Time Is the Only Currency That Matters || Masterminds Podcast EP85

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You can lose money and make it back. You can lose an opportunity and find another. You can even lose your health and recover it. There is only one thing you can never get back, and most people are spending it like it is unlimited.

In this solo episode of the Masterminds Podcast, Richie Mensah breaks down why time is the only real currency and why protecting it matters more than protecting your wallet. He unpacks the three ways people quietly waste their lives, explains the compound effect and how one hour a day can put you 360 books ahead of the next person in ten years, and gives you a practical six-step system to audit, protect, and take back control of your time starting today.

In this episode, you'll learn:

• Why time is the only currency you can never earn back
• The difference between time management and time allocation, and why allocation matters more
• Why some people are simply wrong for you, and how they drain the time you can never recover
• Why being reactive instead of intentional is the biggest mistake people make with their days
• How the compound effect turns one hour a day into a life-changing gap over ten years
• How to audit your hours and find the filler time bleeding out of your day
• How to identify your highest value activities and design a template day around them
• Why you should consume only what moves you toward your goals, even when you are relaxing
• Why you must treat your calendar the same way you treat your wallet

Chapters

00:00 – Time Is the Only Thing You Cannot Recover
 00:36 – Problem 1: Wasting Time on the Wrong Things
 01:59 – Problem 2: Spending Time With the Wrong People
 03:15 – Problem 3: Not Being Intentional About Your Time
 05:22 – The Compound Effect of Time
 06:20 – One Hour a Day: The 360 Book Difference
 08:12 – Step 1: Audit Your Hours
 09:33 – Step 2: Identify Your Highest Value Activities
 10:22 – Step 3: Cut the Consumption
 12:02 – Step 4: Design Your Template Day
 12:26 – Step 5: Audit Your Relational Time
 13:23 – Step 6: Treat Your Calendar Like Your Wallet

Transcript

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You'll lose money and then you'll make it back. You lose opportunities and new ones will arise. Sometimes you will even lose your good health, you lose your confidence, but there's always a way to bounce back. So one thing that you can never recover, the most important and most expensive thing in this world is time. But it's a mistake that so many people are making because we don't understand that time is the only real currency. So instead of protecting your wallets and protecting your relationships and protecting everything else around you, what you need to protect the most in this world is your time. The first problem most people are making with their time is not even time management, it's the fact that they are wasting their time on the wrong things. It's time allocation. Now, we all have the same 24 hours in a day, same seven days in a week, same 365 days in a year. But the difference with the person who is moving forward versus the person who is going nowhere is where you are putting your time. A lot of people are dedicating their time to things that don't mean anything to them. Doom scrolling, you know, doing useless tasks, doing things that are not in alignment with who they are or where they want to be, not understanding that that 30 minutes you just lost, that two hours that you just wasted, you will never ever recover that time. So your time must always be spent on the things that move you forward in the direction that only you want to go. The second problem is spending your time with the wrong people. Now, when I say the wrong people, I don't mean like good people versus bad people. I don't believe such exists. What I believe is some people are wrong for you. People who are distracting you from your goal, people who are draining your energy, people who are not in alignment with you. Sitting there arguing for three hours to let somebody understand what your dream is is a waste of your time. Having a long conversation with somebody about a topic that doesn't genuinely interest you is a waste of time. Being around people who just suck your energy. You wake up in the morning and you feel energetic, you're ready to conquer the world, you're ready to live life, and somebody is just draining you with all their negative talk and things that don't actually concern you, you are wasting your time. Spending time with the wrong people can never be gotten back. You need to choose people who are in alignment with where you want to go. If you are choosing a mentor, choose somebody who is already where you want to be. Choose people who match your energy, not people who are going to drain you, suck your energy, argue with you, fight you for reasons that don't make any sense to you. There are no good people, they are no bad people, but there are people who are wrong for you. Now, the third and the biggest problem is not being intentional about your time. This is the mistake most people are making. We are living life in response to life instead of actually taking control of what we do. Like I said in the beginning, time is your most expensive asset. So you need to treat it as such. The same way you do a budget for how much you're going to spend, the same way you check your account balance for how much money is coming in, you are checking if your boss has paid your salary. You need to be intentional about your time. When you wake up in the morning, what are you spending your time on? What plans you have for the week? What plans do you have for the month? And you see, when I say being intentional about your time, I'm sorry. I'm sorry if I'm sounding boring, but I don't mean for you to be boring. I don't mean for you to work, work, work every day or read, read, read every day. No, be intentional about what is important to you. If food is what is important to you, be intentional about spending your time on quality food. If going to the club and dancing is what's important to you, be intentional about doing that. If reading is important to you, be intentional about doing that. If your career, if your relationship, whatever it is that you hold dear, that you take as your values, who you want to be known for, who you want to be remembered as. Put your time in those things. Be intentional about it. Wake up in the morning and say, Today, I want to make two sketches, I want to listen to music, I want to watch two movies, I want to hang out with my friends, I want to write my business plan, I want to answer my voicemails, like be intentional about it. Because when you are drawing up your time properly, then you start to see that am I filling my time with things I genuinely care about, or am I filling it with other people's intentions and priorities? When you start being intentional about your time, you start to notice what means a lot to you versus what you are just reacting to. And the reason this is so important is because time has this effect that we don't notice, and that is the compound effect. The compound effect is so gradual and so slow that most of us don't pay attention to it because whatever you spend your time on daily, every second, every hour grows. If you spend your time reading all the time, you become very knowledgeable. If you spend your time working out, you become fit and healthy. If you spend your time eating, you become full and put on weight. If you spend your time working hard, you make money. Whatever you put your time in consistently grows exponentially over time, and the compound effect is one of the most powerful forces in this life. I want to give you a very simple example. Let's say somebody decides to dedicate one hour a day to reading, and because they do that, they are able to finish a book every week because they need seven hours to finish reading a book. This means within one week, within one year, they've read 52 books. Whereas somebody else decides to dedicate one hour a week to reading. Now, based on the fact that they also need seven hours to finish a book, this means every two months they finish one book. So at the end of the year, they finished six books, and the other person has finished 52. This is the compound effect within just one year. Now multiply this by 10. In 10 years, the first person has finished 520 books, and the second person has finished 60 books. That's 380 difference. Sorry, 360 book difference. Yet they all started at zero. So the compound effect is very, very strong, and it goes the same way for negative habits. So you need to be intentional about what you are doing with the little little moments of your time. I want to teach you a small trick that's going to help you become very efficient with your time. The first thing is you need to audit your hours. So for one week, just try and write down what you think you are doing every day. Spread the 24 hours across and just try and write down what you feel you're doing every hour. Pay attention to this for one week. I remember the first time I did this, everybody knows me as a super hardworking person. But the first time I did this, I realized that there were actually a lot of gaps where I wasn't doing anything productive. I call it filler time. There were hours where I was just having a random conversation that didn't move the needle in any way. Or while I was sitting there waiting for a meeting, I was just doom scrolling. Or I just like, you know, I was wasting time thinking I was working. So I'll go to work for nine hours, but when I actually calculate, maybe I only did three hours of real work. Audit your time, and you'll suddenly start to notice that a lot of your time is bleeding away into things that you don't want your time bleeding away into. The second step is identify your highest value activities. The things that when you do them consistently, you know is going to improve your life. Only you know what your life goals are. Maybe you want to be a guitarist and tell the world and play for a rock and roll band. Then identify what I can do to get to this goal. Is it by playing the guitar two hours every single day? Is it by watching guitar videos on YouTube? Is it by going to sit down with my guitar mentor and having conversations to understand the rock and roll industry? You look at your highest value activities and schedule it and plan your life around how you can do that consistently. The third step, cut the consumption. You know, we live in a world where we are consuming and taking in so much. Now, when I say cut the consumption, I don't mean everything, but cut the consumption to anything that does not bring you value. You know what your values are, you know what is important to you. If you are trying to develop your personal finances, watch personal finance podcasts. If you are trying to become an entertainer, watch more things about entertainment and lifestyle. If you are trying to become a content creator, go to your favorite influencers page and watch how they do their content. Consume what is valid and valuable to you. Stop consuming everything because it's draining your time without you noticing. Become an expert in whatever area of your life that is important. If you plan one day on being a football manager, then watch football endlessly. That's fine. Study tactics, understand what they are doing so that one day you can put that into practice. But if you plan on becoming a medical doctor, don't go watch football endlessly. No, watch documentaries about medicine. You know, watch the content they've given you in school. The day you go and sit on Netflix and you want to watch a TV show, don't just watch a random TV show. Watch a hospital or a medical show so that even when you're entertaining yourself, you are still moving in the direction that you want to go to. Step four is design your template day. You need to have a basic design for what you want to do with your day. Like, okay, this is my morning routine. I wake up, I walk, I do this, I meditate, I do that, I do that. That's your morning routine. After that, I work for four hours. After that, I take a break and relax for two hours, then I go back to work for four hours, and then maybe I read, I sketch, then I have some peaceful sleep. Have your template day so that you can fix things into your template day. It keeps you more structured and helps you to use your time effectively. Step five, audit your relational time. Look at the time that you are spending with other people. The people that you are spending the time with, is it bringing you value or not? If it's bringing you value, then you can focus more time in your day to that. If it's just draining you and distracting you, then you need to cut down on such time. Now the final step is treat your calendar the same way you treat your wallet. The same way you're not going to allow any money to just fall out of your wallet without knowing exactly where it went to. It's the same way don't allow any time in your day to bleed out without knowing exactly where it's going to and choosing that first. Protect your time like you protect your money. So remember, money is renewable, time is not. You can have all the money in the world, and you cannot buy your time back. So make sure you focus on spending your time in the right places for the right reasons with the right people. Hope this conversation has brought you another step closer to being the mastermind I know you are meant to be.