PRACTICAL EDGE
Would You Trade Places With Warren Buffett?
WHY IT WORKS
About an hour into the conversation I put a trade to Josh. Warren Buffett hands you every dollar he has. Tomorrow you are one of the richest people alive. The only catch is that you take his age and he takes yours.
Josh is 23. He said absolutely not, straight away, the way everyone does.
Which means he already believes something he owns is worth more than all of Buffett's money. That something is time. I stole the question from Sahil Bloom's The 5 Types of Wealth, and I quote it constantly.
Bloom's argument is that money is one of five kinds of wealth. The other four are your time, your relationships, your mind and sense of purpose, and your health.
A billion seconds is just under 32 years. That is the one unit Josh has more of than anybody on the Forbes list.
Money gets the attention because it is the easiest to count. It shows up on a statement every month. It buys things other people can see. The other four do not come with a scoreboard.
The part I keep coming back to is the tradeoff. Go all in on one of the five and it usually comes out of the other four. The extra hours for the bank account come from dinner, the gym, sleep, and the friend you have been meaning to call.
THE DATA SUPPORTS IT
Relationships are not a soft metric. Julianne Holt-Lunstad and colleagues pooled 148 studies covering 308,849 people, followed for an average of 7.5 years, in PLOS Medicine in 2010. People with stronger social relationships had a 50% greater likelihood of survival, an effect the authors put in the same range as smoking.
Money works best when it buys back one of the other four. Ashley Whillans and colleagues surveyed 6,271 people across the US, Canada, Denmark and the Netherlands for a 2017 paper in PNAS. People who spent money to buy themselves time, paying someone to do tasks they disliked, reported greater life satisfaction. In a follow-up experiment, a time-saving purchase beat a material one.
And money does matter. A 2023 adversarial collaboration in PNAS between Matthew Killingsworth, Daniel Kahneman and Barbara Mellers found that for most people, happiness keeps rising with income well past $100,000. The half nobody quotes is the rest of it: for an unhappy minority, happiness rises to roughly $100,000 and then flattens. More money kept working for most people and stopped working for the ones who were already unhappy.
HOW I USE IT
I quote this book all the time, mostly as a reminder to myself.
Money is the easiest of the five to chase. We all want the fancy cars, the big house, the private jets. I do too.
The catch is that the finish line keeps moving. Every time life moves up a level it recalibrates, and you find problems you did not know you had. I stopped believing there is a number that makes everything easy.
Josh is spending time at a rate he cannot see yet. He is 23, he is going to make a lot of money, and he told me exactly what he is trading for it without me having to ask. That last part is the whole difference.
THE SETUP
→Run the trade on yourself. All of Buffett's money for all of Buffett's years. If the answer is no, you have just priced your own time above $100 billion. Spend one hour this week like you meant it.
→Score the five. Money, time, relationships, mind, health. Which one got funded this year, and which one paid for it? You already know both answers.
→Say the trade out loud. Josh can tell you what he is spending and why. Most people cannot, and an unnamed trade is how you end up calling it a regret.
