Time Is the only Currency that matters

I have never been the kind of person who sits still. Even when sitting still was the financially correct thing to do.

There were moments in my career where staying put, doing nothing different, would have made me richer. Stock was vesting. Bonuses were compounding. The machine was working. All I had to do was stay inside of it and collect.

But, I never could.

Not because I am brave, and looking back, I am not sure it was bravery at all. It might have been restlessness. It might have been naivety. Sometimes it was just a gut feeling that the comfort I was sitting in was slowly eating something I could not name. I know what it was now. It was time.

The trade you do not notice

Time is the one thing you spend every day without a receipt. Money, you track. Energy, you feel. But time just moves, and you only notice what it cost you when it is already gone.

In 2012, I was the fifth employee at a company that grew to over a hundred and forty people around the time I left. I grew with it. I went from writing code alone to leading teams, to managing the managers who managed the teams. I received company stocks for the first time in my life. Real stock, with vesting cliffs and all the mechanics. It felt like recognition. It was recognition. I was proud.

But somewhere in that growth, I stopped growing. The layers above me and below me thickened. My days filled with coordination, proxying priorities and estimations, not creation. I was well paid, well positioned, and learning almost nothing new.

The comfort kept going up. My energy kept going down. I was trading my time for safety, and I did not realize how expensive that trade was until I felt it in my body.

So I left. I walked away from the vesting schedule, the title, the safety. And the moment I did, I questioned it. Not once. Constantly. When you leave a position like that, people around you either think you are stupid or they quietly admire it. Neither reaction helps at 2 a.m. when you are lying in bed wondering what you just did.

The weight of not knowing

What nobody tells you about these decisions is that there is no clarity on the other side. There is no map. You leave a comfortable room and step into fog. You cannot see what comes next. You can only feel that staying was worse than not knowing.

Over the years that followed, I made that same bet more than once. I opened a company office for a foreign startup in Portugal, for less pay and no equity but total responsibility. I founded my own company, built something I was proud of, then burned out trying to sell it to a market that did not want it. I left with nothing while the company survived without me. I started an outsourcing business, loved the work, felt the stress of thin margins, and when COVID hit, I had to sell. Each time, I traded something comfortable for something uncertain, and each time, the only thing I brought with me was what I had learned.

None of this was clear while it was happening. It is easy to look back today and connect the dots. When you are living it, the dots are scattered, and everything in front of you is just fog. You move forward not because you can see where you are going, but because standing still feels like the bigger loss.

And I want to be honest about this. There was no grand plan. There was doubt. Real, heavy doubt. There was frustration. There were moments where I questioned every exit, every sacrifice, every decision that left money or equity on the table. The only thing that kept me moving was the inability to sit still, which is not wisdom. It is stubbornness with a better reputation.

When it hit me

After years of building, failing, rebuilding, I landed a remote role with a stealth company in Los Angeles. Best-paying position I ever had. World-class people. Cutting-edge work. My wife and I upgraded our life. Better house. Better stability. We had earned it together.

But the time zone was eight hours apart. I started work at 6 p.m. I stopped at 3 or 4 a.m. And then: My second child was about to be born. That is when it hit me. Not as a theory. Not as a quote I read somewhere. It hit me in the body.

I could not be the father I wanted to be while working those hours. I could not hold my newborn son at night if I was on a meeting with people on the other side of the world. I could not be present for the first months of his life if my entire schedule was inverted.

You do not get a second chance at that. You do not get to replay the months when your child is small enough to fall asleep on your chest. You do not get to redo the mornings when your older kid wants you to walk her to school. Those moments are not waiting for you to finish your sprint or close your next deal. They happen once, and then they are gone.

I left the best-paying job I ever had.

And here is the thing that surprised me: everything I had learned, every uncomfortable exit, every financial loss, every foggy decision, it all converged. I found my role at Powerdot, right here in Portugal, in my time zone, with a mission I believe in. I am building something that contributes to more sustainable mobility, better energy independency, and a world I want my children to inherit.

I did not have to sacrifice. Not this time. But that only happened because of every decision I made before it.

You cannot buy your own time. But you can buy it back.

This is the last thing I have learned, and it changed how I think about money entirely.

You cannot add hours to your own day. That is fixed. No salary, no title, no amount of stock will give you a single extra minute. The only thing you control is where the minutes you already have go.

For most of my career, I sold my time. That is what a job is. You trade hours for money, and someone else decides what those hours are worth. Everyone does it. It is how the world moves.

But there is something else. When you invest, when you put money into someone else's work, you are buying a fraction of their time. Their effort compounds for you while you are doing something else. And what that really means, what took me years to understand, is that you are not just growing money. You are buying back the right to choose where your own time goes. You are slowly moving from selling your time to owning it.

All those years of working inside startups, doing due diligence, watching companies succeed and fail, taught me how to recognize the ones worth betting on. And now, that experience lets me place bets that free up my own time instead of consuming it. Those investments still need to pay off. But the direction is right, and I can feel the balance shifting.

I choose my family. I choose my wife. I choose being healthier, being more present, being happier with the value of small things. Not because I figured out some formula. But because I finally understood what I was trading all along.

What I know now

It is easy to look back and say "it all made sense." It did not make sense while it was happening. What I had was not clarity. It was people.

Every person who crossed my life and gave me some of their time, whether it was a conversation over coffee, a story about their own failures, a warning about a mistake they made, or just the honesty to tell me what they saw when I could not see it myself, those people shaped every decision I described here. When I was standing in the fog, it was their stories that gave me some outline of what might be on the other side. Not a map. Just enough shape to take the next step.

I cannot repay that. I can only try to do the same for someone else. If my story, with all its mess and doubt and incomplete answers, helps someone feel less alone in their own fog, then this was time well spent.

Time is the only thing you actually have. You will feel the moment when it is time to stop trading it and start choosing where it goes. Trust that feeling. It knows before you do.