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The Industrial Age is Dead – Time is the New Money

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The Industrial Age is Dead – Time is the New Money

As a business owner, you’re likely carrying a lot of baggage from the Industrial age (1800-ish to 1965-ish) that won’t fully go away for decades to come. He who makes the rules wins. You need to stop running your business on Industrial Age rules.

The Industrial Age brought us two incredibly bad ideas that led to many other bad ideas:

  1. Retirement
  2. Separation of work and play

A few weeks ago we said retirement is a bankrupt industrial age idea . Here we’re saying separation of work and play is a bad idea.

Time vs. Money
A young web designer friend of mine just one year out of college was given a huge pay raise by an ad agency, from $48,000 to $69,000. The company saw him as indispensable and didn’t want him going anywhere. A few months later, as winter approached, he quit. They wanted him there 8am-5pm and in the winter the only time to ride a bike was in the afternoon.

He would have worked in the evening, and that would have had no impact on the company, but they were stuck in the Industrial Age that valued money over time, and couldn’t see it. They were giving him the same tired “I’ll trade you money for your hours” deal that was dominant in the Industrial Age. He now runs his own very successful company and goes for a run or bike ride in the middle of the day any time he wants.

The Old (and Returning) Normal
For thousands of years people lived where they worked (over the storefront, on the farm) and played where they worked. Community was built around work and small markets. The kids ran and played, learned and worked there, the grandparents helped out – everyone was involved.

And there wasn’t much separation of work and play in the process. We look back and have a dreary and incorrect view of what life before “jobs” was like. What we miss is that above all else, we had community, something we’re only now beginning to recapture.

Humans as Extensions of Machines
It’s easy to see how this happened. During the Industrial Age, machines needed humans to become extensions of them in order to serve the machines properly. The machines needed people to be there all the time to run them, so we created humans in the image of machines. That “condition” was spread across all vocations, and “jobs” that separated work and play become the norm, even where there were no machines.

The Silent Generation – the worst label ever given
And it all worked in response to the needs of the machine, not the person. As the companies that owned the machines became huge, the pervasive need was to serve the corporation, and we were told to shut up, sit down, live invisibly, be loyal, don’t make waves and go out quietly. The generation which lived at the pinnacle of the Industrial Age, who are now in their late 70’s and early 80’s, have been labeled by marketers and sociologists as “The Silent Generation.” Can you think of a more condemning label? But it accurately reflects the damage the Industrial Age has done to us as a culture.

Time is The New Money
The Industrial Age taught us to value money above time. Giant Corporation, Inc. wanted you to focus on making money, not on having time to do anything with it. They needed all your time to run the machines. In the 21st Century we will understand that riches may equal money, but wealth equals freedom – the ability to choose what to do with my time. We will understand that money does not give us freedom, only time can do that.

Do you have time (wealth) or just money (riches)? Stop focusing on making money (see my book, Making Money Is Killing Your Business on the same subject), and intend to be wealthy instead. You’ll actually make more money and have a lot more fun in life, too.

Wealth vs. Riches – Which one defines business success?

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There is a significant difference between Wealth and Riches, and which one you choose will likely define whether your business is successful or not.

I was at a friend’s house in Maryland who lives on the water. We were sitting on his deck looking out over the water and I noticed that his neighbor had a nice 30’ sloop docked at his house. I mentioned it to my friend and without pausing he said, “Yeah, it’s a nice one, but I never see it go out.” I asked him to explain and he said, “Every spring he pulls it out of the water to knock the shellfish off and paint it, but I don’t remember the last time I actually saw him take it out. If it’s out, it’s certainly never out enough for anyone around here to notice.”

This guy was rich, but he definitely wasn’t wealthy. Riches equals money, but Wealth equals “the ability to choose what to do with my time.” Riches just accumulates money and stuff, but Wealth creates freedom. Too often business owners don’t make this distinction and buy off on the notion that piling up the money is the definition of success. This is leftover thinking from the 1980s and 90s that was expressed in the bumper sticker “He who dies with the most toys wins.” We got a chance to try it during the 1990s and 2000s, and it came up short.

Too often we intend that our business should throw off money, so at best, that’s all it does. But business should give us three things; two resources and a benefit.

Resource One: Money

You can do a lot of things with money, but getting money by itself is not a good goal. Ask anyone who has made a lot of it – Making money is not an empowering vision. Do you have an empowering vision that is bigger than making money? If not, you will likely never make a lot of it. The blue flame coming out your backside will come from having a vision for something that grips you, and money will just be a way to get there.

Resource Two: Time

Most business owners never ask their business for time, just money. So they get what they ask for – some money (usually not a lot). I expect my business to throw off both time and money, and relentlessly work to get the business to the point where it creates both assets for me. Without time, money is meaningless – it’s just a boat that never goes out.

The Benefit: Significance

The most important, least asked question in business is “Why?”. Most business owners have no idea why they are in business, so it’s no surprise they don’t know where their business is taking them. What is it that you could do with your business to create significance for you, your family, your employees, and in the world around you? The bigger that vision is, the more likely you are to succeed in your business. Significance, or creating meaning should be the reason you are in business. If you have a Big Why, you will be much more motivated to design your business in a way that it throws off both a lot of money and a lot of time. When you have both, you are Wealthy and can now choose how you will create significance in the world around you.

There are a lot of rich people in the world who don’t have freedom and haven’t done what they could have to create significance in the world around them. There are a lot more struggling business owners who just focused on making money and never made much of it because they never got a Big Why for being in business.

Go for “Wealth” – time, money and significance. We get what we intend, not what we hope for. Stop hoping your business will get there – random hope is a terrible business strategy. Instead, intend to build a business around your Big Why, and intend for it to throw off time and money so you can create significance. It’s not “He who dies with most toys wins”, but “He who lives with the best Lifetime Goals wins.”

Wouldn’t you rather leave a legacy than a pile of cash and a boat that never goes out?

Is Your Business Making the Rules for You?

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He who makes the rules wins. The problem is your business is probably making all the rules for you and beating you up at every turn.

We have it all backwards. We build a business intending to work hard and make money at it, and then we just take whatever lifestyle the business is willing to throw off for us. We live in reaction mode – reacting to everything our business needs us to do in order to make money this month.

Every business should throw off three things for us – time, money and significance. We only expect it to generate money so that’s what it does. But a healthy business grows up and gives us all three.

Let’s get it right. Figure out what your Ideal Lifestyle is and what it will cost you to live there. Then intentionally build your business to produce that lifestyle. Stop taking whatever your business will give you, take control and start making decisions that will bring you time and significance as well as money.

He who makes the rules wins. If you’re in charge then make the rules and build a business that responds to your direction, not the other way around. Do you own your business or does your business own you? Who’s really in charge?

It depends on which one of you is making the rules.

What an old guy told me that changed my life.

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The Time, Money, and Energy Conundrum – When I was just starting out, a creepy old guy (about my age – mid-50s) told me life had a built in problem. He said “The problem with life is this.

When you’re young, you’ve got all the time and all the energy to enjoy life, but no money. When you’re in your middle years, you’ve got all the money and all the energy, but no time. And when you’re retired, you’ve got all the money and all the time, but no energy.”

He then went on to say something very profound. “The key to a good life is to figure out how to have all three at once – you’ll make a lot bigger impact in the world around you if you can figure that one out.”

Lifetime Goals are foundational for figuring out the Time, Money, and Energy conundrum, for a very important reason. The definition of a Lifetime Goals is:

A goal which can never be checked off.

A true Lifetime goal can never really be fully completed – there is always something more you can do to make it better, more complete. Any goal that can be checked off as complete is not a Lifetime Goal. Been dreaming about that house on the spit of land at the edge of the lake with the thirteenth tee behind you? That is not a Lifetime Goal – it can be checked off, and once it is, it will no longer be motivating.

The red herring we’ve been fed is that the accumulation of junk is the same as Lifetime Goals. “My lifetime goal is to have $5 million in the bank, a Mercedes, a 6,000sf house, and a nice boat.” No it isn’t. Making money is not an empowering vision, and a goal realized is no longer motivating. This is just making money so you can check off the accumulation of junk. Wouldn’t get me out of bed for three minutes in the morning.

If you’re initially motivated by those things and obtain them, you’ll be sorely disappointed if you don’t have a bigger reason to have them than just having them. The old bumper sticker from the 80s – “He who dies with the most toys wins.” – was wrong. No, he who lives with the most motivating Lifetime Goals wins.

I believe every one of us was made to do something significant with our lives. Have you figured that out for yourself yet? If you’ve got a burr in your saddle or a blue flame coming out behind you for something that really excites you, you know you’re on to something. And everybody is going to want to be part of your life. Nobody runs to catch a stopped train – get yours moving and watch what happens.

You can solve the time, money, and energy conundrum and have all three at once, and make a lot bigger impact in the world around you.