Friday, March 7, 2008

Designing Your Life Using Mathematics

Once, when I was in school, I had wondered the use of learning all kinds of mathematical equations. Now, I know I could not have designed my life without maths.

And I'm going to share with you the maths for success, so that you may design your own life.

Lesson 1: Identify Your Income

1. Write the amount of money you make a month in your job - i.e. your salary. Mine was RM5,000 when I left my job to do my own business in 2005.

2. Then, you need to know roughly how much you make a year, because projecting your income on a monthly basis will not prepare you for emergencies. To use my RM5,000 as an example,
RM5,000 x 12 months = RM60,000 a year

3. Next, write down the minimal amount you need to work everyday. In general, that would be from 9am to 5pm, which is 8 hours, and minus the 1 hour lunch break... you are now working 7 hours per day. This means, assuming you do not work on Saturdays and Sundays, your total allotment of hours in your job is

7 hours x 20 working days = 140 hours a month

It can also be useful to know how much you are paid per week, per day and per hour, so I have roughly calculated for you in the following table:


So, when I did the calculations, I identified that I earn RM35.71 per hour, because my salary was RM5,000. This definitely helped me prioritize the things that I wanna do, and also manage my time more effectively.

So, you should ask yourself how much money you want to have on a monthly, weekly, daily or even hourly basis in the next 12 months, 2 years, 3 years, etc...

And, how much time you would want to spend to get that dream salary? More than 7 hours a day? More than 140 hours a month?

Think. There are people out there, just like you, who are earning more than RM80,000 a month by putting in about 2 hours a day, that amounts to only 60 hours a month.

Because they work and think smart. Because they decide to design their own life.

You can too.

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