Finding the time to do more of what we love doing is one of the biggest challenges facing working adults today. Between our jobs and personal care and sleep, we are left with precious little time to do what we love doing and to pursue our biggest dreams and aspirations.
A Year Off represents all that extra time we’ve ever wanted to pursue our big life goals and our dreams. We don’t get that time in our day-to-day working lives. We need big chunks of time for our big goals, and a Year Off provides that time for us.
Time is the most valuable of things.
Just think about it for a second. What’s more valuable than time? You can never get time back. Once it’s used up, it’s gone. And we only have a finite amount of time in our lives. New material possessions can always be created and purchased, but time is always running out.
Think about it even deeper. What’s more valuable than the time to do what we love doing? We’d rather spend our time on the things that mean the most to us than spend our time on the things that we could care less about, right?
If you had all the money in the world to cover your needs, what would you do? You’d probably quit your job and start prioritizing your time differently. You’d start spending more time doing the things that mean the most to you.
If you only had a short amount of time left in your life, how would you spend it? Once again, you’d spend the remaining time you have on the things that mean the most to you. You wouldn’t spend your time on things that are unimportant.
We greatly value our time, and when we have more time to do what we love, we are happier.
Think about how annoyed you get when people or things outside of your control waste your time. Pretty annoyed, right?
Dissatisfaction in life occurs when we have to commit our time to things we need to do to survive, when we continuously need to work to support a certain lifestyle, and when we don’t have time to carry out our dreams. But the good news is we can create the free time we want by purchasing non-working time.
Time is something you can buy.
You can buy time for yourself each day by paying someone to carry out your various day-to-day tasks and chores. Think about ways you already spend money to create more free time for yourself.
Going out to eat and having a chef cook your meal. Dropping your clothes off at the dry cleaners. Paying a maid service to clean your apartment. All of these activities would need your own free time to complete, but you pay someone else to complete it for you so you have more free time for yourself.
You purchase time when you retire too. If you spend every dollar that you earn on your day-to-day needs, then you have to continue to work until the day you die. Otherwise, you run out of money for food, water, and shelter. The goal for retirement is to have enough money to cover your needs so you no longer have to work.
You don’t have to wait until retirement to buy this time. It’s possible to purchase it now when you’re younger.
As a young professional, you can shift your focus from buying a big house, fancy car, and material possessions to buying time instead. You can start that today.
You don’t have an infinite amount of time on this planet. Your time is eventually up. You don’t have an unlimited number of years when you’re healthy. Nothing is guaranteed in life. So don’t wait until you’re older, when you’re statistically less likely to be here, to buy that free time to do what you love doing.
You can buy more day-to-day time by paying someone to complete your chores and other daily duties. But you need big chunks of time to pursue your big dreams. That’s the purpose of a Year Off.
A Year Off provides the big chunk of time to do more of what you want to do and to pursue your big dreams.
It provides an entire year to do whatever you want. You don’t have to worry about working and making money. You have the money saved to provide everything you need. There’s no boss to answer to. No daily and weekly schedule. Only free, unadulterated time.
And you have the extra money to pursue your dreams and goals. Whatever those dreams and goals are.
You can always make more money. You can always go back to work. But you can’t get time back once it’s spent.
Future time is not guaranteed. You have no idea when you’ll die. You have no idea if you’ll be in good enough health in the future to do everything you dream of doing. You’re statistically much more likely to have good health when you’re younger.
So start looking into a Year Off now. Start saving the money needed to get out of debt and buy that non-working time now instead of waiting until retirement.
Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover. ~Mark Twain