The ancients said: There are rulers in life, and there are degrees in life.

The so-called "scale" seems to be a unit of measurement, but in fact it reflects a truth from the perspective of economics, that is: everything has a price.

Cost is also cost, but it doesn't just refer to money.

There will never be a free lunch in this world. If someone is willing to provide you with free services, rest assured that his customer is not you, and you are just his product.

For example, when I was in school, I was puzzled. I wondered why the bar in front of the school always held a "Lady's Night". I only knew that every event day, there would always be a group of wolves and hungry tigers flocking here.

Later, I realized that the girls at Latest Mailing Database that time only liked the fun and didn’t like to drink, and the profit of the bar came from the boys.

In other words: the bar's products are women, and the real customers who pay are men.

Another example is the search engine that we all use, which seems to be free and does not cost money, but has been sold as a product for a long time. Search engines want scale, and advertising is mainly about exposure, which is the transfer of benefits and costs.

So we often say that free is the most expensive.

Because others often need to pay a huge price in exchange, such as time and attention, but now he can get it for free, why not do it?

So, looking back, life is actually a process of constant reckoning, and time is the most precious wealth resource for each of us.

Unfortunately, since the first day we were born, life has entered a countdown: this resource is constantly depleting every minute and every second.

As a result, many people began to pay attention to ROI "return on investment, ROI = (return - cost) / total investment", and strive to create greater benefits within the same unit time.

However, the fate of life is uncertain and unknowable. Therefore, experts tend to care more about cost and pay more attention to the utility brought by each time investment.

In other words, the future is unpredictable, we can't decide the amount of our time, but we can control the quality of our time investment.

Therefore, if we want to make better use of time and achieve stable and continuous growth, we must have a " cost thinking" and improve our cost efficiency from the following three dimensions:

1. Opportunity cost: how to find the right direction?

Freedom is shackles, choice is giving up.

Life is a process of constant choices and trade-offs, and when there are choices, there are costs. In short, giving up something in order to get it is the "opportunity cost".

The above principle may seem simple, but it is easier said than done.

For example, marriage choices and careers in life, most of the time, it’s not that we don’t know how to work hard, but we don’t know how to choose at all. Because every choice you make means an overdraft of another choice.

In other words, the hardest thing in life is not the effort itself, but when you are too free and have no direction.