So, would you buy and sell people's time if it were available on an open market? People are doing that now on a platform called Human IPO. But, of course, you can also sell your own time. But before we get into that, I want to remind you all that today is Mother's Day.

Now, depending on when you're listening to this podcast, it might be too late. And for that, I'm sorry. 

Now, I want you to think about this. In a survey conducted, the AARP found that 40% of young adults spend less than one day per week with their parents. As you can imagine, an adult grows up over time, and this is going to go up and down. Maybe they have young kids, so maybe for a portion of time, they'll spend a little bit more time. Still, I think overall, you're going to spend a little less time with your parents because as you grow your own family or as you accumulate other friends and responsibilities, you'll naturally have less time to be able to share.

So if you put this into perspective, By the time you graduate college, you'll most likely have spent the vast majority of all the time you will ever spend with your parents. You've already spent it. It's gone. So, whether you're younger now or whether you're an adult or, perhaps, you are a mother, this is an excellent opportunity to remind ourselves to take that extra moment, spend that time value it because. It's finite. There's not an infinite amount of that time.

And that reminds me. I better also carve out some time for the wife today.
 
So it's time for today's tip of the day tip of the week, tip of the podcast, whatever you want to call it. The advice for today is to follow the Boy Scout rule. So what is the Boy Scout rule? The Boy Scout rule is you leave a place better than you found it. Or, more specifically, when you leave a room, you leave it better than you found it. So, I'm saying it's a little bit different from the batching methodology that I talked about in a previous episode. So rather than maybe trying to clean the whole house at once. Who often gets time to do just that?

Now, you may be thinking that it sounds inefficient to stop what I'm doing in a room to try to clean it every single time I'm in a room. But, if you think about it, a lot of the time you spend in your home is just traveling from room to room—moving from here to the kitchen, to the bedroom, to the living room, et cetera, et cetera. So, what you want to do is while you're in the room, do what you have to do. But the moment that you're transitioning from one room to another, take a glance. And in that movement from one room to the other, remove the things in the room that don't belong there or organize the papers a little bit before you get up.

And that doesn't add much time, if at all. And so you end up slipping in a lot of cleaning and maintaining the overall organization and cleanliness of the house without having to have separate time dedicated for that.

To give you some more specific examples, what this reminds me of is my wife constantly, not nagging, gently reminding me that I've left cups all over the house. And so I go end up running around and hunting for these cups every, every day. And what I now do is make sure that, hey, when I get up, if there's a cup here, I take that cup with me. I don't leave it there. So even if I think I'm going to come back, I might not.

And so just doing that little thing is useful and, it just makes the day a lot more seamless.

We have three little kids, and so they are just leaving stuff everywhere. And so it's a huge battle. For us to say, okay, stop playing, coming, clean this room, then go clean that room. And it creates a lot of friction. And so, sometimes I'll pick up for them. And sometimes, when I notice that they're leaving the room, I'll remind them and say, Hey, pick that thing up on your way to the kitchen. Pick that thing up on the way back to the bedroom. And so we're starting to build that habit with them.

Okay. So back to buying and selling people's time. This is interesting. So, visualize this for a moment. You go to the website. Okay. And I'm sure many of you have googled for a ticker symbol for a stock to see what the current price was right. And so you go to this homepage. So it's much like the homepage of these stock market websites where you see all of the different ticker symbols, and you see the current price and whether it's trending upwards and downwards. The only difference is that these ticker symbols now are people's names. And, the price of what's going up and down is the price of an hour of their time.

Before you get your undies in a knot here, I want to note that these people voluntarily do this. So they've chosen to put their time up and their likeness up on this site called Human IPO. So I think it's an extremely innovative concept. I'm not sure how I feel about doing it myself, But I do find it fascinating that people are ticker symbols that you can invest in a person, and there's a lot of good things about that, and there's a lot of concerning things about that as well that I'd like to talk about.

So why in the world would you buy an hour of someone's time? Like what intrinsic value could that possibly have.

The thesis of the site is that you are investing in people today that you believe have a high potential in the future to achieve many more things. So you look at their achievements today, look at their track record, and much like a stock on the public stock market. Then, you try to forecast whether you believe that person will accomplish greater and better things in the future.

Now, a share of stock is a percentage of a public company's equity or ownership, so the equivalent thing here is the person's time. That's what we're saying has value. It's saying, you own a percentage of their life too, in a very indirect way, because obviously life is time. As we say, life is what you choose to do with your time, and if you've sold your time, then someone else is going to decide what you're doing with that time.

Now, they can't make you do anything. So it's mainly to have a conversation with that person to pick their brain, get their advice, or maybe it's just clout to say, Hey, I can call this famous person because they sold their time a long time ago, but either way.

The intrinsic value here is the value of talking to that person. To me, that seems a little on the edge of this is an ethical or moral issue now? I'm not saying it is. I'm saying it's on the edge of maybe we need to consider what that means because we're not valuing an hour of their work. We are valuing an hour of a conversation with them. Or do I go back to schoolyard days? How cool are they? 

Okay. Here's some data to consider. The US Bureau of labor statistics, as of 2020, and I tried to pick a category that I thought would equate the best, so I looked at professional services... the average hourly rate for someone working in professional services is $36 an hour.

Now, looking through the Human IPO site, most rates were much higher than that. You're talking a 100. I saw as high as $900 for someone who was a very wealthy investor.  And so, really interesting to me that there was such a delta these are not normal people. You can almost say that you're already looking at the cream of the crop. It's not intended for someone who is, say, just out of school and thinking that they want to sell their time.

These are people that have had some moderate success in some cases, a lot of success, but we're betting that they'll have even more success in the future, to the extent that hour that we're buying will appreciate. Or we'll want to redeem it. Now redeeming is using it. And so that is one interesting thing about Human IPO versus the public markets is that you can't, you can sell a share, you can buy a share, but it's not destroyed. For a person's time, however, a share of a person's time can be consumed in this scenario. You can redeem it.

In general, you can think of this in a similar way to investing in public markets and the available inventory of companies there. Those publicly traded companies have passed a threshold where they've reached a scale that they've become mature investible companies. Of course, some are still a lot younger and newer than others, but in general, they're of a higher quality and a higher maturity than companies all the companies that are out there.

This means the new companies, the startups, that generate what they call 100 X returns, meaning you invest a thousand dollars, get a hundred thousand dollars back at some point in the future. Those are not available on the publicly traded stock market. They only do so at the very end of that value creation curve. And that's what they call the IPO.
That's where they finally list the shares out for the public quote-unquote. And so Human IPO is very similar. I feel that the types of people listed there that have a page are people who have maybe reached a level of their careers or their personal brand where they're not new anymore.

Why this is important is that the people that you are investing in on Human IPO. They are generally not in the first year of their career. And so it is interesting that you can't just take a, say, random college student and say, hey, he's getting good grades has got a good head on his shoulders.
I want to invest now when maybe his time is worthless, but I know he's going places. And so I don't have that opportunity on Human IPO to do that. So it would be really interesting to open that up a little more, but I think by design, they are looking at people several years into their career path but maybe early enough where there's still some runway left for growth.

So, if you are interested in selling your time, this is actually how you do it:
You'd go to the site.
You create your listing, you have your accomplishments, create your page, and then work with Human IPO to set a pre IPO.
Figure out what your current offering is going to be to the market.

Now that price is the money that you're going to get for your time. You're not going to get any future earnings, as far as I know. So the appreciation as you improve your list of accomplishments, as you get further into your career as your brand grows, you're not going to get credit for any of that. You're only going to get credit for where you are now. So, you set those hours, and you have to figure out how many hours am I currently willing to sell?

I think the max is something like 500 hours. That seems extreme. To commit 500 hours to something. Especially when I feel like my hours will be worth more in the future. And if I were to sell it today, I don't know that anyone would offer me anything for it.

But that's another story.

So. The next thing you do after that is, if your IPO is successful and you can sell some early shares, you go out onto the market, and then people can also start selling your shares back to other people.

I assume, at some point, people are going to want to redeem their hours. And so you have to be prepared for that as well. What you would do is maybe set aside a few hours throughout your week, where you could offer those slots. Essentially, you will get a request for someone who says, hey, I want to use the time that I bought, and then you have to speak with that person.

It is something that you will have to commit to. While you're going to get some income today, you also have to recognize that you're not going to get credit in the future for any growth An investment in yourself and you will also end up having to use those hours as people redeem them.

The closest thing that I can share from my personal experience is, back in the late 2000s, I consulted for many different companies simultaneously. And so it was interesting to be, putting a value on your time. And also sometimes that was not valued the same. So, depending on different companies and my supply, I had some clients who demanded more time than others. And so if I got new clients, I would tend to charge a little bit more because I didn't have as much available. So I wanted to make it worth my while.

That feels a little bit more... not just realistic, but it seems like it's more transparent. Maybe fewer steps. Like you will buy some of my time, I will do this work immediately for that amount of time, and you're compensated for it. And I think the transaction is a bit more clear. It doesn't involve third parties. No, one's taking a cut.

Other than your payment processor.

The takeaway here is if you are a little bit established, have a few accomplishments under your belt, but need some immediate cash for something that you have to do, and you feel like you have the time, then Human IPO might be a good option. Or if maybe you believe that you can pick out the winners and invest in people who will bring more value in the future, that may also be a good use case for you.

Otherwise, you can maybe just get a part-time job. However, something to consider is what does this say about people that we're not valuing just their work; we're valuing a conversation with them.

I'd like to hear what you think about that. If you have any thoughts about buying and selling time or have any questions about things in your life that you'd like some tips on saving time, you can text me and my community number at (407) 214-4303. I will personally respond. And if you'd like to get notifications about new episodes, follow or subscribe on the platform that you were listening on.

And remember, life is how you choose to spend your time. Use it wisely!

https://www.aarp.org/home-family/friends-family/info-12-2012/how-to-parent-adult-children.html

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t19.htm