The #1 Growth Driver for Companies Entering Southeast Asia
If your company is expanding its operations to capitalise on the growing base of consumers in Southeast Asia..
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“The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.“ — Henry David Thoreau
ROI, or Return On Investment, is a word you hear bandied around a lot, especially if you’re in the marketing world like I am.
You go to a conference. You’re measuring the ROI.
You send out a Facebook ad. You check the ROI on the daily.
You spend money revamping your website, and you measure the ROI after 6 months.
Business owners seem to have this tiny acronym in the forefront of their minds:
Return On Investment.
It’s essentially asking the question ‘Did I receive the same value as to what I put in?’
A normal ROI that we use in business is purely based on monetary value, and although we try to quantify it, the results can never be perfectly accurate.
Why? Because returns are not always immediate.
Say you go to a conference, and it costs you $1000. You come back with a few ‘leads’, and feel excited and inspired from all the people you met, and the information you gathered. But no sales materialised.
You might decide that spending that 1k wasn’t a very good thing to do for your business, as it didn’t generate the required ROI that you need.
However, you could have met someone at a conference that you personally inspired to go and write a best-selling book.
You could have met someone that years down the line, that remembers you and invites you to their exclusive, members only mastermind group.
These returns are invaluable.
But how exactly do we measure the more important things in life?
Well, it all comes down to our values.
Other measures could be things like: freedom, fulfilment, meaning, creativity, connection.
This morning I’ve been reading an incredibly inspiring income report from seasoned digital nomad Jonny FD, who not only publishes his monthly earnings online, but tells the story of how he’s committed to giving his mom a steady paycheck’ of $1000 for life.
He is investing in his parents happiness. And the returns offer a far greater yield than money can buy.
You see, so many of us use monetary ROI as not just the focus of our business, but the focus of our LIVES.
We buy a house. We invest. We grow our business. We are solely focused on the next rung of the ladder, without stopping to focus on what other indices of success we’re basing our investment on.
When it comes to our life ROI, we have to recognise that our investment is our time.
Are we trading our time purely for money?
Are we making life decisions based on monetary value alone?
When I go to parties, I meet new people. Of course, when chatting you always find out what the other person does for a living.
My next question always is
‘Do you enjoy it?’
Sometimes it’s a ‘yeah, it’s ok, it pays the bills(!)’
I can tell that actually, they don’t like how they’re spending their time, but they’ve convinced themselves that, like everyone else, they should measure their life ROI in monetary terms.
Others are brutally honest, and tell me straight up that no, they do not like what they do. I admire that.
There’s only ever a handful that have a gleam in their eyes. A beam spreads across their face, and they say ‘I love it.’ Then they proceed to tell me why they love it.
When you put time into something, whether it’s a person, a situation, a job or an experience, it is incredibly, incredibly precious.
What we commit our time to is probably one of the most important decisions we make in our lives.
Our lives are the most precious things we own, so it makes sense to get the most juicy, soul-satisfying ROI from our time as we can.