For decades power companies have been looking into ways of storing energy after they generate it. They’ve considered ideas like industrial batteries, molten salt, pumping water in a tall structure, heat, or pressurized gas so it can be released later and converted back into energy.
Essentially they’re looking into savings accounts for their energy so they can convert it to currency at a later date.
We humans have different ways of storing our energy: money. In order to get currency, (dollars, Euros, or whatever your country’s currency is) we have to trade something and store our “energy”. We can spend that currency to convert it to things we buy.
If you’re working a job, you’re conversion is time = money. Since most transactions these days wont accept time as a currency, money will have to suffice.
That means anytime you spend money, you’re trading your time.
That makes you think differently when you look at something and ask yourself how much of your time something is worth.
It means there are limits to both how much someone will pay you for your time, and how much time is available to trade with.
We only get so much time and you can’t convert that money back into time (not directly at least, there’s another metaphor here about buying freedom and freedom = time, but that’s for another day).
How Entrepreneurs Kick Up the Equation
Entrepreneurs change the time = money equation. We use our time to put gears and levers into place (products and marketing) to convert our time into energy and make that energy generate money. It changes the equation to mean our time plus value multiplied times our marketing equals money.
(Time + Value) x Marketing = $$ Money
We’re storing value instead of time and multiplying the value of our time.
This means we can look at the price of something and think about how much energy or value it costs. A much more comfortable thought.
So ask yourself one thing every day: how am I going to create value today?