How to Lose Time and Money

如何浪费时间和金钱

July 2010

When we sold our startup in 1998 I suddenly got a lot of money. I now had to think about something I hadn’t had to think about before: how not to lose it. I knew it was possible to go from rich to poor, just as it was possible to go from poor to rich. But while I’d spent a lot of the past several years studying the paths from poor to rich, I knew practically nothing about the paths from rich to poor. Now, in order to avoid them, I had to learn where they were.

当我们在1998年卖掉我们的创业公司时，我突然得到了一大笔钱。我现在不得不去想一些以前从未想过的事情:
如何不失去它。我知道它是可能的，从富有到贫穷，正如从贫穷到富有是可能的。虽然我在过去的几年里花了很多时间研究从穷人到富人的道路，但我对从富人到穷人的道路几乎一无所知。现在，为了避开它们，我必须知道它们在哪里。

So I started to pay attention to how fortunes are lost. If you’d asked me as a kid how rich people became poor, I’d have said by spending all their money. That’s how it happens in books and movies, because that’s the colorful way to do it. But in fact the way most fortunes are lost is not through excessive expenditure, but through bad investments.

所以我开始关注财富是如何流失的。如果你在我小时候问我富人是如何变穷的，我会说因为他们花光了所有的钱。这是书和电影中发生的事情，因为这是一种丰富多彩的方式。但事实上，大部分财富的流失不是由于过度支出，而是由于投资不当。

It’s hard to spend a fortune without noticing. Someone with ordinary tastes would find it hard to blow through more than a few tens of thousands of dollars without thinking “wow, I’m spending a lot of money.” Whereas if you start trading derivatives, you can lose a million dollars (as much as you want, really) in the blink of an eye.

要花一大笔钱而不察觉是很难的。品味普通的人很难在花掉几万美元的时候不想到“哇，我花了很多钱。”然而，如果你开始交易衍生品，你可能会在一眨眼的时间里损失100万美元(真的，想损失多少就损失多少)。

In most people’s minds, spending money on luxuries sets off alarms that making investments doesn’t. Luxuries seem self-indulgent. And unless you got the money by inheriting it or winning a lottery, you’ve already been thoroughly trained that self-indulgence leads to trouble. Investing bypasses those alarms. You’re not spending the money; you’re just moving it from one asset to another. Which is why people trying to sell you expensive things say “it’s an investment.”

在大多数人的心目中，把钱花在奢侈品上会敲响警钟，而投资则不会。买奢侈品看上去是自我放纵。除非你是通过继承遗产或中彩票获得了这笔钱，否则你已经被彻底训练过，自我放纵会带来麻烦。投资可以绕过这些警报。你不是在花钱;你只是把它从一种资产转移到另一种资产。这就是为什么那些试图向你出售昂贵物品的人会说“这是一项投资”。

The solution is to develop new alarms. This can be a tricky business, because while the alarms that prevent you from overspending are so basic that they may even be in our DNA, the ones that prevent you from making bad investments have to be learned, and are sometimes fairly counterintuitive.

解决方案是开发新的报警器。这可能是一件棘手的事情，因为虽然防止你过度消费的警报是如此基本，甚至可能存在于我们的DNA中，但防止你做出错误投资的警报是需要学习的，有时是相当违反直觉的。

A few days ago I realized something surprising: the situation with time is much the same as with money. The most dangerous way to lose time is not to spend it having fun, but to spend it doing fake work. When you spend time having fun, you know you’re being self-indulgent. Alarms start to go off fairly quickly. If I woke up one morning and sat down on the sofa and watched TV all day, I’d feel like something was terribly wrong. Just thinking about it makes me wince. I’d start to feel uncomfortable after sitting on a sofa watching TV for 2 hours, let alone a whole day.

几天前，我发现了一件令人惊讶的事情:时间的情况与金钱的情况非常相似。浪费时间最危险的方式不是把时间花在娱乐上，而是把时间花在做虚假的工作上。当你花时间玩的时候，你知道你是在自我放纵。警报很快就会响起。如果我某天早上醒来，坐在沙发上看了一整天的电视，我就会觉得事情不对劲。光是想想就让我畏缩。坐在沙发上看两个小时电视就会觉得不舒服，更不用说一整天了。

And yet I’ve definitely had days when I might as well have sat in front of a TV all day — days at the end of which, if I asked myself what I got done that day, the answer would have been: basically, nothing. I feel bad after these days too, but nothing like as bad as I’d feel if I spent the whole day on the sofa watching TV. If I spent a whole day watching TV I’d feel like I was descending into perdition. But the same alarms don’t go off on the days when I get nothing done, because I’m doing stuff that seems, superficially, like real work. Dealing with email, for example. You do it sitting at a desk. It’s not fun. So it must be work.

但是我肯定有几天我可能整天都坐在电视前 - 结束时，如果我问自己那天我做了什么，答案就是：基本上，什么都没有。这些日子之后我也感到难过，但是如果我整天在沙发看电视上度过了一整天，我会感觉像我那样糟糕。如果我花了整整一天的时间看电视，我会觉得自己正在降临灭亡。但是，在我什么也没做的日子里，同样的警报不会发出，因为我在做似乎像真实工作一样表面上的事情。例如，处理电子邮件。你坐在桌子上。这不好玩。所以这一定是工作。

With time, as with money, avoiding pleasure is no longer enough to protect you. It probably was enough to protect hunter-gatherers, and perhaps all pre-industrial societies. So nature and nurture combine to make us avoid self-indulgence. But the world has gotten more complicated: the most dangerous traps now are new behaviors that bypass our alarms about self-indulgence by mimicking more virtuous types. And the worst thing is, they’re not even fun.

在时间上，就像在金钱上一样，避免享乐已不足以保护你。这或许足以保护狩猎采集者，或许也足以保护所有前工业化社会。因此，先天和后天的共同作用使我们避免自我放纵。但世界变得更加复杂:现在最危险的陷阱是通过模仿更高尚的类型来绕过我们对自我放纵的警报的新行为。最糟糕的是，它们甚至一点都不有趣。

Thanks to Sam Altman, Trevor Blackwell, Patrick Collison, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this.

翻译自 http://paulgraham.com/selfindulgence.html