You Can't Buy Back Your Time. No One Ever Has

Ben Franklin wrote five words in seventeen forty-eight.

And you've been paying for them your whole life.

Welcome to The Real Jason Duncan Podcast. And welcome to episode four hundred.

Four hundred. That still doesn't feel real to me when I say it out loud, and I want to mark it, because every time this show has crossed a hundred, I've stopped and done something different.

At episode one hundred, I went back through the first hundred and played you the best things my guests had said. At two hundred, I brought five of them back and we did a panel. At three hundred, I turned the microphone around and interviewed myself about how this whole thing started.

And for four hundred, I'm going to tell you why I do this. Because you're believing lies right now. Not somebody else. You. You've been believing some of them your whole life, you've never once checked them, and they're costing you more than you know. By the end of this episode, I'm going to show you one of them, and I'm going to show you how to get out of it.

But first, I owe you an explanation, because some of you have been here a long time and you watched this show change.

For three hundred fifty episodes, this podcast was called The Root of All Success. I sat down with successful people and tried to find out what made them successful. Good conversations. I'm proud of them.

But somewhere in there I noticed something that bothered me, and it kept bothering me.

The most successful people I talked to were also the most trapped. Not the least. The most.

They had the revenue, the title, the house, the awards on the wall. And a lot of them, when the microphone was off, would tell me they couldn't get out. Couldn't take a real vacation. Couldn't sell the business. Couldn't stop.

I knew exactly what they were describing, because I'd lived it. In twenty eighteen I had a business doing a million dollars in EBITDA, and my business coach told me the reason I wanted out of it was the same reason nobody would ever want in. It was built on me. It looked like success, and it operated like a prison.

I call that a golden cage. A golden cage is a lie that looks like something you'd want. The gold is what draws you in. The cage is the truth underneath. And you can't see the bars, because the bars are covered in gold.

So at episode three hundred fifty, I changed the show. I quit asking successful people how they got successful, and I started asking them what they believed that turned out to be a lie. And every Wednesday, I started writing about one of those lies myself, with the research behind it, in a newsletter called What's Real?

The name changed because the show changed. The Real Jason Duncan Podcast. The lies you believe and the truths you don't.

And here's what happened. The show grew. We're picking up thousands of new listeners every month or two. Downloads are up. We're in the top two and a half percent of all podcasts in the world. And that didn't happen because I got a better microphone. It happened because when I started talking about golden cages, people recognized their own.

That's what I want you to understand about why this show exists, and why I'd like you to stick around.

Most of what you believe about money, work, success, and even faith, you never checked. Nobody sat you down and lied to you. You picked it up from a parent, or a boss, or a book, or a sentence everybody repeats, and you built a life on it without ever asking if it was true.

And I'm not blaming you for that, because every human being does it. We can't verify everything, so we trust what the people around us trust.

The problem is that some of those beliefs are wrong, and the wrong ones don't feel wrong. They feel like wisdom. They feel like discipline. They feel like success. And that's what makes them dangerous, because you'll defend a lie that feels like success harder than you'd ever defend an obvious one.

Here's what I've watched happen over and over. A man works for twenty years inside a belief he never examined, and then one day he finds out it wasn't true. And the first thing he feels isn't anger. It's relief. Because the moment you see the bars, you also see the door.

That's what you get here every week. One lie, taken apart, and I show you the research that proves it. This isn't motivation. There are plenty of people who'll do that. I'm here to hand you the truth, show you the research, and let you decide what to do with it.

And I want to say something about that last part, because it's the part I care about most.

You have my permission to disagree with me.

I'm serious. I'm going to say things on this show that you were raised to believe the opposite of. Some of them are going to make you mad. If I'm wrong, I want to know it, and I'll tell you when I've been wrong. You're going to hear me do that in about ten minutes, on this very episode.

What I'm asking of you is this. Don't dismiss it because it's uncomfortable, and don't accept it because I said it with confidence. Go check. Read the sources. Argue with me. Reply to the newsletter. I read every response.

Because a truth you checked for yourself is the only kind that will ever set you free. A truth you took on my authority is just another cage with a different owner.

So if you're not subscribed to the newsletter, do it now. It's free, it comes out every Wednesday morning before this episode drops, and it's at therealjasonduncan.com/articles. That's therealjasonduncan.com/articles, and the link is in the show notes. And if you're not subscribed to this podcast, hit the button wherever you're listening, because Monday's interview and Wednesday's edition are the same mission from two directions.

This week's post is called 'The Most Expensive Sentence in American Society.' And it's the perfect example of everything I just said.

In seventeen forty-eight, a forty-two-year-old printer in Philadelphia handed his shop to a partner and walked away from work for good. He had enough money that he'd never have to work again. Then a friend asked him for advice on getting ahead, and Benjamin Franklin sat down and wrote one of the most repeated sentences in American society.

Remember that time is money.

This appeared as the first line of a short letter called Advice to a Young Tradesman. While the rest of the letter he wrote was pretty ordinary, it was that first line that everyone has remembered. What did he mean by that?

Franklin was saying that, in today's money, if you can earn four hundred dollars a day and you take the afternoon off, the fifty dollars you blew on lunch and a movie isn't your real loss. The two hundred dollars you didn't earn is.

His point was that an idle afternoon costs you what you didn't make. It was practical advice for a guy running a shop, and I don't think Franklin meant anything more by it. But, boy, did we sure make more of it than he intended. Stay with me.

By the way, Franklin didn't even come up with the phrase. A London newspaper printed it in seventeen nineteen, when he was thirteen years old. He just made it famous, which is how most big lies get started. Somebody people trust repeats something that was already floating around, and it sticks.

Franklin wrote a sentence about a shopkeeper's wasted afternoon, and America turned it into a way of life.

Whether or not you say time is money out loud, you don't have to. You believe it anyway. How do I know? Well, if you've ever felt guilty on a Saturday for doing nothing, or figured out what a two-hour lunch cost you, or opened your laptop on vacation because sitting still felt like losing money, then you're telling the world that you believe time is money without even knowing it.

I've done all three, and I bet you have too.

But time is NOT money!

And believing this has consequences. Literally. Let's look at the research.

Sanford DeVoe and Jeffrey Pfeffer are researchers at the University of Toronto and Stanford, and they spent years studying what happens to people once they put a dollar figure on their hours. What they found is consistent, and it's pretty ugly.

People who think of their time as money say they feel more rushed. They're less willing to volunteer, and when they do volunteer, they give fewer hours. They enjoy their time off less.

In one experiment, they had people calculate their own hourly wage and then sit and listen to a piece of music. The people who'd just done the math couldn't enjoy it. Something in the back of their mind kept asking what the listening was costing them.

These weren't workaholics. They were regular people who had been handed a lie, and they believed it hook, line, and sinker. Sound like anybody you know?

The modern version of Franklin's sentence is buy back your time. It's the title of a bestselling book by Dan Martell, and his whole method is built on a formula he calls the Buyback Rate. You take your annual income, divide it by two thousand to get your hourly value, and then divide that by four.

So if you make two hundred thousand dollars a year, the formula says your hour is worth a hundred dollars, and you should hand off anything somebody else will do for twenty-five dollars an hour or less.

Now, I'm not saying the advice underneath is bad. If you've been following me for any amount of time, you know that I teach you how to get work off your plate. I've taught that for years, and I still believe it.

But look at the very first thing the formula asks you to do, which is to price your hour. That's the exact behavior DeVoe and Pfeffer measured, and it's the very thing that makes you impatient with your own kids at the dinner table. So the very first step of his method locks you in the same cage he's promising to free you from. Don't you see the problem here?

And I need to clear something up, because I've used the phrase buy back your time in my newsletter a few times over the years. What I was teaching was a rule I still believe. If you're going to spend a resource, spend the one you can get more of to get the one you can't get more of. In other words, spend money to get your hours back from work, and never the other way around.

I now realize that the words buy back were sloppy, and I want to fix that.

You can't buy time, no matter how many books Dan Martell sells. Not a minute of it, not at any price.

What money actually buys is somebody else doing the work. The hours that are freed up as a result of someone else doing that work were already yours to begin with. Money didn't create a single one of them, and it never will. Please do not gloss over this.

I know this may sound like splitting hairs, but it isn't. Once you see the difference between buying time and buying work, you can't unsee it, and everything else I'm about to say depends on it.

I call this the Currency Trap.

Money is a currency. You can earn it, spend it, lose it, and earn it again. It flows, and we always hope it flows in way more than it flows out!

Let me give you a real story to illustrate how money as a currency works. My cousin was a successful contractor in the early two thousands. Like many people, he lost everything in the two thousand eight crash. When the dust settled, all he had left was a pickup truck and his wife. Five years later he was a millionaire again.

Money flows. Money regenerates. Money comes back, even if sometimes very slowly. I've watched it happen to almost everybody I know who kept working after they got knocked down. Heck, it's happened to me a few times.

But hear me clearly. Time does not work like that. You get a hundred sixty-eight hours this week, you'll get a hundred sixty-eight hours next week, and not one of last week's hours is coming back no matter how much you pay. Time is the only resource you can't earn again, borrow against, or buy at any price.

Which, by the way, is why I will never reply to an email, a direct message, or any other message from a stranger that says anything like, "Can I borrow a moment of your time?" The answer is no, because you cannot repay it. But I digress.

Now, you may already be thinking, "Yeah, but Einstein proved time is relative." He did. And it's true, if you're near a black hole or moving at a serious fraction of the speed of light, time starts to bend. Down here where we live on Earth, it's a rounding error. An astronaut who spends six months on the space station comes home a few thousandths of a second younger than you. Big deal. Nobody on this planet has ever gotten a hundred sixty-ninth hour, and nobody's week has ever come up short at a hundred sixty-seven.

Someone else may argue that they've gotten lost in a project and looked up and realized that three hours passed, but it felt like time stopped for them. But it didn't. Regardless of what it feels like, everybody on this planet gets the same hundred sixty-eight hours a week. Period.

The Currency Trap is what happens when you take Ben Franklin's sentence further than he ever took it. He said a wasted hour costs you what you could have earned. That's it. He wasn't trying to equate something as precious as time with something as common as money. But unfortunately, we heard him say time is money and decided time and money were the same kind of thing, that they were equivalent, so you could trade one for the other any time you wanted.

That's the lie, and Franklin didn't tell it. We did. As a result, millions of people trade their non-renewable hours to chase renewable dollars and think that they're doing something smart, trying to squeeze more money out of every hour.

But think about the phrase knowledge is power. Everybody believes that one too, but nobody in their right mind thinks knowledge and power are actually the same thing. You can't deposit a college degree, and you can't spend one. We all understand it's just a comparison.

Time is money has the same grammar structure, but somewhere along the way we quit treating it like a comparison and started treating it like a fact. And we started writing books about it and building lives around it. And giving TED talks about it.

So let's test it like a fact.

If time were money, you could save it. You can't. Every hour you don't use is gone at midnight, whether you used it well or not.

If time were money, you could borrow it. You can't. Nobody has ever gotten next week's hours early.

If time were money, you could earn more of it. You can't. The richest man on earth gets the same hundred sixty-eight hours this week that you do, and the same hundred sixty-eight next week.

You can save money, borrow money, and earn more money, and people do all three every single day. But you can't do any of those things with time. That's how you know they were never the same thing, and that Franklin never really intended any of us to take that phrase literally.

But we did, and that's why books like Buy Back Your Time become bestsellers, because people still believe this lie, even though time is money never meant that to begin with.

Why am I harping on this so much? Because this is a golden cage if I've ever seen one. The gold is efficiency and time management. It looks like productivity, and it feels like getting your money's worth out of every hour of the day.

The bars on the cage are that money can be earned again while time can't. So the harder you follow the rule, the more you lose the very thing you were trying to protect. Ouch.

So what do you do with a resource you can't save, borrow, or earn?

You quit trying to manage it. Time shows up at a fixed rate and leaves at the same rate no matter what you do, so managing it was never possible to begin with.

What you can manage is where your attention goes inside the hours you've got. That's the reason I built the 10-Block method around focus instead of time, and it's the reason I wrote back in August about what multitasking actually does to your brain. Both of those are linked in the show notes.

The bottom line is that you don't control the hours on the clock, and you never did. What you control is your attention and what you focus on during those hours, and that's a big difference.

Let me get biblical for a minute, because Paul wrote something to the church in Ephesus that sounds, at first, like he's agreeing with Ben Franklin.

This is Ephesians chapter five, verses fifteen and sixteen, from the New King James.

See then that you walk circumspectly, not as fools but as wise, redeeming the time, because the days are evil.

Redeeming is a purchase word. The Greek behind it is exagorazō, which literally means to buy something up out of the marketplace, and in Paul's day it's the word you'd use for purchasing a slave's freedom out of the marketplace. So on the surface it sounds like Paul is on Franklin's side and Martell's side, telling you to go buy, or redeem, the time.

But the truth is that he isn't, and you can see it if you look at what the time is being bought out of. Paul isn't buying days back from a schedule. He's pulling them back out of waste. Exactly the way Franklin meant it in seventeen forty-eight.

Paul's picture is a man who can see his days getting lost to foolishness, and who gets them back by walking wisely inside them.

There's no exchange rate in that verse. Nothing gets traded for money. Paul is telling you to pay attention to how you're living, because the days are getting away from you.

That's the truth Franklin's sentence buried. The day is already yours. You can't buy it and you can't sell it, so the only decision left is what you're going to pay attention to while it goes by.

And I'll leave you with this about Franklin. He quit working at forty-two, and he spent the next forty years doing things a man doesn't do if he thinks every hour has a price tag on it. He flew a kite in a thunderstorm, invented a stove and refused to patent it, started a public library, and helped start a country.

Franklin understood that time is money was advice for a workday, not a rule for a life. We're the ones who turned it into something he never meant, and we've been paying for it ever since.

Time isn't money. Money is the one thing you can earn again, and time is the one thing you can't.

I said a minute ago that what money actually buys is somebody else doing the work, and I want to give you a real example of that from my own week, because it's also who's sponsoring this episode.

Every follow-up email I send after a podcast, a sales conversation, or a speaking inquiry used to be me, sitting at a keyboard, typing the same thing over and over. That's hours every week that I was handing over for nothing.

Since twenty eighteen, I've used a tool called Dubb instead. I record one video, and Dubb turns it into a personalized video email, a text, or a landing page with a button on it. It tracks who watched, how long they watched, and what they clicked, and it can run the whole follow-up sequence without me touching it.

Now, I'm not telling you Dubb buys you time. It doesn't. Nothing does. What it does is take work off your plate, so the hours you already own go to something better than typing.

I've known Ruben and Darius, the guys who built it, for years, and they've sponsored this show for a long time. If you want to try it, go to therealjasonduncan.com/dubb and use the promo code T-R-J-D-five-zero at checkout for fifty percent off your first two months. That's therealjasonduncan.com slash D-U-B-B, promo code TRJD50, and the link is in the show notes.

One more thing before I let you go. I'm booking keynotes for twenty twenty-seven. If you know somebody who puts on a conference or runs an industry group, send them to therealjasonduncan.com/speaking. That's therealjasonduncan.com, slash, S-P-E-A-K-I-N-G, and the link is in the show notes.

Four hundred episodes. Thank you for being here for this one.

If you got something out of today, do me a favor and send it to one person who says time is money and means it.

As always, I am your host, The Real Jason Duncan, and Jesus is King.