What If I Gave You $4174. That’s It. Is That Enough?
Do you consider it life-changing money? It actually IS your life.
Imagine.
You announce you want to start a business, and some stranger steps up and says they are going to change your life by giving you a whopping $4176 or so.
How would you feel?
Grateful, for sure.
But also knowing that, while $4k is a good chunk of change as a gift, it isn’t really going to move the needle in today’s world.
And so you thank the stranger and tell him you appreciate his generosity, but you are going to need more than that to start any kind of business.
Then he looks at you and says, “Nope, my friend, this is all you get, and you will have to make it do.”
Shocked, you stand there while he smiles and says:
“The first $1100 or so you will spend trying to figure out how to spend the rest of it. Understand this as you take the money.
The last grand or so will be spent looking after what you spent your money on for the previous 40 years.
So, in reality, you have about $2100 or so to spend on your business.
So you better get crackin’…”
He smiles, turns, and is lost in the crowd nearly immediately.
You stand there feeling a little lost, and a bit stupid, clutching a wad of hundreds, twenties, and tens.
Let’s face it, a little over four grand isn’t going to change your life.
But see, it IS your life.
All of your life, represented in dollars.
If you are lucky.
If you live to the ripe old age of 80 or so, you will have spent 4170 weeks on this spinning ball of rock and water.
Four Thousand, One Hundred Seventy-Four Weeks.
The first 1100 weeks or so are spent learning how to walk, talk, do math, find out what you love to do, get into trouble, and, hopefully, get out of trouble.
Then, at 21, you can look forward to spending 2100 or so weeks of your life in the world of work. That’s 40 years.
Does that sound like a lot? Does it sound like enough to you?
Cause listen, ya’ll don’t have much more than that, buckos.
Then, you get to spend another 1000 weeks or so in your older age at a slower pace, hopefully in good health, but slowly diminishing in energy and strength.
And the interesting thing is that we are not promised any weeks at all, we all get the weeks with the same amount of hours.
Elon Musk has the same number of hours in his week as a drunk laying in a ditch. Bill Gates doesn’t have any longer weeks, or days, or hours than anyone else.
Anyone you name, no matter how rich or famous, poor or worse, has the same amount of hours per week, and some of them have more weeks than others.
Maybe it isn’t the total number of weeks, but what we do with what we get that makes a difference.
But we get what we get, and we need to have a good idea of what we want to do for each of those weeks so we can maximize each and every one of them.
4100.
Today is Monday. The beginning of this week.
What are going to do?
Hi, I’m Don Giannatti, a photographer and mentor for up-and-coming photographers. You can find me on my own site, Don Giannatti, and at my Substack site, where I also publish for creative people. All subscribers to my Substack have access to a free long-form workshop on the business of commercial and professional photography.
