The way time interacts with money has always been a point of fascination for me. While I’ve often thought about how to go about buying time with money, recently I’ve been thinking a lot more about buying money with time – and without it.

Time is an input into all productive processes that eventually will be exchanged for money. It might be an initial investment or it might be a unit cost, and your final pricing philosophy should be different depending on which.

If you sell something that requires your time as a unit cost, you should charge more. For instance, if you are a plumber, you’re not charging enough. Virtually everyone who sells their time directly would do better if they doubled their prices. When you have a business, there’s always the inclination to lower your prices because of a universal fear of “losing business.” But here’s the thing: if you’re not losing any business, then almost by definition you’re not charging enough. You should lose business.

Why? Let’s say you charge $20/hour as a freelancer doing whatever it is you do, and at that price your calendar is full – you work 50 hours a week consistently. Cool, you make a thousand bucks a week. Now let’s say you raise your prices to $25/hour and as a result, you lose 20% of your business. Those canceling clients scare you, but… you still make a thousand bucks a week. And you work ten fewer hours. So now you can either just enjoy making the same money in less time, or you can spend the extra ten hours hustling for new clients and make even more money.

(And hey, don’t forget – with every passing month you’re getting more experienced and better at what you do, so those prices should be going up anyway.)

If you double your prices and lose half your business as a result… good! Time is your ultimate bottleneck, not “number of clients.” There will always be a range of available customers at a variety of price ranges, but time is a unit cost for you, then there are only so many you can ever serve. Your goal shouldn’t be to maximize the number of clients, it should be to maximize the total value of your book of business, and that means moving up the hierarchy.

Now, if time isn’t a unit cost for you, you should lower your prices!

The easiest example: if you write a book, then you should probably lower the cost of digital copies. Time was an initial investment, but there’s no per-unit cost in time to sell additional e-reader copies. Your goal is to get the book read, and beyond a certain minimum threshold, everything is profit. So you want to get more copies out there. If lowering the price of your book from $10 to $8 doubles the number of units sold, that’s an incredible move. (Of course, if lowering the book from $10 to $8 doesn’t change the number sold, then don’t – but the point is that there’s a “sweet spot” and it’s probably lower than your initial assessment.)

There are, of course, a bajillion considerations when it comes to determining the final price of any product or service. I don’t mean to reduce all of that here to one simple decision. But I do think this guiding philosophy would help most people evaluate all those other factors more effectively, especially the early entrepreneurs and small business owners out there. If you sell your time, charge more. If you don’t, charge less. Start there, and go make more money!

You can use time to plan a day or a week. Maybe you can use time to plan a month, but probably not. You definitely can’t use time to plan a year – or your whole life.

Too many things change, there are too many variables. You can pretty confidently plan out a schedule for tomorrow, but you can’t schedule out the next five years of your life. “Five-Year Plans” are a joke. The problem is that people do them anyway, and then they don’t survive contact with the enemy, and people fall back on nothing at all.

Here’s your tip: stop planning using time. Start planning using conditions.

Don’t say, “I’ll stay in this job for three years, then I’ll transition to this other role where I’ll spend 4 years gaining XYZ skills, and then…” because it just won’t happen.

Instead, say, “I’ll stay in this role until I’ve met A, B, and C criteria. Once those are satisfied, however long that takes, I’ll move into a different role based on the next thing I want to accomplish. Then I’ll stay there until I find this specific kind of opportunity,” etc.

Conditions. Timelines may change, but that’s okay. If you know what you want you can be moving towards it – faster or slower. Think of it like this: if someone tells you which series of busses to take but never actually tells you where you’re going, what do you do if you miss a bus? You have no idea how to adapt. But if you know your destination, it’s easy to say “my first step is to get to downtown Main Street, and once I’m there I take whichever the next bus is that’s headed east.”

“If, then” is greater than “when.”

You: “I think we should swim across the ocean.”

Me: “What?”

You: “Yeah, there’s lots of great stuff over there. We should swim over and get it.”

Me: “Um, I don’t think–“

You: “Do you not want the stuff?”

Me: “The stuff would be great, sure. It’s just–“

You: “I think you don’t want the stuff. Or maybe you just don’t want ME to have the stuff. Is that it? You don’t want me to be happy?”

Me: “What? Of course I want you to be happy. I just don’t think you attempting to swim across the ocean is the way to make that happen.”

You: “So you admit that you don’t want me to swim across the ocean.”

Me: “I didn’t say I don’t want it. I don’t think it will happen.”

You: “So you don’t support it.”

Me: “I think you’re being deliberately obtuse. Something being impossible is different from me not wanting it. I would love gold to spontaneously appear in my house, but that doesn’t mean I expect it.”

You: “Then why not voice your support for it, at least? It might not happen, but you send the right message.”

Me: “Well for one, I don’t necessarily think that loudly wishing for gold to appear in my house ‘sends the right message,’ whatever that means. But in your case, there are more than just empty platitudes at stake. You can’t swim across the ocean, and if you try, you’ll probably drown. I don’t want you to drown, and that’s a pretty big unintended consequence of ‘sending the right message,’ don’t you think?”

If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. If you teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime.

If you sell a man a fish, you feed both of you for a lifetime.

There is a time and place for all three. A man on the brink of starvation will not be helped by teaching him how to fish. Sometimes, you just help your fellow humans, and that’s okay. There are also some people who will always be incapable of fishing, no matter how much you try to teach them. That doesn’t mean they’re incapable of anything, though! They just might be lousy at fishing. But if they’re great at making shoes, and you aren’t – then sell that man a fish!

He gets fish, you get shoes, and both of you thrive.

Here’s a fun experiment, either as a learning exercise for your kids or as a team-builder for adults: have the participants write down the instructions for how to make a Peanut Butter & Jelly Sandwich (or as my kids call them, a “peeb sammy”). Then, perform those instructions exactly as written, interpreting them as literally as you can.

If the instructions say “put peanut butter on the bread,” then put the jar of peanut butter on top of the loaf of bread. After all, the instructions didn’t say to open the jar and use a knife to scoop a little bit out, right? Did the instructions say “open the package that contains the bread and remove two slices, placing them on the table, flat and side-by-side?” Or did they just say “get bread?”

Often your literal, exact performance of the instructions written will be hilarious (to kids) or maybe a little frustrating (to adults). But they’ll illustrate an important point: when we give instructions, we’re usually making a huge number of assumptions!

I often see directions or instructions that contain a half-dozen (or more) assumptions per step. Some of them are cultural assumptions about the shared definitions of terms. Some of them are assumptions about prior expertise or foundational knowledge. Some of them are even assumptions about modes of thinking.

In each case, the assumption will be invisible to you. The instructions will seem crystal-clear from your point of view. You marked the path you took to the solution and turned that path into instructions for others, but that only works for people who started from the same position as you did. Someone approaching the problem from somewhere else might be very confused!

For a more concrete example, write down the directions from your house to the nearest movie theater. Now give those directions to someone else who lives in a different part of town – if they followed those directions, they wouldn’t get to the theater, would they?

Always keep this in mind when you’re teaching others. You can know in advance where you want your audience to end up, but you can’t control where they start. So the further out from your solution you go, the more broadly applicable you have to be. You do have to assume some foundational knowledge! For instance, it would be absurd to write out directions for making a peeb sammy that included instructions on how to identify peanut butter or how to grow your own grapes for the jelly. (Carl Sagan once quipped, “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.” But if you want to tell someone how to make apple pie, you’re allowed to skip a few steps.) You’re allowed to make assumptions – you should just always be aware that you’re doing it, and make sure that you’re not assuming so much that the directions are only useful to your own clones.

Sometimes that means that the best way to go about it is just to clearly define the end goal, and leave the rest up to them. I showed my kids a peeb sammy and how I made it, and then said “do you think you can make one?” Sure enough, they did just fine.

I am, as the existence of this blog should tell you, an examiner. I like to understand why I think the way I do. At its core, that’s what this blog is about. Thinking about thinking.

I have a deep tendency to pull on threads, especially when I can sense that my intuition pulls me in two (or more!) directions. I don’t think we should blindly trust tradition, but I also don’t think we should ignore the wisdom of those that have walked ahead of us. I don’t think we should obey every rule, but I don’t think we should disregard rules by default. And so on.

So, I look for threads to pull. Ways to understand apparent contradictions and find sense in the things that seem simultaneously true and at odds with truth. For the most part, I’m happy with what I discover here.

Sometimes, though, there’s not a deeper truth – and that’s okay, too. If you like cherry pie, there doesn’t have to be a reason. You don’t have to go deep into your subconscious memories of your upbringing to find the moment when you ate cherry pie on your birthday when you got your first bike or something like that. You’re allowed to just like it because it’s good.

My point is that sometimes we over-examine. We pull on threads until they unravel the thing we’re exploring entirely. I have no intention nor expectation that I’ll stop being an analytical sort of person, but I just want to make it clear that in a lot of cases, it’s really and totally fine that just like what we like.

When I was a little kid, I would occasionally catch performances of symphonies on TV. I liked classical music a lot as a kid, and I was always really impressed with the performances of big symphonies. What always threw me off was that, at the end of the performance, the applause and credit were clearly being primarily directed at the conductor. The conductor! Why? That dude didn’t do anything! He just stood there waving a wand around, he didn’t even play anything.

As a kid, I didn’t get it. When I was in my school’s 4th-grade band, one kid, usually the one with the least amount of musical talent (so in this case, very much me), got the unenviable job of thumping on the big bass drum. I had one job, which was to thump on that drum at regular intervals. I had to do this (it was explained to me) so that everyone could keep time together. Okay, so I got that – but I certainly didn’t get credit for it. At the end of a performance, nobody was shouting “Wow, that would have been impossible without the boring-but-reliable bass drum kid back there!”

So in my head, the conductor was the equivalent of the water boy – a supporting character, not the main thing. Only as I grew up did I realize that the conductor wasn’t just important, he was essential. Even if he never played a note.

The more complex the interplay, the more essential a conductor is. When you get eighty people together, all of whom are doing individually complex things and those incredibly complex things have to come together into a beautiful whole without flaw, it would be utterly impossible without someone directing. No matter how talented each individual member is, tiny mistakes are both inevitable and like dominoes. They will cascade into disaster without someone whose skill is exactly in anticipating and correcting those mistakes, coordinating that beautiful effort.

Many adults think the way I thought as a kid – that managers don’t work. And I’m sure some managers don’t. But coordinating things is a beautiful and necessary skill on its own. Don’t forget how vital it truly is.

A fellow is hitchhiking along a lonely stretch of road in Missouri. He’s trudging along the westbound side, keeping his thumb out even though a car hasn’t passed in hours. As the afternoon stretches on, a car pulls up in a cloud of dust. The friendly driver rolls down his window and says, “I’m headed to Los Angeles, friend! Want a ride?”

The hitchhiker looks disappointed. “No thanks, I’m actually headed for San Diego. Guess I’ll keep looking.”

Don’t do this! If you’re in Missouri and trying to get to San Diego, then for all practical purposes someone headed for Los Angeles is doing exactly the same thing you’re doing. 90% of the journey is probably the same. The possibilities are all good ones. Maybe you’ll get out when the road gets close enough for different routes to the final destination to be meaningful. Maybe you’ll fall asleep in the car and ride all the way to Los Angeles by mistake, and you’ll still be closer to San Diego than you were. Or maybe along the way you’ll talk and realize you’d actually rather end up in Los Angeles! And maybe along the way, if nothing else, you’ll make a friend.

I see people make this mistake all the time. They think they can only join forces with people who are doing exactly the same thing as them. And of course, that means they never join forces with anyone because no one is doing exactly the same thing as you, ever. But very few roads go to only a single destination, so you can effectively carpool with many different folks doing many different things.

And the subtler, deeper problem I often see is that when people are so single-minded about a particular goal, it’s often a goal that they have no real way of knowing is the right one. In the analogy above, the hitchhiker has never even been to San Diego before; he just wants to go to a beautiful, sunny California town that’s different than the life he’s known.

So maybe you really want to be a folk singer, all your life. You’ve never sung professionally, but you’ve got a lot of talent. One day, a famous rock band hears you singing in a karaoke place and they ask you to tour with them. Don’t say no just because they’re a rock band and not a folk band! Clearly, singing with a rock band for a while gets you closer to your end goal than refusing. Whether you use the rock band to get famous and then launch your folk career or whether you just decide it’s really fun to sing with a rock band and stick with it, you’re better off.

Don’t ask, “Is this my exact goal?” Ask “Is this closer to my goal than whatever I’m doing now?” And then ride along with whoever is headed that way.

Rockets are cool. All sorts of awesome technology, a bunch of fire and noise, all the promise of what they’re after – what’s not to like?

If you get a bunch of space enthusiasts together and ask them to tell you all their favorite things about rockets, those are the kinds of answers you’ll likely hear. The different kinds of engines. The physics behind calculating the launches. All that stuff. Very few people would probably say that their favorite thing about rockets was the big concrete slab that they take off from.

But the launchpad is vital. The secure foundation, the level surface, the stability to hold everything in place while you get ready. These are critical components of a successful launch.

A launchpad isn’t flashy or fun. It doesn’t even look like it has anything to do with space when you’re first starting to build it. But you need it. Perhaps more importantly, you can build it once and launch a hundred rockets from it if you built it right.

If you only consider a very narrow frame of reference, then at any given time half of a moving wheel looks like it’s moving in the wrong direction. A single dot. painted on the side of the wheel and viewed alone, would appear to be moving against the direction of the vehicle.

In order to not be alarmed and view this as a problem, you need some context. You need to know the direction of the wheel as well as how every part contributes.

Don’t forget that when you’re the hub. You might know all the things that are happening and why, but other people might not. If they’re confused, they can’t help. They might even feel demoralized, like they’re failing. But at this moment, they’re just on the other half of the wheel.