The Most Efficient Way to Spend Your Time and Money

We spend lots of money on stuff that doesn’t matter. I think we can all agree on that. We’ll call this unnecessary spending. These are our third TVs, when we get a second latte in one day, and video games (I’ll stand by for the hate mail). No one actually needs any of this!

We also spend lots of money on stuff that matters, but for which the money/time investment doesn’t quite match the return we get. We’ll call this mismatched spending. This is the category where most graduate degrees, going to Disney World, and “buying groceries anywhere besides Aldi” belong. They are good things, just way overpriced!

Our goal should be to buy the things we buy at a great value. That doesn’t mean cheap, necessarily. It just means the price is below what you’d expect to pay based on what you get out of it. We’ll call this efficient spending. And, yep, you guessed it… The best example of this in the whole world is books.

For $16 and six hours of reading time you can be whisked away to another world or learn how to cook dumplings or take steps toward healing your marriage or learn all about the compelling life of Winston Churchill.

The Internet is a marvel… but it’s also often a huge waste of time. Conferences are fantastic… but they are also prohibitively expensive. I firmly believe that dollar for dollar and minute for minute, books produce the most life-change of anything in the world.

Go read one. You’ll be smarter, more equipped, more interesting to speak with, have more money in your pocket, and have more time on your hands.