Everyday Investing: Money, Time, Emotion
My neurotic strategy for efficiency is to approach endeavors as a hedge fund would approach a potential investment. I’m not investing others’ capital, but I am investing my own money, time, or emotion. As much as this sounds like a claim of self-importance, it’s as relevant to the people I’m interacting with as it is to me. If I don’t anticipate to get more out of an interaction than I put into it, it’s unlikely to be worthwhile for either party.
Being that we are actively selfish, treating actions as investments comes naturally. However, I’d argue that it’s not actively leveraged or thought about by the average person. Ignorance has its pros and cons: The pros allow you to avoid getting drowned in your own ideologies. The cons revolve around wasted inputs of money, time or emotion.
Everyday investments can be sorted based on the situation or occurrence. For simplicity, I’ll outline each with personal context:
The most frequent investment of time I make is allocated to meetings. I’m at a point in my career where meetings–business development, hiring, management–absorb the majority of my day. Is the projected outcome of a meeting, based on outcomes of similar previous1 meetings, worth the investment of my time? I treat books, blogs, film, art and music the same way.
Disbursement of disposable income is an investment. I’m less hesitant spending money on useful experiences and items than I am with my time, simply because I’m confident I can make more2 money, but not more time. What I attempt to calculate is if the net payoff of the experience or item purchased will be greater than the net effort involved in creating the original wealth.
Emotional investments are allocated to relationships. There isn’t much to say about this investment, except that I’ve found it beneficial to take note of how you feel after you’ve spent time with someone. As you might assume, it’s the hardest payoff to calculate: emotions often feel one way but mean something else.
The basis for any investment–time, money and emotion–like a hedge fund, is based on objective and risk. I live by the general rule that the younger one is the more risk they should take. While I’m aware of my investments, I tend to not let the neuroticism involved with quantification become counter-productive to my efforts for profitability.
- I realize projections based solely on historical context go against Nassim Taleb’s investment philosophy, but I abide to it anyway. People aren’t stocks. [↩]
- Time runs out. Money, technically, doesn’t have to. [↩]
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