Having a Job Isn't Free. You're Selling Your Time. Make Sure it's Worth It.

If someone offered to pay you $10 for your television, you'd never take them up on the offer, right? So why don't you value your time the same way?

The vast majority of people can easily conceptualize turning almost anything into a marketable asset. People sell all kinds of things from electronics to their own bodily fluids. Yet for some reason, so many of us don't seem to think of our time in the same way.

I've learned that one of the things successful people have in common is that they place a high value on their time, and they treat their time as an asset. The ordinary person, though, doesn't share this mindset. The ordinary person will sell their time to a corporation for a rate far less than what that time is actually worth, and they'll be happy to do it because the corporation keeps paying them an inflation adjusted rate for that time.

Like any asset you're going to sell, you need to think about the return you're getting on it, and think about how you could sell it for a higher price. If you're in a dead end job that makes you unhappy and pays you a mediocre wage, you're getting a fairly terrible return on your asset. This puts an entirely new perspective on your employment. You should encourage yourself to consistently shop around, and see if you can get a better offer on what you're selling.

More importantly, time is the asset you have the most of. So don't waste it. Sell, trade, or utilize as much of it as you possibly can to get the most out of it. The most successful people in the world have this figured out. The first thing they ever had was time. They just sold it for things that are far more valuable than what most of us are selling it for.

After all, time by itself is worthless. What makes it valuable is the staggering amount of things you can exchange it for.