Lost Time Is Gone Forever | How to Spend Your Time Wisely for a Happier Life

[Anderson]

We are all, without exception, professional investors. Seriously. Every day, throughout our lives, we invest the most precious resource we have - time - in hopes of yielding the most valuable outcome: joy and fulfilment from life.

Although we often don’t realize it, these investments are far riskier and more complex than financial ones. Unlike money, lost time is irrecoverable. If you invest your time unwisely and fail to gain happiness, that time is gone forever, with no possibility of replenishment.

I used to think I was investing my time in earning money, building a career, improving my health, or nurturing relationships. But then it dawned on me that these aren’t the final goals—they’re just steps along the way to our ultimate objective: joy.

Whether it’s achieving athletic success, gaining power, or finding love, these are merely projects where we allocate our time capital. In reality, they’re not the end goals. They’re just the means to an end, the end being the happiness we hope to gain.

In my life, I’ve made many poor investment decisions. Looking back, it’s frightening to think about the enormous amounts of time I poured into projects that, in the end, didn’t bring me any joy. It’s astonishing how we all recognize that time is more valuable than money, yet I spent most of my life willing to invest my time under conditions I’d never accept if it were money on the line.

I invested time in relationships that brought more pain than happiness. I invested in businesses that caused more stress than satisfaction. I lost hundreds of thousands of hours on these failed investments before I finally learned to assess my time investments not by the intermediate goals achieved, but by the ultimate result: how much happiness these goals actually brought me.

I learned to ask myself, “How much joy am I getting for each unit of time I invest?” regardless of whether that time was spent on career, relationships, meditation, or therapy. I began to ask myself these questions, answer honestly, and make decisions based on those answers.

Often, it seems like each of us is running our own personal business - some of us build, some write, some repair, some manage. But the truth is, we’re all engaged in the same business. We’re all investing our time in the pursuit of joy. It’s a global enterprise, one in which we’re all involved, without exception.

This means we have a tremendous opportunity to share our experiences in this business. What investment in joy has been the most successful for you? Which one was the biggest failure? What time investment brought you the most happiness? Which one drained your joy instead of adding to it? Let’s share our stories, because, after all, we’re all in this business together.