One of
the greatest resources available to humanity is time, and one major thing that
distinguishes success stories from failures is what they do with their
time. The successful person spends time with greater economy than he would
spend money because he realizes that although time is free it is still one of
the most perishable commodities available on earth. Once it’s lost
there’s no getting it back.
The Law
of Time Perspective says: The most successful people in any society are those
who take the longest time period into consideration when making their
day-to-day decisions. This insight comes from the pioneering work on
upward financial mobility in America conducted by Dr. Edward Banfield of
Harvard University in the late 1950s and early 1960s. After studying many of
the factors that were thought to contribute to individual financial success
over the course of a person's lifetime, he concluded that there was one primary
factor that took precedence over all the others. He called it "time
perspective."
What
Banfield found was that the higher a person rises in any society, the longer
the time perspective or time horizon of that person. People at the highest
social and economic levels make decisions and sacrifices that may not pay off
for many years, sometimes not even in their own lifetimes. They plant trees
under which they will never sit.
People
with long time perspectives are willing to pay the price of success for a long,
long time before they achieve it. They think about the consequences of their
choices and decisions in terms of what they might mean in five, 10, 15 and even
20 years from now.
Money
has a time value. The time value of money is the interest. This is the reason
why our friends the bankers are happy to pay you something just for you to
leave your money with them for a given time period. It might be peanuts, or way
below what you desire or what your appetite would want, but it’s something. If
you have a bigger appetite then simply sit with a bank manager and negotiate your
interest. Let’s see who will push the other. So, the law of time perspective
advises you to plan for the long-term for your money. I’m talking about
investment here. Of course there are sometimes short and medium term investment
plans and goals, but this thing called money tends to reward you more if you
think long-term.
As you
begin thinking longer term and organizing your life and priorities with your
future goals and ambitions in mind, the quality of your decisions improves and
your life starts to become better almost immediately. Delayed gratification is
the key to financial success. Your ability to practice self-mastery,
self-control and self-denial, to sacrifice in the short term so you can enjoy
greater rewards in the long term, is the starting point of developing a long
time perspective. This attitude is essential to financial achievement of any
kind.
Sacrifice
in the short term is the price you pay for security in the long term. The key
word here is "sacrifice." When you resist the temptation to do things
that are fun and easy and instead discipline yourself to do the things that are
hard and necessary, you develop in yourself the kind of character that
virtually guarantees you a better life in the future. You are putting yourself
on the side of the angels. You are virtually guaranteeing your future when you
develop long time perspective.
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