While you were growing up, you were taught a lie that you must abide by the traditional path of working at least 50 hours every week to stabilize your career. And at the end of it, you get an impressive paycheck as a reward. In a nutshell, you must reach your work early in the day, keep working into the late hours, and even arrive at the office on weekends if there.
Perhaps then you can manage to get a raise someday. People do so with the hope that they would save sufficient money before they finally decide to retire. But who introduced this? Since when did the hard and fast rule you have to trade your time for money come into play? Time plays the most crucial role in your lives, and that is not something we can deny. Isn’t this rule a big hoax then?
Time Decides Your Income
Your earnings are limited by time when you are trading your time for money. There can be several reasons why it is so. You get only 24 hours in a day to run after money. Out of those 24 hours, you need at least eight hours to have a sound sleep after a hard day’s work. And the rest of your day goes like this, two hours to commute to and from work, two to four hours, to cook, eat, take care of your hygiene, take a break from work, and spend some quality time with family and friends.
How much time do you have in hand? Around 10 to 12 hours, right? You trade these 10 to 12 hours for money. However, the reality is something different. Irrespective of how much your organization values your time and pays you for an hour, time will always be the biggest concern. How many of you can ask for more money for all your hard work? Most of you would wait for years before you get promoted, and there is a high probability that you might not be rewarded with a promotion at all.
Would that hurt? Of course, it will. There is another reason why your earnings are limited by time. The more you earn, the more you tend to lose. In other words, employee tax is a big headache. The more you rake in, the higher the tax on your income. Suppose you get a promotion and income gets a hike from $60,000 to $100,000. Thanks to the employee tax, you are not technically receiving an extra $40,000.
A Limited Impact
When you are running after money and trading time for income for a major part of your life, you cannot make out time for things that you love doing. It can be a hobby you are passionate about. You might also have the desire to give something back to society, do good to the poor, etc.
You would not get any time for these because you have already chosen a life that requires you to slog throughout the day. It is because of this time constraint that your impact becomes limited. Now, the question that arises is how you would stop this from happening? How would you stop trading time for money?
You Need To Change Your Mentality
The first and foremost thing that you need to do to stop this corrosion is changing your mentality and beliefs. When you throw away the mindset that trading time is necessary to make more money, you would automatically come across more possibilities. No rule of thumb tells you if you have to earn X dollars, you must X hours. Choose to trade value for money instead of time.
Work On Building Your Expertise
You need to realize your strengths and let other people discover them as well. By developing your expertise, you will be able to make yourself competent enough to solve problems that only a handful of others can solve. But, achieving the recognition of being an expert would take a lot of time and require plenty of hard work. This is why building your authority is equally significant. When you do that, others will discover your strengths and abilities.
Never forget to reward yourself. If you can’t enjoy the time you have extracted out of your schedule, what’s the point of all these? Utilize your time by learning new things, going out with your loved ones, traveling to new places, so on and so forth.