It's easier to earn than to save, and the mindset that makes you ruthless with your time, energy and attention.
Everyone gets the same line drummed into them young. Spend less than you bring in, tuck a bit away every week, and you'll be comfortable one day. Sure. Your mum and dad would approve. It's also the slowest road to anywhere I know of. I went the other way with nearly all of it and that's done far more for me than scrimping ever did.
Think about what saving actually is. You trim, then trim more, and one day there's nothing left to trim. That's it, that's the bottom, and you get there fast. For most people the drop down to it isn't even that far, they weren't spending big to start with. Earning's different. Nothing caps it. Right offer, right person, and you can get paid for years on the back of one afternoon.
Say it's ten grand you're after. To save it you've got a whole year of going without ahead of you. Skipping the trip away, keeping the old car another year, telling yourself no at the coffee counter, on and on, and every bit of it is effort, and the moment you ease off the saving stops with you. Earning that same ten grand might come down to one good call to the right person. Tell people that and they look at you like you've got it round the wrong way. I haven't. I've done both ends of it and I know which one's harder.
Year was 2007. I started something called Young Media and I had nothing behind me. No money in the bank, no product, just a website I'd biroed across a few sheets of paper at the kitchen table. So I ran off some sign-up forms, threw together a presentation that'd make me cringe to look at today, and I went round Melbourne on foot, shopfront after shopfront, four hundred dollars to come on board. Hundreds of them said yes over time. I'd banked twenty-one grand before the website was anything but a drawing. That money's what built it in the end, paid for a poster run, got the wheels turning. And not a cent of it had been sitting in some savings account waiting for its moment. I'd just figured out the one thing that actually brought money through the door and pointed myself flat at it. Once that clicks, that earning is the whole game, the thing you start running out of is time. Worth knowing what an hour of yours goes for, then.
People love that story when I tell it. Then they go home and save up for a year. Anyway.
Put a price on your hour and defend it
For me the figure's five grand an hour. I've never once put that on an invoice and I don't intend to. It's not what I charge, it's a cut-off, and most things that come my way get held up next to it. Worst run I ever did was the year we pushed hundreds of millions of dollars of testing kits through, ones I'd designed myself, barely anyone on the team and me running on no sleep, and the thing that saw me through was being properly hard about where the hours went. Below the cut-off, somebody else's job. End of conversation.
The five grand isn't real, by the way. Nobody'd pay it. That's not the point of it.
So work out yours. Find the hour where you're on the thing that genuinely brings money in, and put your price on that one, not your average Tuesday. Then pitch it high. High enough that most of what turns up on your desk is plainly beneath it. Now look hard at your actual week. The couple of hours behind the mower. The whole Saturday swallowed by the house. You up at eleven at night, doing your own books, getting them wrong. There's a cost on every one of those and there's a cost on you, and the minute someone'll do that job cheaper than your number, doing it yourself is just handing money over for nothing. Reckon your hour's worth five hundred, a tenth of mine. Mow that lawn yourself and you've spent a grand to hang on to eighty.
So get good at saying no. Honestly, that single habit has done more for me than any ten years of being careful with money ever could.
Then point your best hours at the biggest problem
Mind you, clawing back those small hours counts for nothing if you fritter away what you've freed up. And that's exactly what most people do. The gap opens and they cram it full of whatever was making the loudest racket that morning, then knock off feeling like they've had a big day.
Spend it on whatever's doing the most damage right now. The biggest, ugliest problem you've got. Funny thing is that's nearly always the one you've been stepping around for a month, because it scares you a bit, while the small jobs keep waving their hands wanting doing first because they're quick and they're easy and there's a little hit of done when you finish one. Ignore them. Write your problems out worst first, by what each is genuinely costing you. Then stay on the top one until it's properly dead and buried, and only then drop to the next. I'd take one afternoon that finally finishes off the thing strangling the business over two weeks of small wins any day of the week.
In the limit, you're as good as your best decision
There's a thing sitting under all of this. Pull back far enough and you're only ever as good as your best decision. Which business you get behind. Who you take on. The deal you turn down. The bet you put two years of your life behind. A whole year's graft can dangle off one call you make over a single afternoon, and the rest of it is mostly just noise around that one call.
Which is what the hours are for. You keep them back so that when one of those calls comes, you're not meeting it on no sleep with someone shouting down the phone at you. I get dumber when I'm worn out, and the worst calls I've made all came at the tail of weeks I'd let run away from me. You've done the same, most likely, you just won't cop to it. And a bad one up the top doesn't cost you an afternoon, it costs you a year.
So I'm careful with the head. People reckon that's a bit much. First hour of my day there's no phone, I'm usually out walking, and that's where nearly everything good I've decided got decided. I'll bin a morning of meetings to hang onto it.
And there's my real problem with pinching every last dollar. It quietly eats the thing you can't buy back. Squeeze forty bucks off some bill and you've burned a clear hour doing it. The forty you'd have made back by Friday anyway. The clear hour you don't get back till you've slept.
So here's the whole thing
So that's roughly where I've come out. You can go and make more money whenever, but those hours are never coming back, and once you've really felt that the rest sort of follows. Don't be precious about the cash. Be precious about the time. Sure, save where it costs you nothing to. I'll just say this though, all the money that ever made a real difference to me came out of the hours I spent earning, not a cent of it out of the hours I spent doing without. So stop handing your good hours over to jobs some kid round the corner would take for fifty bucks, and start aiming them somewhere they pay you back.