05/25/2025
WHAT IS YOUR MOST BASIC RESOURCE?
by Tom Hopkins
What is your most basic resource? It's not money, not brains, not who you know. Your basic
resource is time. Unless you use your time well, you'll never even get a glimpse of what your
potential is. Using your time well isn't easy -- which is why so few people do it. We all have
challenges with organizing our lives, setting priorities, and planning our time.
Regardless of what you do in life, time is money. If I gave you a check for $86,400 and said,
"From this moment you have 24 hours to invest it. You can invest in anything you want to with this
money. Whatever you don't invest, I get back tomorrow at this exact same moment." What would
you do during the next 24 hours? You'd be out there working hard and fast to invest that $86,400,
wouldn't you?
That being your attitude, why aren't you busily investing as much as you can of the 86,400
seconds given to you every day? That's right -- at the beginning of every day we're all given
86,400 seconds. As each second ticks by, we've lost the benefit of it forever unless we find a way
to invest that moment in the future.
The seconds of your life -- and that's the way you live it, one second at a time -- can be invested in
countless ways that will bring you a future return. Many of these ways will give you repeated
returns stretching over many years. You can invest your seconds in the creation of future income,
in gaining new knowledge and acquiring useful skills, in making contacts, in enhancing your
personal life. The methods of gaining future benefits from present time are myriad. And so are the
ways of wasting time. The seconds you squander vanish forever with no potential return. If you
don't invest your daily treasure of 86,400 seconds wisely, in essence you hand them back at the
end of each day to the force that gave them to you. So, invest your time wisely!