When COVID hit the USA in Spring 2020, my business encountered a problem: the shipping process we’d been using became less-than-desirable.
It used to be that we received an order, forwarded the shipping info to the printer, and the printer handled all the logistics of getting the book(s) to you, the reader. With COVID, though, there were fewer people working in warehouses. And those who were, were prioritizing essential goods like masks and cleaning supplies. Books did not qualify.
In the month of April, domestic book shipments were taking nearly a month to get delivered to customers. In a world of INSTAgram and Amazon Prime 2-day shipping, this was not a sustainable model.
I realized I’d have to (re)start doing what I didn’t want to do anymore: stock my own products and ship them out myself. Standing in line at the post office was a real drag, though. That wasn’t gonna work, either.
I bit the bullet and purchased a $400 laser printer, along with the boxes full of my own books. This way, I could package orders and have the postage paid for every order from the comfort of my home office.
I dropped off 7 packages at the UPS Store earlier this week. The line at UPS was so long that day that it spilled out of the store. There were six people lined up outside of the store, along with the five in line inside and the three people being served at the counter.
I walked in and went straight to the front.
Since my packages are already postage-paid and labeled, I don’t have to stand in line: I just drop them at the counter and let one of the staff know that they were all set to ship. I was in and out of the store in 20 seconds.
The $400 printer hasn’t technically made me any money — the labels themselves aren’t free, and every label carries shipping costs — but it’s bought me a ton of time. Gaging the value of an hour of my time, the printer (and shipping account) has paid for itself many times over already. The time I save with the use of the printer, I can now use to do things that make me money.
***
Here’s the great thing about the books you read: someone took 2, 5, 10 years of their life — or their entire lifetime — identified the most important and valuable aspects of that time period related to the subject of the book, and condensed it into something you consumed in 3 weeks.
What took them a decade to learn, you got in less than a month. If you learned anything useful from the book, your investment in reading the book was you buying time: for 3 weeks and $20, you got 10 years of experience.
It’s the same thing you do when you hire a coach (business, life or sports): while you still have to do the work, the knowledge your coach brings to the situation either cuts down the time it would take for you to get that result, and/or allows you to sustain the desired results for longer. Results = more of what you want (love, admiration, money, etc). So, paying that coach actually makes you money.
That reduced / extended timeline is what you’re paying for. For this to make the most sense for you, you have to understand what your time is worth in dollars, plus what you stand to gain — which makes it easy to know whether an investment is worth the cost.
I read Robert Kiyosaki’s Rich Dad, Poor Dad in 2002. I bought the book on eBay for $0.99 cents and read it in a week.
$0.99 cents from my account
+
One week of time
=
Seeds of entrepreneurship planted in my head.
Worth it? Yes.
Wise people understand that their most important limitation isn’t money — it’s time. I can’t speak on when or if you’ll ever run out of money (depends how much you earn and how you use it), but I guarantee, given the known science of today, that you WILL one day run out of time. When your time is up, it won’t matter how much money you have left over.
So the game is to buy time.
Every person you talk or listen to, read, or watch, that time can either get you to your goals faster,
keep you indulged in your goals for longer — or it can move you further away.
Each choice either buys you time or costs you time. Your job is developing the skill of discerning which does what.
Speaking of Time, my 25 Hours course will help you to stop managing time and start controlling it, so you can make the most of your most valuable resource — which means no more regrets about the things you never got the chance to do.
25 Hours is available at the “Season” Level of Work On Your Game University, which is open for registration NOW. See it here: http://WorkOnYourGameUniversity.com