Let’s say you have a budget of $300 for the month. That has to cover all your needs – your food, gas, etc. You’re budgeting very tightly; there are no dollars to spare. Then you discover a local vendor is selling five-dollar bills for $4 each. Given your tight budget, how many should you buy?
The answer is all of them! Obviously! Buy 75 immediately, and then use all that money to buy even more, and repeat until the vendor either stops selling them to you or raises the price above five dollars.
It’s insane that I would even have to say that, but there are plenty of people who don’t seem to grasp the concept. Some expenditures of money (or time, or juice of any kind) give you more back than you spent. There are almost always diminishing marginal returns, but until you hit that point, you should absolutely buy those things.
If you’re a fisherman and you catch fish by hand to sell them, then buying a net is obviously a smart call. Buying ten almost certainly isn’t, because you probably can’t use ten. That’s the diminishing marginal return. But if you don’t buy even one because you “can’t afford it,” then you’re a really terrible business planner.
It’s like saying you don’t have time to assemble your bicycle, because you have to start walking across the country and it’s going to take you weeks if not months. The amount of time you spend assembling the bike will clearly pay itself back many times over!
Don’t be one of those people. If there’s a five-dollar bill for sale for four dollars, buy as many as you can.
The Opportunity Machine 