For some reason, commercial life is filled with pointless and misused expressions.
Seth Godin would say that jargon helps people demonstrate what tribe they are in — that they’re “people like us.”
Mostly they’re just confusing.
But sometimes, their etymology is interesting.
Take this phrase: Out of Pocket.
I’ve heard people using it when they’re going to be unreachable for a while, which is quite apt. They are taking some of the time out of the company’s pocket and putting it back into theirs.
Time is, after all, our most valuable resource.
Time is how we turn our skills into other things, like money. And we can never get more time.
Every day we make a trade.
We trade one day of our time for whatever we can achieve on that day. We each get about 30,000 days to trade — more if we’re lucky.
And that’s all we get. Time, and a body to experience it.
Spend time wisely. Invest it wisely because it pays out cumulatively.
And make sure you’re not”out of pocket” at the end of the day too often, or there will be nothing left to spend on yourself.