Recently, I was reading a great book by Oliver Burkeman called Four Thousand Weeks. The title is referencing the number of total weeks you can expect to live on average. Since your time is already so limited, you can only reasonably expect to achieve so much in your lifetime. You can’t achieve everything, but you need to make sure that you’re working towards achieving the right things.
It’s a fantastic book that I recommend to help you really get a good idea about how important it is to be living the right way now. One passage, in particular, caught my attention in the way it relates to personal finance.
“…a teacher arrives in class one day carrying several sizable rocks, some pebbles, a bag of sand, and a large glass jar. He issues a challenge to his students: Can they fill all the rocks, pebbles, and sand into the jar? The students, who are apparently rather slow-witted, try putting the pebbles or the sand in first, only to find that the rocks won’t fit. Eventually-and no doubt with a condescending smile-the teacher demonstrates the solution: he puts the rocks in first, then the pebbles, then the sand, so that the smaller items nestle comfortably in the spaces between the larger ones. The moral is that if you make time for the most important things first, you’ll get them all done and have plenty of room for less important things besides. But if you don’t approach your to-do list in this order, you’ll never fit the bigger things in at all.”
I’ve heard this one before, and although Burkman takes some admittedly hilarious jabs at making fun of the parable, I actually really like it.
However, Burkeman makes an observation that I’d never considered when I’d heard the story before.
“The smug teacher is being dishonest. He has rigged his demonstration by bringing only a few big rocks into the classroom, knowing they’ll all fit into the jar. The real problem of time management today, though, isn’t that we’re bad at prioritizing the big rocks. It’s that there are too many rocks-and most of them are never making it anywhere near that jar.”
So the takeaway?
Even though you’re trying to only fit the biggest rocks into your life first, the truth is you have enough big rocks in your life that you could put in the jar, that you’ll never actually have enough room to do it all.
I couldn’t help but draw a parallel between the point Burkeman is making about having to choose between great directions you could go with your limited 4,000 weeks and the big rocks that you’ll need to choose when it comes to your finances.
The truth is, there will probably always be more that could be purchased with your money. In fact, our wallets are pulled in a million different directions each day.
But what you have to do is decide what the most essential rocks will be for your money and cast aside those other things that will make a play for your limited resources.
Decide the very most important goals for your money and make sure that above all else, you’re making a plan for achieving those goals.
However, there’s one last twist.
The jar in the story is fixed, much like the time we have to live. Our time really is our most valuable resource. We can’t get it back, and once it’s gone, it’s gone.
With money, however, you’re dealing with a renewable resource.
In other words, your jar has the potential to get bigger.
So there’s a bit of good news when we think of this analogy in terms of money.
But we know that chasing a bigger paycheck won’t actually make for a more fulfilled life. Therefore, the question remains, how are you going to be spending your time just in the pursuit of making a bigger jar?
It’s unlikely that trying to earn more will change the amount you can budget next month. You’ll still be left with a limited amount of resources and be faced with the challenge of deciding where the dollars you’ve earned today will need to go.
When faced with all of the big rocks, pebbles, and sand sitting on the table, It’s up to you to decide what actually gets to go in the jar.
This is a good one!