Bretton Curtis - TOBS Staff
There is a price to be paid for everything, especially the choices you make outside of just buying something. How much are you paying for your choices? What are they costing you?
Personal development legend Jim Rohn has a quote from one of his seminars that has stuck with me over the years, where he asked a man in the crowd,
"How much does your TV cost you?"
The man gives a figure of say $500. A $500 TV in the 90's was quite a nice TV after all. But Jim wasn't concerned at how much the man paid to purchase the television, he was making the point that the time spent mindlessly entertaining himself was costing him dearly in terms of production and time spent doing something meaningful. Jim goes on to tell the man he figured the TV was costing the man around $40,000 per year in lost profit, holding the man back from investing his precious time in personal development and growth.
In the current age of decadence where we carry a brand new iPhone around with 4 different social media apps, a television in every room in the house with every streaming service available, a fast food restaurant on every corner delivered to our house by DoorDash, it makes it quite easy to spend our time doing nothing but eating and entertaining ourselves. While all of the subscription fees and value meals add up to a sum that costs us hundreds of dollars a month, the price we pay in our own personal growth is much greater. Rather than read a book, go for a walk or spend quality time with your family we can just flip on the TV and mindlessly consume and distract ourselves. While at first it seems like fun, we later find that we wind up wanting more and are rarely satisfied. It turns into a vicious cycle of instant gratification leading ultimately to a feeling of being unfulfilled. It's hard to fill our cup when we are constantly pouring in things of little substance.
Think about how good you feel when you finish a hard workout, or are reflecting on something useful you learned in a self improvement book, or learned a new skill. This is how we are truly satisfied in life, reaping the harvest in the fall after working the ground and planting the seed in the spring. The longer the gratification is delayed, often the greater the gratification we recieve. Have you ever made a home cooked meal from scratch? Or built something you could've just bought? There's something to be proud of! It's probably much healthier cooking a meal at home rather than grabbing something from a restaurant, not to mention the money saved by cooking it yourself. The hardest part of the entire equation is taking action, once you do that you'll be motivated to keep going! A body in motion stays in motion. Once you get the initial hit of satisfaction you'll want to more.
The next time you go to flip on the TV, or open your social media app to mindlessly scroll, consider cracking open that book you bought last year and had planned to read, write up a budget and see where you are spending money, interact with your family or just go outside for a walk, you will be glad you did!
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