How to lose time and money
Paul Graham’s essay simplified for 10-year-olds and above
This is my humble attempt to adapt the essay How to lose time and money by Paul Graham for those who’d like a simpler version. I tried my best to retain the original. Hope you and your kids gain from it as much as we did!
Paul Graham is a successful entrepreneur. He built a software company called Viaweb and sold it to Yahoo in 1998. When he sold his startup, he suddenly got a lot of money. Now he had to think about something he didn’t need to think about before — how not to lose money.
He knew it was possible to go from rich to poor, just like it was possible to go from poor to rich. Although he had spent a lot of years learning how people go from being poor to rich, he knew nothing about the opposite.
How do people go from being rich to becoming poor?
Why would he want to find that out? So that he won’t make the same mistakes.
The basic “Having fun? Wasting money” alarms
He started paying attention to how fortunes are lost. If you ask a kid how rich people become poor, they’d say by spending all their money. That’s how it happens in books and movies because that’s the colorful way to do it. In reality, the way most fortunes are lost is not through wasteful spending, but through bad investments.
Unless you have super fancy tastes, it’s hard to spend millions of dollars without noticing. To give you a rough idea, even if you update all your devices or your entire wardrobe, you’ll be done in a few tens of thousands of dollars. And while you are on this shopping spree, you will definitely be thinking, “Wow! I am spending a lot of money.”
After you press that ‘Buy’ button, you’ll tell yourself, “No more shopping for another 3 months!”
This realization of overspending doesn’t happen while people are trading. Trading is a type of money investment that comes with a lot of risks. In trading, you can invest a million dollars and get back 10 million dollars. But, you can also lose the entire one million dollars. That’s what makes it a high-risk investment.
Trading is like gambling in a casino. People have lost millions of dollars in high-risk investments in the blink of an eye.
Buying things that make you happy triggers a warning alarm in your mind, “I’m spending money on myself…I am wasting money…I need to stop!” ⛔️
We know for sure that wasting is bad and it can get us in trouble. Your mind already has those alarms set, thanks to your parents, teachers, etc. who teach you to not waste money. It’s like the default settings in a new device.
Investing money doesn’t trigger that alarm because people aren’t buying something to have fun, to look good, to feel good, etc.
If it isn’t fun, it must not be ‘wasting’.
In their minds, investing is just moving money from one place to another. In the society we live in today, investment is looked upon as a wise thing to do. This is why people trying to sell you expensive things say “It’s an investment.”
For example, a salesperson selling you a super expensive mattress would say, “It’s an investment for your sleep quality.” Someone selling you an expensive slow juicer would say, “It’s an investment for your health.”
I’m not suggesting that those are bad products to buy. My point is that investments can waste money.
Our basic “If it isn’t fun, it must not be wasting” alarms are unable to catch the sophisticated ways of wasting money like investment.
The solution is to set new and improved alarms that can catch the complicated ways of wasting money 🕵️♂️.
The new alarms for not wasting time
New alarms are like new settings. Install any new apps you need, change to a live wallpaper, maybe even learn to replace the default app icons on your home screen. It might not be straightforward but it will save you a lot of trouble in the future.
Just like you need to learn and set new alarms for not wasting money, you need to learn and set new alarms for not wasting time. Most people use the basic, default ones that aren’t good enough.
When you spend hours watching a TV series or playing a video game, You’re wasting time, stop! alarm in your mind starts to buzz. You might not stop right away. But you are aware you’re wasting time. It’s like snoozing the alarm. Sooner or later, you will stop.
This realization doesn’t happen when you start wasting time on fake work.
If you spend an entire day struggling to complete one math exercise or reading one boring essay, how do you feel at the end of the day? Frustrated? Yes. Guilty? No.
You don’t feel guilty because you weren’t chilling or having fun. Your wasting-time alarm didn’t buzz even though you wasted the entire day.
Somehow, not having fun justifies not getting the work done.
Just like with money, not having fun is no longer enough to save the day. It was probably enough long long time back when humans were hunter-gatherers — Not having fun meant you were watching out for a lion that might have you for her meal. It was probably enough for our farmer ancestors. Not having fun meant they were toiling in the field growing food so they won’t starve to death.
The world has gotten more complicated. The most dangerous traps now are new behaviors that pretend to be good behaviors. It’s easy to get fooled because they copy the boringness of the actual good behaviors.
Don’t get fooled by the boring nature of work. Just because it’s boring, doesn’t mean it’s work.
