Have you ever played Minecraft? For the non-gamers out there (or those who have successfully avoided that addiction), Minecraft is a game where you start with nothing, and the first step is to go out and gather resources. Put very simply, you use those resources to improve your equipment so that you can gather even better resources, and so on until you’ve built a safe, comfortable home and maybe even defeated a dragon.
Life is a lot like that. We all have resources to gather and manage, and we have to use those resources to build our lives, sometimes from the ground up. For any task in your life, big or small, you can typically choose which of these resources you’re willing to spend, depending on the amount you have and the value you place on them. In reality, those resources can typically be simplified down to the following:
- Time
- Money
- Energy
- Support
- *Knowledge
For example, say you want your kitchen to be clean. Your current mindset may lead you to always spend Time and Energy to just clean it yourself.
However, that isn’t the ONLY option. You could also spend Money to have your kitchen cleaned by professionals. You can call on your Support team (your partner, family, asking favors from friends) to help you. You could learn more about cleaning and increase your *Knowledge so that you can learn techniques to clean faster and with less energy.
Another thing that you can do is to spend one resource to gain more of another. The easiest way to look at this is through the lens of working at a job. If we made work into an equation, we’d see that:
Time + Energy + *Knowledge = Money
We can do that to increase any of those resources. For example, how do you build your Support team? By spending Time with people, using some of your Energy to have deep conversations and help with what they need and build trust.
Time + Energy = Support
How can you add Energy to the amount you can spend in a day? This is an odd one. You can do that by eating foods that don’t make you feel sluggish (which can cost Money, but I’m not putting it in the equation since you’d have to eat either way) and spending some Time each day doing some kind of physical movement – which requires an up-front Energy deposit to get more the next day.
Time + Energy + *Knowledge = ++Energy
The only thing that we can’t get more of is Time. Even by paying someone to clean our kitchen, we had to trade some of our Time for the Money we paid to get the Time back – it goes full circle.
Now, you might be wondering why I put an asterisks next to *Knowledge. The reason for that is that Knowledge is the only unlimited resource. Gaining *Knowledge costs Time, certainly, and sometimes it costs Money depending on if you’re taking a paid course or reading a book you purchased. But it’s the only resource that doesn’t deplete when you use it. That means that *Knowledge is the ultimate resource.
Here are my two takeaways:
- Mistakes are never a waste of Time, because you learn from them, so take action now and gain *Knowledge as you go.
- If you gain *Knowledge about how to use your Time wisely, you will be rich no matter what your bank account says.
Stop waiting for the perfect time. It doesn’t exist. Gather your resources, and start the next chapter of your life right now.
