There’s a question I come back to every day.
Am I building an asset — or burning one?
Most people hear “asset” and think about their bank account. I’ve stopped thinking about it that way. Money is just one item on a much longer list.
Time is an asset. Attention is an asset. Your health, your reputation, your relationships, the systems running quietly in the background of your business — all of it qualifies. And every single day, you’re either putting those things to work or you’re cashing them out without much to show for it.
Here’s a small example. Most mornings I sit down with my wife for coffee. If I’m actually present — talking, listening, unhurried — I’m making a deposit. If I’m sitting across from her with my phone face-up and half my mind already at the job site, I’ve spent the same thirty minutes but built nothing. The time looked the same from the outside. The return was completely different.
The same logic applies to my commute. I live in Atlanta, which means I spend real time in the car. For a long time I treated that as dead time — just the tax you pay for living in a sprawling city. Eventually I started treating it as inventory. Audiobooks. Podcasts worth keeping. Phone calls I’d been putting off. The drive didn’t get shorter, but it stopped being a loss.
That shift in thinking eventually led to a bigger decision. For years I drove to a gym every morning — the commute, the workout, the membership fee, all of it stacking up. One day I ran the real numbers, not just the money but the time, and realized I could engineer a better outcome. I bought decent equipment, set it up at home, and got the same workout. But I traded the drive for something I’d been undervaluing: slow mornings, good coffee, unhurried time with my wife before the noise of the day starts. The workout still happens. Now something else is being built alongside it.
Business looks different through this lens too.
A satisfied customer is an asset. So is a five-star review, a well-shot project photo, a documented process your team can actually follow. Every system that lets your company run without you holding it together by hand — that’s an asset compounding quietly in the background. I’ve become almost obsessive about building those systems, not because I love process for its own sake, but because a well-designed business keeps producing value long after the hustle that created it has stopped.
Relationships work exactly the same way. Returning a call builds trust. Checking in on a friend builds trust. Following through on something small you promised — that builds trust. None of it feels like much in the moment. Over years, it becomes the whole thing.
So I keep asking the question.
Will this build something that keeps producing after today — or am I spending something I can never replace?
It’s changed how I use my money. More than that, it’s changed how I use my life.