The 3 Currencies Of Life

In this blog, we're going to talk about what the three currencies of life are and why they are important. At the end of this article you will learn how to identify how much of these you need in order to create a real impact at home.

What Are The Three Currencies of Life?

Oftentimes we think of currency, we think of money. But what we need to do is we need to shift the way that we think of currency, because currency is anything that we can spend to create. That's the whole point of what currency is.

However, time is arguably the most valuable resource you have. But how frequently do we count having a lot of free time as a success factor on the balance sheets that our culture uses to define "success"?

The time-rich in the past were either children or unemployed individuals. Not quite the person we hope to become when we grow up!

That's why money makes a lot of sense. You can spend money to create something, but there are three currencies of life that we all have access to and that we can spend in order to create something.

In this case, we're talking about impact at home. We're talking about creating the Mufasa effect. Being a boss dad, we need to understand these three currencies so that we can truly be effective and impactful in what we're doing.

Time

We only have a certain amount of time, so how we spend it is so important. It's actually maybe the most important currency that we all have. How we spend that time, how we invest that time is critical to what we're doing.

Consider this: we need time to achieve our goals, finish school, do our duties, better ourselves, and overcome all of life’s challenges.

Despite the fact that time still appears to be an absolute concept, it is one of the things that we all wish to understand. We sometimes feel like there isn’t enough time in the day to get everything done that needs to be done, and other times we feel like it’s moving too slowly.

Time, though, is uncertain. You can either live 100 years here on earth or die at the age of 12. Time, essentially, is a scary, but highly valued currency.

Money

It seems that money is what keeps the world going. Without money, we won't be able to build a wealth empire for ourselves, sell goods and services as readily as we can now, and our economies will collapse entirely.

Let's face it: In today's culture, money reigns supreme.

Money is the one item that has the power to radically transform a person's life in an instant and plays an important role in each of these sectors, including: creating the lifestyle we want for our family, enjoy guilt-free splurges, and expanding our business which in return, creates more money.

Energy

Unlike time, energy is a currency that can be created. And this is something that I think we don't always recognize at times. There are energy builders that we have inside of our lives.

How you invest your energy will determine your overall life and work satisfaction. It is important to make the distinction between managing time vs managing energy. Managing time can apply to any task that fits onto your calendar. Managing energy is about understanding what tasks make you feel energized, neutral or depleted — and then choosing where to invest your engagement.

Identifying How Much Time You Need

The first thing that you need to do is to start on a daily and weekly standpoint. Determine what your day and your week looks like in order to create an impact.

Think about your family, business or your job, other things that need to be taken care of to be able to have the balance in all of these.

Identify what your day and week looks like

For me, here's how I've defined this. I've defined this in terms of kind of day right? I start my day at 8:30am. (I don't start any earlier than that and I’m calling it a day at 3:30 in the afternoon)

The key element of this whole thing is knowing your “why”. I start working at 8:30am and I end at 3:30pm. I only set appointments after 11am. (I usually have about a half day of flex time, meaning I don't like to be booked Friday afternoon)

So I've got a little bit of flex time in there and then no weekends and no evenings. Why? I’ve defined some certain walls that will help protect my time so that I can impact my family. To be able to create a real impact, the “Mufasa Effect”, I need to create a balance between my business and my family so that I can always be present on things around and be more powerful with my family.

Daddy's for donuts, different things like that. And I don't work the weekend because that's family time. So understand we're doing it's just easier to think about it in terms of work, but now you've got to do the hard work and identify why this is the case. So for me, my kids go to school about 7:15am, so that gives me the freedom to be able to drop my two kids off and pick them up after school.

Now, I'm not saying that it always happens that way sometimes. My wife does it, sometimes I do it. But I have the freedom to do that. My wife works until about 11 doing some different things, social media and doing some really cool things. There. So if I need to take our baby, we have a brand new baby, then that's why I like to stay.

Not having appointments where I get a little bit of flexibility, a little bit of free time, sometimes he's nap and I can still work during that time, but I've got the freedom now to be more impactful with my family and to help my wife out. I also want the freedom to be able to have lunch with my wife.

Just the other day we went and did Daddy's with Donuts at my son's lunch, and I've done that multiple different times. So the ability to say things like, Yeah, I don't work Friday afternoon, which means if I get an appointment that schedules and I need to move things around, I can move it to Friday afternoon and have that freedom, that flex time and what I'm doing.

Identify what your month looks like

What does your month look like? And this will be a little bit different. For me, I don't like any sort of travel. I don't want to be gone for more than two days. If I'm going and speaking somewhere, if I'm going to be there, I don't want to be gone for more than two days because I got to get back.

So nothing too crazy when it comes to your month. Maybe yours is, looks a little bit different, a little bit of flex time, whatever it may be there but start to identify and it's okay if this is blank, right? It's okay if that's blank. But recognize that there might be some things that will happen inside of there.

Long weeks, you know, for trips and different things like that. Those all kind of packed into that now yearly same thing start to identify what do you want in a year, right? So for me, I like to take trips in March and really we'd like to go to Disney together as a family. And we usually like to go sometime in May or June.

We like to take a couple of times as far as that's concerned. And then in between the week of Christmas and New Year's, like, I hate working that week, nobody likes working that week. So I just want to be able to build that into my schedule and what I'm doing. Why? It's because we like going to Disney in March.

I want to spend time in the summer with my kids. And then, you know, that holiday time is family time, but I'm preemptively designing the time that I want to be impactful on my family. Kind of see how that works here. We're spending the time that we have. We're defining walls. We're building borders that protect what is truly most important, which will always be your why.

Identifying How Much Energy You Need
What are things you do that build your energy and can drain your energy? Look at your life and write down those things in your life that give you energy and drain you.

For instance, I freaking love coaching football. I just freaking love it. Whenever I'm on the football field, I walk away from it more energized, more enthused, more energetic. I literally walk away from the football field and be a better dad for my family because I have more energy.

For some of you, it might look like this: running, working out, playing video games, audio books and taking walks and all other stuff, right? Find activities that you love doing, make you enjoy, and make you feel energetic.

I'm happy to see my kids, especially when I’m energetic. There are things that we do in life that build energy, right? Jot down those things and beside it, create a column and identify the things that drain you.

For me, I am terribly dyslexic. Which means if I have to spend time writing emails, editing, copy, things like that, I feel drained. Another thing that drains me is consistent tech implementation. A lot of attention to detail about each unique code has to be done there. Once again, I'm dyslexic, so I mix those things up a little bit.

So it takes all of my energy to focus and it drains me. Doing emails, editing copy, working on taxes and legal paperwork, all of those things. They drain me and I'm just listing those things off.

It doesn't mean that I don't do them. It doesn't mean that I don't have to. At times, bite the bullet and make sure that those are taken care of and that they are done and done right.

You need to identify what these activities are and here's why. Once again, I'm a better dad when I walk off the football field. I'm a freaking crappy dad if the last thing I do on my workday is editing, copy.

Recognize what activities build you and what activities drain you and plan one energy-building activity into your day. And ideally, it should be before you transition into your role as dad.

For instance, it might be the last thing that you do at work. Write those activities that bring energy to you to be able to build that momentum and have those energy and good vibrations as you come home and spend time with your family.

Time block the things you need to do, start your day doing the things you love, next to it are the things that drain you, but most important is, end your day with things that build energy right before you come home and spend time with your family.

Identifying How Much Money You Need

As you get to this section, you’re going to learn here how to identify how much money you need to be able to create an impact or create the lifestyle you want for your family, both in terms of month, in terms of a year, and then once again, knowing your “why”.

A lot of times that this thing has been out there. I've seen this exercises referring to: 

• How much money do you want in life?

• What's the lifestyle that you want?
  

And I think those are bullcrap because most of the time we pick an arbitrary number and we just go after it.

For the longest time, I legitimately thought I needed $50,000 a month to live the lifestyle that I want, and that's not true at all. So instead what we really need to do is we need to start with our “why”.

We need to be able to understand:

• What is the lifestyle that we're trying to create

• The amount of money that we want in our lives

You're designing the lifestyle that you want to create on a monthly basis and a yearly basis. For example, the total expenses for the lifestyle that I want to create is about $9,000 per month.

Like, perfect, great. Well, that means that I only need to make $9,000 a month. That's all I've got to make to be able to cover this.

That's all I've got to be able to do in order to play this out. And the fun thing about this, is like, if you have a fixed income, maybe your wife works and she makes $1,000 a month, maybe she makes more than that.

Maybe she makes $5,000 a month. You can drop that in a spreadsheet and then you’ll recognize how much in your business, your side hustle, whatever it is you've got to make to be able to cover the rest.

So if you’re bringing home $6,000 a month, you can literally drop in there and be like, “Oh man, if combined we made $11,000, we're great”, right?

But if you're not taking home what you actually plan, in this case, $6,000, then you're not serving your family based on the style and the lifestyle that you wanted to create.

In order to fill in the gap, you might need to negotiate your salary, work on a side-hustle, or invest your money somewhere else to bring in additional cash flow.

The Right Equation to Create A Mufasa Effect

At The Present Entrepreneur, we created the boss dad blueprint where we follow specific steps in order to create a better impact at home, the Mufasa Effect. Now, in order to do those things, there's just a simple equation that we got to follow. 

The equation is this:

Money + Time + Energy that we invest in our families = Impact At Home

Money plus the time plus energy invested in our families creates the percent of impact. And here's why this is important. If you want to create a high impact, begin with the end in mind.

First, determine how much impact you want to have as a dad. The more that we have, the more impact we create, the more of a boss dad that we can potentially be. So determine how much impact you truly want to have.

The impact you want to create is determined by the investment you create in terms of managing your time, your energy, and money. That's why we're talking about the three currencies of life.

We created a guide where you can get for free which includes a sample business model that you could play with where you've got products, recurring services, and all those different things.

You can come in and play with it all you want. But the first thing that you fill in there is your take home and after this point, what you're really trying to do is to figure out what is the simplest, quickest, most efficient way to be able to go make that money?

So, hit us up through email or leave a comment below with your email and type “EXERCISE” and we’ll send the guide to you for free.