Excerpted from 55 and Out, Chapter 2: Time Is the Asset
Time Is the Asset
· 3 min read
I used to track my time purely by how late I was. Missed flights, last-minute arrivals, and a general disregard for schedules. I always had an excuse: I was busy, pulled in too many directions, important things to do. Then a friend, Kelly, told me that every time I was late, it was a declaration: "My time matters more than yours." The truth in that hit me. I had been making that declaration my entire adult life without hearing it.
From that day forward, I worked to make a radical shift. I started showing up early, sometimes an hour or more before meetings. My wife, Michele, calls it a different disease, and maybe it is. I might sit in an airport lounge for hours, eating free nuts like a nervous squirrel. The core lesson, however, remains: time is the non-renewable asset. Most things you lose—money, possessions, even relationships—can, in theory, be rebuilt. Time cannot. The hour you spent today is gone. The year you are living now will not return. Wasting time, or failing to recognize its value, is perhaps the greatest mistake we can make.
Many of us live by a script that tells us to work hard for forty years, then retire at sixty-five to finally enjoy life. This script is outdated and was never designed for our current reality. Otto von Bismarck invented the first government-run retirement system in 1881, setting the retirement age at seventy when life expectancy was around forty-five. The system was designed so most wouldn't live long enough to collect. When the U.S. created Social Security in 1935, the retirement age was sixty-five, while life expectancy was sixty-one. The underlying assumption was that most people wouldn't collect, or would only do so for a few years.
That world, with its physical labor and company pensions, is gone. The script remains, asking us to defer living. But the years you defer today cannot be fully reclaimed tomorrow. Time does not move at a constant speed. A year at forty feels shorter than a year at eight, not because clocks run faster, but because each year becomes a smaller fraction of your total experience. The conventional script asks you to trade your longest years, when time feels most expansive, for the promise of freedom in your shortest years. This is not a wise trade.
There is also a critical difference between lifespan and healthspan. Lifespan is how long you live; healthspan is how long you live in a condition to do what you want. Lifespan has increased, but healthspan often ends earlier. The script promises enjoyment in your golden years, but if your healthspan ends at seventy or seventy-five, you're left with five to ten years of compromised freedom after decades of labor. Planning your life around being an exception to this reality is hope, not a strategy. What's the point of reaching retirement if your body can't enjoy it?
This leads to the concept of "useable years"—the years you have the health, energy, and motivation to do what matters. These are concentrated earlier than most imagine:
"The script asks you to bet everything on being the exception."
- The Prime (25-40): Peak physical capacity, fast recovery, high energy. The script tells you to spend these years entirely on career building. - The Pivot (40-55): Body is still strong, but signs of decline begin. Recovery takes longer. This is the window for re-evaluation. - The Selection (55-70): You can still do much, but the menu narrows. You choose activities more selectively.
The script asks you to start ordering from life's menu only after the best items have been removed. This isn't pessimism; it's biology. To take risks, to start new things, the time to do it is when you have both the capacity for recovery and the psychological appetite for risk. Waiting until sixty-five often means waiting until both have faded. The cost of waiting is not merely physical; it's psychological. Decades spent deferring fulfillment can make deferral a habit. When freedom finally arrives, the capacity to use it might have eroded.
Time is the asset you cannot earn back. Spend it with that understanding, and many other decisions become clearer.