This morning I did something I thought I would never do, I purchased an e-book online. Why is this event significant and why should you care?
This event is significant because I was previously of the opinion that there is so much information out there on the Internet available for free, that it made paying for information unjustifiable. It is funny that when you make a sweeping statement like that it comes across as a incredibly naive, but believe it or not, that is what I thought.
So how did the change come about? The other day I was out with a friend of mine doing a little market research for a project we are considering undertaking. The cheapest, and most convenient park in the city was right near the casino, and on a whim my friend suggested we spend a little while in there for a bit of fun.
I am not a gambling man, I wouldn’t even consider buying a lottery ticket, but I love a little spontaneity, so I thought why not and agreed to go in with him. I pulled $40 out of my account – enough to be more than not enough, but not enough for me to feel overly guilty about if I lost it all. Cutting a long story short, I left the casino without my $40 but my friend left with an extra $200. All was not lost, he paid for parking and brought me lunch so you could say I didn’t lose a cent, but I didn’t look at it like that.
That night I was thinking about the $40 I had spent. Granted, it was not a lot of money, we were not going to ‘miss it’, and I wasn’t ‘guilty’ about losing it, but I was thinking about what else I could have done with that money. This was at least in part because my partner beat me up saying we could have had a cheap meal out with that money.
I got to thinking about things that I hadn’t spent money on in the past. One of the things I had not spent money on is e-books for the reason listed above. My thoughts continued running around in my head and I got onto Robert Kiosaki and how his ‘ Rich Dad’ told him to pay his professionals well. I also got thinking about how I am personally considering outsourcing a few jobs I have previously done myself to save time. The logic being that I could spend that time more productively doing other things.
And then I came back to e-books and my justification for not buying them and had an ‘aha!’ moment. I could spend hours, days, weeks or even months scouring the Internet for freely available information on the projects I am working on, or I could spend a few dollars and be spoon fed the exact information I need and spend my time more effectively elsewhere.
Lets look at it a different way, I could spend hours looking for information, being completely unproductive because I googled away a whole day and even then come out empty handed. Or, I could spend a few dollars, get the information I need within minutes, spend the rest of the day being productive on other things and putting to use the newly found information, finish working early and relax in the evening spending some quality time with my partner.
It seems obvious now.
The ebook I purchased this morning wasn’t what I thought it was, but I still got a single nugget of information gold out of it that will save me hours of time, and has the potential to make me a lot of money. It cost me $17.50 USD, even less than the $40.00 I didn’t think twice about spending at the casino.
Aaah, The benefit of hindsight :)
This post was converted automatically from the old bmindful article archive. Some of the mentioned links or references may no longer exist.
“How easy it is in our life, to miss what’s being offered.” — Paul Haller