First published 4 March 2024 on Your Best Year Starts Here with Nigel Risner.
Listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
We'd only made you wait a week for this one, so waiting felt like the thing to talk about. I started with a line a friend of mine uses. TIME stands for Things I Must Earn. Nigel came at it from the other side. Amazon has taught us we can have anything within an hour (not where I live, it's more like a day), and loads of people now expect everything straight away.
Then Nigel told the Barbados story. A lad of about 28 asked him how much he spends over a weekend, took his phone (most people know Nigel's passwords, apparently) and bought £300 of Bitcoin with it. Weekend money's gone by Monday anyway, was the lad's point. Nigel's been told to wait two years, maybe five, and checks it every couple of weeks for fun. We both said clearly this isn't financial advice.
A friend of my son's did something similar years ago. Instead of buying a pizza he put the money in Bitcoin, and when he got married that pizza paid for the wedding. He bought at the right time, mind. And it isn't only money. Time gets spent or invested too, so what do you expect back from it? Nigel took that into arguments, and I came out with one I like. Accept the apology you'll probably never get.
My other one was that perseverance is a calculation. Patience multiplied by persistence. Once you've played your part, sometimes you just have to wait, and if you keep pushing you wreck the thing you wanted. Somebody once told me that if you get multiple people pregnant, you don't get the baby any quicker. Nigel wanted to know what's happened to me over the last six months.
We finished on Nigel's new iPhone 15. The man in the shop told him most people wait ages to upgrade and then use it exactly like the old one. Nigel's still playing Candy Crush on his. So I left him with this. The number on the iPhone goes up by one roughly every year, and so does your age. What upgrade comes with yours?
What I took from this one
- TIME stands for Things I Must Earn.
- Think about what you expect back from the time you put into something. Sometimes it's just enjoying yourself, and that's fine.
- Accept the apology you'll probably never get and the relationship gets fixed a lot quicker.
- Perseverance is patience multiplied by persistence. Once you've done your part, stop pushing.
- If you've waited for the new thing, learn what it can actually do.
Perseverance is patience multiplied by persistence.
Neil Martin
Every Monday morning, whatever you've spent from Friday night, Saturday, Sunday, has gone. You can't get that money back.
Nigel Risner
