Would you rather have a billion dollars or a billion seconds?
If something takes you a million seconds to do, that’s about 12 days. If you need a billion seconds, however, that’s 31 years — not counting sleep.
Equating seconds to dollars, a billion dollars is worth 31 years of your time. Would you make that trade?
In his daily newsletter to 93,000 investors, Anthony “Pomp” Pompliano shared similar musings this week. A reader asked him: “If you could switch places with Warren Buffett, would you do it? You’d be one of earth’s richest people — but you’d be 90 years old.” In the money, yet out of time.
If you’re in your 20s, you’re a time multi-billionaire. You likely have more than two billion seconds left. If you’re 50, you could still be a time billionaire. How much would Warren Buffett give to get back those seconds?
“The time billionaires are the wealthiest among us, yet they fail to recognize the wealth that they enjoy,” Pomp writes.
The time billionaire can have a time horizon that is counted in decades. The time billionaire can afford to be patient. The time billionaire can slowly compound money over time. There is no rush. There is no compressed timeline that clouds the judgement of a time billionaire. They can recover from almost any mistake. The time billionaire is unshakeable in a sense.
If you’re a time billionaire, don’t fret about your lack of dollars. Embrace your advantage in time. Unlike the pieces of paper we all covet, each of us only gets to spend their seconds once.
This article first appeared on Medium.