Life. Construction. Legacy.
If life came with a lease, how much would you have left?
If you’re 25, you might feel like you’ve barely started it.
At 35, there still seems to be plenty of time.
At 50, you might suddenly become more aware of how much of the term you’ve already used.
At 65 or 70, you may look at time completely differently again.
But here’s the strange part.
None of us actually knows the length of the lease.
In property, we understand the importance of the remaining term. A long lease feels different from a short one. As the years reduce, decisions around the property start to change.
What do you spend on it?
What improvements are still worth making?
What return are you expecting?
And how long will you actually be there to enjoy what you’ve built?
I’ve spent most of my working life around buildings, projects and programmes, and the more I think about it, the more I realise we don’t always apply the same thinking to ourselves.
Most of our lives are spent building.
At one stage we’re building a career.
Then perhaps a home.
A family.
A business.
Savings.
A pension.
Some security.
There is nothing wrong with any of it. We need to build.
But eventually another question has to come into it.
At what point do you start living in what you’ve built?
Imagine owning a property and spending the entire lease improving it.
New kitchen.
New bathroom.
Extension.
New roof.
Constantly adding value.
But you never really live there because you’re always preparing it for some point in the future.
It sounds ridiculous when you put it like that.
But I wonder how many of us do something similar with life.
I’ll enjoy myself when the mortgage is paid.
I’ll travel when I’ve saved a bit more.
I’ll slow down when work settles down.
I’ll spend more time with people when things aren’t so busy.
I’ll do that thing I’ve always wanted to do when the time is right.
And the completion date keeps moving.
That’s something construction teaches you very quickly.
A programme can look perfect on paper.
Then real life gets involved.
Something takes longer than expected. Circumstances change. Costs increase. Priorities move. Something you assumed would still be available later suddenly isn’t.
Life doesn’t always follow the programme either.
Which is why I’ve started looking at the idea of financial freedom differently.
It doesn’t necessarily mean becoming wealthy enough to never work again.
For some people it might.
For somebody else, it could mean working three days instead of five.
Taking a few months away.
Starting something of their own.
Travelling while they’re physically able to.
Or simply reaching a position where every decision doesn’t have to start with, “Can I afford to stop working?”
Maybe that’s what financial freedom really buys.
Not things.
Control over some of your time.
Because time is the one asset we’re all spending every day whether we realise it or not.
And strangely, we protect almost everything else more carefully.
We insure our houses.
We maintain our cars.
We monitor our investments.
We check our pensions.
We plan projects years ahead.
Yet time can disappear quietly while we’re busy protecting everything else.
That doesn’t mean stop working, sell everything and disappear somewhere.
That’s too simplistic.
People have mortgages.
Children.
Parents.
Businesses.
Responsibilities.
And tomorrow still needs paying for.
But there has to be some balance between preparing for tomorrow and continuously postponing today.
That’s where the idea of a lease becomes interesting.
If you knew you had 40 years remaining, would you live differently?
What about 20?
Ten?
Five?
The uncomfortable truth is somebody reading this at 30 could have less time remaining than somebody reading it at 70.
We simply don’t know.
So perhaps age isn’t really the important number.
It’s the reminder.
The reminder that the term isn’t unlimited.
And once you understand that, some things start looking different.
The work you accept.
The people you spend time with.
The arguments you continue having.
The experiences you keep postponing.
The things you’re building.
And whether you’re ever going to give yourself permission to enjoy any of it.
That’s also where legacy starts to mean something different.
Legacy isn’t only what is written in a will.
It isn’t just property, money or a business.
It’s what remains in people.
What they learned from you.
What you gave them.
What you built with them.
Whether you were actually there.
And what they remember about how you used the time you had.
We spend years trying to increase the value of what we own.
Maybe every so often we should look at the remaining lease as well.
Because you wouldn’t spend the entire lease improving a property and never actually live in it.
Maybe we shouldn’t do that with life either.
Life. Construction. Legacy.
Marlon Amele MCIOB
