I recently came across a comment in a wealth building community, it said “you can’t grow a company by cutting costs“. This makes sense. Making savings is a function of expenses. At best you could save everything you spend, but that isn’t going to increase your income, just the amount of money that you get to retain. If you are pulling in a fixed figure per month, then that is as much as you are earning. The most you can keep is that figure, and no more. If you want to grow, you have to do something else.

This thought has been fascinating me for the last month or so, as I’ve been engaging with the idea.

What I have come to realise is that there is an analogue between cutting costs and saving time. I have a list of things to do as long as anyone’s arm, and I find myself operating out of a ‘if I can just get my list done then I’ll have time for…’ mentality. The bills need paying, the bank statements need reconciling. The house need redecorating, as well as a patio laying and some damp proof course needing replacing. Then I have a bazillion books I need to read, some papers I need to write, and some friends I need to get back in touch with. That’s on top of the demands (and luxuries) that come from having a growing family, and a startup business. How on earth do I juggle all that? The seemingly obvious thought is that I need to just be more efficient, and save time, so that there is more time to fit it all in and get it all done. The obvious answer is that I just need to save time.

But, the wealth lesson suggests that that is wrong. You can’t grow a life by saving time, as you can’t grow wealthy by saving costs. This should be obvious, and it becomes so with a little thought experiment. I imagine that all of my tasks are done, and stay done – the bills pay themselves, the statements reconcile and file themselves automatically. The books get read, and the information is available to me anytime I want to use it. And so on. What is left? Just a whole lot of time, and nothing on my todo list that needs to be taken care of….. so what then? Ah, now there’s time to do the things that I really want to be doing. Interesting that, how the day to day tasks get in the way of the real things that are important, and prevent them from happening at all.

I’m reminded of another metaphor about things in life being compared to different sizes of stones, pebbles, gravel and sand, where size is importance. A life itself is compared to a finite sized container, in which all the things get put. The moral is that if you fill it with sand first, then there is no space to put the large things in – they just don’t fit. The suggestion is, start with the big things, and the small things will automatically fill the gaps between… but don’t whatever you do don’t fill it with the small things first, otherwise the important things wont fit.

I can’t grow and develop the things that are important to me just by servicing the distractions that arise as part of my lifestyle, and I can’t grow just by trying to be more efficient at those things. The more time I save, the more that can be done in that time, and the more things need to be done. The tasks always grow to fill the available space, most of it is just sand, there’s an infinite amount of it, and it can consume all spare resources.

We are born to grow, obviously. Little children get bigger, and as they do so, their life keeps changing as their comprehension and interests develop. However, it seems to me that most of us reach a particular point and then just stop. Life contains what it contains, we don’t physically grow anymore, new things don’t come along and change the focus away from the old things. We get in a groove (or rut), and nothing changes on its own… and when it does it’s usually a problem – an accident, a health issue, or being made unemployed. We are busy with the business of maintaining this lifestyle, doing all the tasks we have set ourselves, or doing things to distract us from those things.

How many of us are actually growing still? What of the things that are really important to us? How much of our time do we really dedicate to those things? Any? Or are we working out of the (false) assumption that we need to get the little stuff done first before we can really start pursuing our dreams?