What is the most valuable thing you own?
❓ Your car?
❓ Chanel bag?
❓ Degree (yes, that little slip of paper)?
No.
It’s your time.
No matter how unfair life & the world is, we all have the same 24 hours in a day.
That makes time the thing that we have to guard jealously.
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To be honest, it took me years to learn this lesson.
When I was feeling lost in my career, I thought, “I’m resourceful, I can figure out what my dream job looks like by myself”
And so I -
✅ Read every self-help book there was
✅ Watched every YouTube video on career change
✅ Listened to every podcast episode on figuring out who I was
6 years later, I still got nowhere.
I was still grinding away at my finance job, with not a clue what I wanted to do next.
The longer I stayed, the more lost I felt, and the more my sense of self started to deteriorate.
I started losing friendships around me.
I finally put my foot down and decided to invest in a career coach and things started to turn around for me.
Within a few weeks, I knew:
🔥 What I was interested in (fashion)
🔥 What I valued in my career (passion, creating, building, intellectual growth)
🔥 What I was skilled at (people skills, creative problem solving, thinking outside of the box, operating under uncertainty)
And was able to identify and land my dream of working at fashion startup Style Theory.
And that’s when I learned my biggest lesson -
(Insert star emoji) I can either pay with time or pay with money.
The same thing happened when I first launched my business in 2020, I was determined to do everything myself:
✅ Ideate, draft, edit and schedule social media posts and reels on LinkedIn, Instagram & TikTok
✅ Craft the curriculum for my clients
✅ Respond to every DM and take every call with every potential client
✅ Manually schedule (and re-schedule!) every single call
✅ Figure out pricing
✅ Run the Ctrl + Alt Career Podcast
As you can imagine, I burned out fast. And no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t land a single client for months!
At my wit’s end - I hired:
🔥 A business coach
A very pricey investment but within the first two months, I landed my first client!
That became 3, then 5 and I suddenly saw the light.
So yes, spending money hurts.
But time is also money.
And we often forget there’s a hidden emotional cost associated with time.
Every time I’ve invested in myself, the returns have been exponential and transformative.
My only regret is not starting sooner.
So today I set aside a learning and development budget for myself every year.
So I can propel my career, business and life to the next level.
We work for a reason. So we can have the means to invest in places that can really propel our careers, businesses and lives.
So if you’re ready to stop wasting time and start taking action in your career, DM me “TIME”. I am just an inbox away. 😉
