TIME & MONEY: They both cost!
What is your time worth? How valuable is it to be in your presence. People love to use the term ‘help’. Will you ‘help’ me start a business? I need ‘help’ paying rent. No one will ‘help’ get a fresh start. I could be soooo much further if I had ‘help’. I’ve lived long enough to know and understand for myself that EVERYTHING COST and rightly so!
Anything obtained free isn’t valued and will be treated like what it cost. You know it all too well. Anytime you’re helping someone for free that person will take advantage of your time, ignore what you may have to do and expect you to wait on them otherwise you didn’t ‘help’ them. Take that same person, and he or she is paying for a service and they will treat it differently. They will leave you because now the services you provided free they have to pay and the respect level for the service has increased significantly! Have you ever given someone services for free and watched them go and pay someone else for the same services? They may have thanked you, but never even thought to pay you for those same services. Maybe it was a relative and they felt you should do it for them or a close friend who accepted your freebie until they could do better. The point is their willingness to pay and the respect given when paying for services are connected. Clearly, the service that they had to pay for, felt more valuable to them even if the service you provided was equal in value and performance. When people pay, they pay attention and they respect!
You have to be careful of the things you give to people under the pretense of ‘helping’ them. Sometimes helping is NOT giving to them! Time is one of those things! I’ve always been the ride or die kinda girl! If you’re in the fight, you’re in the trenches, YOU WANT ME ON YOUR TEAM! I’m a fighter, full of ideas, overcoming challenges and encouraging every step of the way. However, I’ve learned to watch the person that is requesting the ‘help’. I’ve learned to match their energy! As compassionate as I am and can be, if the person to whom I’m giving my time isn’t sure or as engaged in the fight, my energy stops immediately. Why? Because I understand the concept of sowing and reaping!
ANYTHING you sow, you will reap! When you plant or sow into good ground, you will reap a harvest. Good ground can be a person that you are ‘helping’ and he or she is committed to receiving assistance and working diligently to grow into a place or time where assistance is no longer required. That person is considerate, appreciate and most importantly respectful of your time and money. Pretty soon a person like that will believe in his or herself and begin to stand on their own. The time spent sowing into good ground becomes a harvest that never ends. There is no way to measure how far that time/money will go. He or she will ‘help’ others and it becomes a continual flow that started with a seed into good ground.
Likewise planting or ‘helping’ people that want a hand-out versus a hand-up, will result reaping as well, however, instead of a harvest, it would be a famine or drought. Time wasted doesn’t become anything in the future but lost time! Time does NOTHING ON IT’S OWN! IT (Time) does not heal wounds, I hate hearing people say that!) It (time) is an inanimate object that records seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, years and alone is passes by! It is the effective use of time that determines how valuable it is or is not! Time in the wrong hands becomes a weapon against one and that’s what is like to plant, sow or ‘help’ someone who refuses to ‘help’ his or herself! Additional, the opportunity cost of wasting time is the lack of money that is made or could have been made! When the ground is ripe, it is impossible to plant and not receive a harvest! The ground is a metaphor for people, ideas, and/or concepts.
Money is like time, it alone accomplishes nothing! Money in the wrong hands becomes a weapon of destruction or a cause of one falling or even becoming a slave to it; however that same money in the right hands will generate a generation of wealth!
Money habits are learned and pass down to the next generation based on what has been seen, heard and done. The knowledge of handling money is usually on an as needed basis too. Simply put, until a person is making a certain amount of money, people tend to use the same method used when he or she was making less money. That’s not the best method or plan. The more one has to manage, the more information and knowledge required to manage it. More money means more opportunity to grow and/or mess up.
So I ask you again, what is your time worth? Are you around or sowing into the places that will produce a harvest or are you contributing to years of famine in your lineage? Are you giving away your time and screaming that it’s valuable at the same time? Are you using your time productively?
#KnowYourWorth