Attention is all there is
Attention is all there is
How will you make the most of yours?
Since there was no session this past weekend, the director team spent last week together levelling up our coaching abilities and determining how we can help students crush the challenge.
As for today’s topic, I want to share a mental model I've been thinking about lately.
Your life as an investor
Finance and investing have been some of my interests for the last decade or so, reading dozens of books and hundreds of hours of podcasts on the topic. One of the reasons I've loved it so much is I believe investing represents the purest form of betting on your beliefs. If you believe in a specific future or have a strong worldview, you can bet money on it.
Today I want to convince you that you’re an investor already. And once you start thinking this way, you'll transform your mindset on how you invest your time.
But how am I an investor? you ask.
Every day you are given a budget of 24 hours. It's up to you to maximize your return on those hours. And the great levelling factor is everyone has the same budget of 24h a day.
It doesn’t matter if you are or aren’t investing money, you make investment decisions every day with your time. These decisions are even more important. Time is our most precious resource and it's startlingly finite. How can you maximize it?
Picking the right portfolio makes a difference
If you look at investing, the first thing you'll realize is that investing money is easier.
Investing has a clear goal: make more money. This makes decisions fairly straightforward: pick what will give you the highest probable return given the risk.
Everything in investing is done by looking at what will maximize returns: what to invest in, how much to invest, and for how long. That’s kind of all there is. People spend hours researching the best way to do this.
But what about your time? As individuals, we should be rigorous about investing our time into the things that have the greatest chance of bringing us the things we want.
The tricky thing is we don't all want the exact same things. This makes allocating time complicated.
What is something you want as a return on your time? What do you want to get out of each day?
This will look different for you than it looks for me. Maybe you'll join a startup in an industry you're excited about because you believe in the future of nanotech. Or you'll double down on specific relationships you know will compound in the years to come. You might decide to take a gap year and try to build a project because you know the returns on that are huge.
How can you build the best portfolio to help you reach the returns you want?
Your attention is all you have
There's one hiccup with this metaphor: your time is not money.
A dollar is a dollar is a dollar. It doesn't matter which one of your dollars you invest, the return is the same.
But a minute is not a minute.
A distracted minute is one where you aren’t getting everything you can out of it. The time you spend doing something can have a higher or lower quality, depending on your intention and presence in that moment.
Your attention determines the quality of your time.
If you hang out with friends for an hour but spend the whole time on your phone, what benefits did you actually get? Or if you’re trying to read a book while you have a YouTube video on in the background, will you remember anything you read?
This is why I talk about things like intentionality and focus. Not only are they helpful tools for life, but they help you get more out of each moment. And remember, the goal is not productivity.
Focus and intention help you get more anything out of life. And with such a limited budget, who wouldn’t want that?
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I also see it as a way to make money on your own intelligence, which really appealed to a slightly younger me.