This Money Lesson Changed My Life

Let's talk about money stuff. You had another company before this. How much did you sell that for? Uh, $10 or $15 million, in that range, based on how you count it. Has your life changed since that moment significantly? Yeah. So here's the thing. And I'd like to say, no, I wasn't focused on money at the time when I was younger. I was very, very focused on money. And I had very kind of modest upbringing. And I was like, okay, well, it wasn't like the money and the accumulation of it. It was the freedom. You know, ever since I was little, I always want to kind of configure the universe to my liking. And having to kind of work in a normal kind of classic job doesn't give you a whole lot of control over your part of the universe. You don't get to control who you work with all that much or who you hire, you don't have a lot of degrees of freedom. And like the first, I'll say $5 million or so had a dramatic impact on my life, right? Because that buys you an inordinate amount of freedom, right? You don't have to work again as long as you're not out, you know, buying small islands and overtaking countries. I mean, that's a decent amount of money for folks. And then after that, you know, more money adds on a marginal basis, a little bit more freedom. You can do more things. But, you know, like the kinds of things I do, like I enjoy food and restaurants. There's only so much you can actually spend as a reasonable human being. Kind of taking it back to the early days, one lesson I learned Early, early on, and this was useful beginning part of my career, is the kind of the relationship between time and money. One thing is that we spend the better part of kind of the first half of our lives converting time into money, right? And you're looking for the hours, you're looking for, you wanna get that rate up as you can. And then the latter half of you desperately trying to buy time back with money, however best you can. But the thing that I kind of learned, this was, and I thought about it probably a few years after that. So I was making $3.65 in my first job when I came over as an immigrant. And I worked all the way through school. It took me 7 years to get my 4-year degree. I was working full-time the whole way through, and that wasn't a lot of money. And as it turns out, I had to do pretty much everything. Nothing was delegatable. But then once I got to the point where I was making $10, $20, $50 an hour, like all of my time, I can make as much billable as I want to, as much as I'm humanly possible willing to work. There was someone willing to pay me for that time. I was an engineer. That's how things worked back then. And the pivotal point for me is I got this bump to like $125 an hour working as an engineer. And that was an ungodly amount of money. I was in Birmingham, Alabama. This is the '90s. So then I made the decision that if there's anything I'm doing with my time that could be done by spending less than $125 an hour, I'm being an idiot by actually doing it, right? If I enjoy it, that's a different story, but if I'm not, it's just stupid. And so I've carried that idea. It's like, okay, so what value would I place on my time? What is occupying my time that I can kind of delegate? Or even if I'm paying a premium, it's like, okay, I could pay $75 an hour for someone to mow my lawn. A, I hate it. But it's still profitable, right? Like, you must be like, why would you do that? It's like, I would do that every day of the week. The short message is most people don't value their time enough and don't think about it objectively enough. Like anything else, it's a resource, but it's finite. But put a number on it and then ask yourself, like, what are the things I'm doing with my time that are not worth that?