not anything you do on purpose. You’re just a kid.
But the older I get, the more I love to talk to older people and just say, “How’d you do it? How’d you get here?” And then you let them talk. They’ve been waiting their whole lives. You’ve got to be careful asking an old person, “How are you?” Because they’ll tell you. And it’s a long story and they’re not doing very good and they’ve been to the doctor four times this week.
But I’ve got this older client in my office. He’s 90, 92, something like that. He still carries around the same picture of his wife when she was 16 years old. It is bruised, battered, beat up. She had passed last year. He cried as he pulled it out of his wallet. That’s what he remembered her as. A 16-year-old kid. And it’s one of those things where you hope, through small little things like asking, “How’d you make it to 62 years of marriage?” you can take your little bit, put a spin on it, and refocus that to where your kids someday won’t just remember Christmas presents, birthday presents, their first car. They can say, “My parents told me these funny stories. My dad was hilarious.”
These little things, as you reallocate your time, you find at the end. You may not have $6 million you’re taking 4 percent out of every year to pay your bills, but maybe it’s just the fact that you’re able to tell your war stories to the kids around a campfire, and you have enough people sitting at your bedside the day you pass. That’s the goal, at least I believe.
There’s no way to hit that if you rob Peter now by pulling all that time away from your kids, those moments, those small things, the time with your family.
I know your family is kind of displaced from here. So prioritizing, especially if you’re a transplant. Jesse, I talked about him in the first episode. One of the things he says is, “If you don’t live close to your parents and you see them once a year, you only have 12 more years with your parents. Or 12 more times you’re going to talk to your mom in person.”
I have the blessing of, I work with my parents every single day, to the point where sometimes I find it’s a nuisance. My mom lives in Florida. I see her, what, 24 more times for the next 12 years if we see each other twice a year. I used to live with my mom. I used to see her every single day.
It’s just those shifts of perspective that allow for you, at the end of your life, when we start to look at it at a much broader scope, to say, “I really want to build these eulogy-level qualities that people talk about me at my funeral that I’ll never get to hear. Not résumé qualities. Eulogy qualities.” You might have caught that from a sermon from Aaron Brockett back in 2025.
That’s what’s on my last piece of my goal list. “I want to achieve.” And it says “eulogy-level qualities.” I just want to pour in enough. Not that people talk about me. But that you can instill those values into the people you get to spend time with.
TR: The last thing I’ll say is, I think we live in a unique time where the models that we were given prior to this were, “You only have this period of time to earn. Make as much as you can so you can cash out and rest then.” But we live in a time now where you can earn anywhere.
I can travel to visit my mom. I can travel to see my dad. I can take my kids to see their great-grandparents and spend a week there. I don’t need to be working 40 hours that week. I can work 20 and make it cover the cost of travel. That’s worth more than trying to grind early to make enough time that hopefully we can spend more time with our aging parents at 60. We’re in a unique digital time where we can change our businesses to fit the lifestyle we’re looking for.
Sean: A hundred percent. One of the things we talk about is, an object in motion stays in motion. The happiest people I’ve ever seen in retirement, and we see people from all walks of life, small town, you see them at the end of their lives, you see them at the beginning of their lives, you see everything in between. The happiest people I see in retirement are objects in motion. The ones who didn’t retire and go sit in a chair and watch their old-time Westerns until the day they die. It’s the people that get back into the community. They never really stop working. They just go volunteer. They just choose. They start doing it for free. They get back with the grandkids.
They reinvest their time. Think about compound interest. Let’s talk about dividends. When the dividend comes to you from Berkshire Hathaway, you can either reinvest it or you can take the cash. The more you reinvest your dividends, especially in that retirement age, you’re going to have compounding on top of compounding. That’s why old people invest in blue chip stocks, not growth stocks. Now you can reinvest back into the memories, the next generation, all those things.
You were part of the High School Hustle program we did last year. You’re already starting to reinvest what you’ve learned, even in the first 35 years, into this next set of kids.
TR: Dude, the time topic with that. How hard it is to tell young kids they have so much time. It’s impossible. I know I wish I knew that back then and I didn’t. I felt like I was running out of time every year. But yeah, having conversations with 19-year-olds who are already really good at this and being like, “Dude, relax, you got plenty of time.”
Sean: And you’re cliché. You’re wealthy.
TR: Yeah. You’re already wealthy.
Sean: It’s such a cliché statement to say. When you say it, it goes in a blink of an eye. I have four kids, and it literally went so fast. But I also remember being 18, like just the other day.
TR: I was 21 in Broadripple two weeks ago. It feels like.
Sean: Yeah. But it’s one of those things that, now you’re just the old guy telling the young guy the same thing you didn’t listen to when you were a kid. And now you want them to. It’s just, the world has a funny way of working out exactly the way it’s supposed to, when it’s supposed to. But it comes from a constant reinvestment of those dividends.
So TR, I thought this was great. Thank you so much for bringing in and sharing some of the stuff from your family, your heritage. It explains a lot about your hard work ethic. I always tell you, I think you’re one of the hardest-working dudes I’ve ever met.
To those of you guys listening, I will say this. It is so easy for me to sit on this screen and tell you about time, and to tell you about reinvesting your dividends, and to tell you about listening for the wisdom in the world. It is a hard thing to do in the world that is around us.
I would urge you, where you can find it, to pursue those conversations and that time with people who can push you to the next level. Find those either mentors or mentees. A mentor of mine always told me to have a mentor and a mentee at the same time. Because there’s always something you can bestow on the person below you, as much as there’s something you can learn from somebody else.
You can never give more than you get. So it doesn’t matter how much you put into the universe, you’ll never be able to put more in than you can take out.
For that, guys, this was the Invest Your Time Wisely podcast. Sean Kirby, my boy, my broski, my dog, that dude over there. God bless.