Most of us are W-2 employees at our day jobs. But in our financial lives? We are the CEOs of You, Inc.
The problem is, most of us are still thinking like “Earners” instead of “Allocators.”
The “Earner” Trap
As Earners, we are trained to measure success by how much money we save or keep.
We spend two entire weekends fighting with TurboTax just to save a few hundred dollars on a CPA fee. We spend Saturday morning fixing a leaky faucet to save $150 on a plumber.
We think we are “winning” because the bank account balance is slightly higher.
But a CEO knows that is actually a losing trade.
The CEO Mindset (Resource Allocation)
A CEO’s only job is to allocate resources—money, people, and energy—to the highest-impact areas.
If a CEO saw their star engineer fixing the office printer for three hours to “save money” on IT support, they would be horrified. They know that engineer’s time is worth 10x more doing engineering.
So why do we do it to ourselves?
When we spend 15 hours doing our own taxes to save $500, we are effectively valuing our own time at $33/hour.
Is that really what our time is worth? Or is our time worth more than that?
The ROI of “Buying Back” Our Time
If we outsourced the low-value tasks (taxes, cleaning, lawn care), what could we do with those 15 hours?
Expand our skillset: We could learn AI, take a negotiation course, or get a certification that bumps our salary by $10k.
Build the Side Hustle: We could work on that business idea that might eventually replace our W-2 entirely.
Active Recovery: We could actually rest so we can crush it on Monday, instead of starting the week exhausted from “chores.”
That is how we generate Alpha in our own lives.
“But I don’t know what else to do…”
This is the most common hesitation we feel. “I don’t have a side hustle, so I might as well just do the taxes myself.”
But that’s exactly the point.
If we don’t know what we would do with our free time, then our new “job” is to spend that time figuring it out.
We are on the Fast Track to Financial Zen. We are going to hit a point where we have tons of time and enough money to cover our needs. If we wait until we quit working to figure out who we are outside of work, we are going to be lost.
We can use the time we buy back now to experiment. To try hobbies. To read. To sit in silence. To find the thing that lights us up.
The Takeaway
Let’s stop trying to be the janitor, the accountant, and the landscaper of our lives.
Let’s be the CEO.
Let’s allocate our resources to the things that move the needle. Let the other stuff sit on the sidelines—or pay someone else to do it.