When I was young, my dad’s favorite line to get me to do something that he didn’t want to do was, “You’re young, your time isn’t worth as much as mine.” And back then he was right, my time wasn’t worth much as a kid and my dad obviously thought his was. As I grew older though, I started taking on more and more responsibilities and trying to fit in additional stuff on my plate. In college, I worked a few odd jobs here and there, played intercollegiate volleyball and majored in aerospace engineering. I was very busy but I enjoyed every minute of it.
Even after all that, I still felt like my time wasn’t that valuable though. There weren’t a whole lot of things I could afford to pay people for so I just did them myself. It also didn’t hurt that I was pretty good at managing my time. I had to be in order to do all that and still succeed. That doesn’t mean there weren’t a lot of things I didn’t want to do: I just didn’t have much of a choice.
In college, I didn’t have the money to pay someone to clean up after me or cook me dinner every night so I did those things myself. In retrospect, I’m actually glad that I had to do all that work since it made me appreciate how tough it was. By comparison, now that I’m working full time I think my life is actually a lot easier. I sit at a desk for 8 hours a day, sometimes only doing around 4 hours of work and go home slightly mentally drained at the end of the day. Other people are out working physically demanding or labor-intensive jobs for much less pay and much longer hours while I sit in a comfortable cubical for 8 hours a day. [Read more…]
