“I had been waiting for two weeks and the day finally came. I got a ride to the dealership with my friend Chelsea. I was soooo excited. Darren, my car concierge, the sweetest guy – he’s gay, from Wisconsin, I think – was there waiting. He grabbed my hand with a big smile and told me to close my eyes. I heard the growl of the engine as it pulled up in front of me. It was GORGEOUS! My brand new SL550 Roadster. Mars Red. And, of course, I had to customize it to match my personality, so I had them do some different stitching throughout the interior. Usually, the tan seats come with tan stitching, but I had them do black, so it would really stand out. And that’s when I noticed. The stitching was BROWN! NOT BLACK! I couldn’t believe it. All that waiting and then to have the stitching be all wrong. I was furious. I let Darren know that it was simply unacceptable. Chelsea could see how upset I was, so she just dragged me out of there. And I’m still hassling with getting that stitching right.” – Some crazy woman I overheard at a Starbucks in LA a couple of years ago.

The intersection of money and time is fraught with complications. It may be shabby sheik to say that money shouldn’t matter, but the fact is that it does. A lot. Nevertheless, you can take it too far, like this insane woman, and live your life as if conspicuous consumption is the express train to nirvana. Once again, time will help us find that middle ground that is so critical with hard issues.

Here’s the basic idea – money buys control of time. That’s it. Any pursuit of money after you have full control of your time – now and in the future – is a waste of time. In other words, there is truly a point – or rather, there are points – when enough is enough. After that, though your bank account may continue to swell, you’re working against yourself. You’re screwing up your funeral because you’re spending too much time trying to make more money, which necessarily is time you are NOT spending cultivating and enjoying good relationships.

So what does it mean to have control of your time? In general, I’d say it’s not being forced to use your time in ways you’d rather not. Getting control of time, therefore, is nothing more than removing the things you have to do for money. There’s a nuance here that is really important.

You can, and, in most cases, should still have things you want to do for money. Sure, it’d be nice to hit it big early and be in a position to cash out of the rat race for life. And if you can make that happen, I think you should. You could spend all your time until the big sleep nurturing your relationships, having fun, and using your skills and experiences to better the world around you. That’s a life well lived. But the reality for most people is that there will always be a need to make money. How often, how much, and what is demanded of you to make it happen are all up for grabs.

Here’s an example of what a temporally unconstrained life might look like – an unrealistic vignette, if you will. Suppose you produce intellectual property that does well commercially. The property you produce is a result of your passion, so the work doesn’t feel so much like work, and it only takes a few hours a day for a relatively short period of time (60-120 days) to produce new work that can be sold. The amount of money you make from each work is enough for you to live your lifestyle for a year or more, and no one can demand that you produce more than you want. You don’t have any obligations other than the ones you’ve happily imposed upon yourself. You can leverage your capital to invest in other ventures, which positions you for larger windfalls of money more often and with less personal effort. Eventually, you have so much money that you could never spend it all in your lifetime and you can literally disconnect from all money-making activities for the remainder of your days.

Like I said, it’s unrealistic. It’s almost a fairy tale, but I find that imagining the utterly unrealistic helps to illuminate the realistic, but usually obscured, options. Sure, the above example hinges on something that most people would say is totally out of reach for them – producing intellectual property that is commercially successful. Fair enough, but you could substitute anything for intellectual property. The idea is that you produce something that people pay for, and you do it in a way that disconnects your personal effort from how much money you can make and how regularly you can make it. That’s the goal, and it’s totally realistic for pretty much anyone who sets their sights on it and rolls their sleeves up to make it happen. (Cue the Lee Greenwood.)

Again, the only way to get control of your time is to remove the things you have to do for money. So when choosing a path, each option is evaluated in terms of time spent in have to do mode versus want to do. Yes, you have to suck it up when you’re young and toil in the salt mines like everyone else. But every opportunity for advancement brings with it a new set of variables related to time. If you look ahead and every promotion means more of your time belongs to someone or something else, even if there’s more money, you’re likely to be in the wrong job. Not that making more money and getting a fancy title aren’t attractive. Who doesn’t want to be a big shot? Just keep in mind that there are always options that bring as much money while requiring less time, and those options are available for would-be big shots, too. We just have to know what we want and navigate toward it.

The trick is to get to full control as fast as possible so we can leverage our time for as long as possible. Remember, control does not necessarily equal retirement. THAT is the truly unrealistic part of the vignette above. We know we’ll probably always need to be able to make money. But you can get to a point of good control in just a few years if you choose a good path, work hard, and have a little luck.

Choosing a good path, however, isn’t just about making good career choices. You have to watch out for the drag.

Imagine yourself as a train bound for full control. If you make bad career choices, you get completely off course. You miss the turn at Albuquerque and end up a wage slave in a dead end job. But even if you make good choices and stay on course, you can get there sooner or later depending on the drag. This is weight of the train. The more things it is carrying – possessions and obligations – the slower it goes. And it can eventually take on so much drag that it grinds to a halt.

In other words, our big picture decisions determine whether we’re aimed in the direction, and our day-to-day decisions determine how fast or whether or not we’ll ever even get there. Interestingly, minimizing drag just so happens to benefit us in ways beyond speeding us to our desired control of time. Consider these two drag-minimizing rules.

1. Own less. Having lots of possessions takes money and time – money to buy and maintain them, and time to manage them. The more possessions, the more drag. The nice thing about adopting this rule is that it immediately re-orients our point of view on consumption. Having nice stuff is great, and our media-driven society is all about dangling shiny new things in our faces at every turn, but the things we own should have a purpose that does not include impressing someone else. From there, we need to put a ceiling on how nice our things have to be. There’s always the 550SL, but the drag on that is enormous compared to the drag on something more practical, like a Honda Accord.

As a side note, I should point out that people who are highly focused on owning things are more often possessed by the things they think they own. Like the woman in the opening quote, their lives revolve around what they buy or plan to buy. Their possessions are topic number one at all times. Pesky things like people and passions and producing are conspicuously absent. So even if gaining control of time isn’t your goal, putting some constraints on the human tendency to accumulate is simply good for the soul.

2. Fuck credit. Pay things off as soon as you can. Credit drags on two fronts – the possessions you buy with it and the obligations it imposes on you in the future. With interest rates as low as they are, financial advisors will scoff at this, saying it makes much more sense to use someone else’s money to buy things and use your own for investments and the like. All I can say is that the expected gain from using credit is not worth the drag on the train. The fact is that the more credit you’re using, the more drag you’re carrying, and the longer it’ll take to get to full control.

A side note on this one is that rejecting (or at least heavily scrutinizing) credit brings amazing simplicity and clarity to most financial endeavors, especially entrepreneurial pursuits. If you’re building a tech business in Silicon Valley, it’s likely that one or more of your near-term goals is centered on getting funding. The very act of raising money, however, is a tremendous distraction from the focus of any business – making more than you spend. Moreover, investors become another kind of customer, which adds complexity to the operation. I’m not saying you should never take on investment. I’m just saying it should be a last resort because of the drag.

Of course, the obvious question with all this is, “how much is enough?” How much money do you have to have to be in full control of your time? It’s different for everyone, so I won’t pick a number. But I think it revolves around being able to sustain a reasonable lifestyle.

If you’re carrying a lot of drag, sustainable may never happen. But if you manage your drag, then it’s likely that you can fairly well pinpoint when you’ve made enough money. Consider the following three criteria…

– You have enough money to live off interest indefinitely or’85
– You have enough money to last until the next time you decide you want to make money and can reasonably expect to be able to do so
– Your spending burn rate doesn’t consistently exceed what you make in interest or have available to spend until you’ll need money again

If these three conditions are true, you can sustain your lifestyle indefinitely, which means you have full or almost full control of your time. You are then free.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of people who reach this point do so in a way that has them so obligated and tied down that they never even notice. They’re “too busy” to realize that the greatest circumstance available to a human has availed itself.

I, for one, do not have full control of my time. I have willingly handed most of it over to my two little boys and my wife. I have also committed myself to various business ventures, all of which revolve around producing commercially-valuable property. But the goal is perfectly clear – full control of my time. Offers come and go, some that offer more money but take more time. I decline. And as I get closer and closer to full control, I am tempted by the things that having more money affords. But I am ever wary of the drag, so I get better and better at saying no to myself. I’m not perfect, but I know what I’m after, and I’m willing to do what it takes to get there. I don’t have time for anything else.}