This post was originally published in 2015 · Jacob M Hansen

An ancient Babylonian tale tells the story of an aspiring young man who is presented with a choice between a bag of gold and a clay tablet inscribed with knowledge. Like the young man, many of us, when offered a similar choice, would choose the wealth over the wisdom. Others however, who understand the actual worth of knowledge, would forsake the gold.

That’s because a little bit of knowledge is worth many, many bags of gold. 

Knowledge helps you make the correct choices to get what you want. Once you have the ability to make correct choices, you essentially have a never-expiring ticket to success.  As the saying goes, knowledge is power—but like most good things, it also isn’t free. In fact, it’s incredibly expensive.

A National Opinion Poll

Debates on popular issues are full of statements like, “…72% of Americans support this idea.” Or “1 in 5 citizens have experienced… such and such.” We use these kind of facts all the time, and we’d be handicapped without them, but have you ever considered how much they cost to discover?   

The PEW Research Center is a non-profit organization that supplies this kind of information. They “conduct public opinion polling, demographic research, content analysis and other data-driven social science research.” The results of their research are presented in articles about three times longer than your average blog post.

During the years of 2012 and 2013, PEW Research compiled 644 publications.

During those same years, they spent over $62 million.

Consequently, some easy math tells us that PEW Research spent (a mean average) of $96,273 per publication.  

Do you have enough money to buy that type of information?  Thankfully, you don’t have to! With a few clicks of the mouse you can obtain almost 100k dollars worth of research, online, at your leisure, and without paying a cent.  

A Book Written By A Multi-Deca-Billionare 

Sam Walton was the founder of Wal-Mart. He died with a net worth of $25 billion. While on his deathbed at age 74, he wrote a book describing his life and the principles he used to build the biggest retail empire in the world–something every business owner should read. He did this out of the goodness of his heart, but do you have any idea how much it cost to produce?

According to this New York Times Article, the Walton family owned 39% of Wal-Mart stock at the time of his death. The annual dividends from this stock was about $93.5 million. This amount was held in five different trusts: one for him and his wife, and another for each of their four children (who were all actively involved in the company). This leads us to the conclusion that Sam Walton was personally earning at least $18.7 million a year from his ownership of Wal-Mart.

From this information we can calculate the hourly wage of Mr. Walton during the last year of his life.

(This is only a low-end approximation, because he also received a salary as the Chairman of Wal-Mart, which we do not have numbers for.)

Let’s suppose that Mr. Walton was working 40 hours a week, with your average two weeks vacation time: that’s 2000 hours a year. It should be noted, however, that Mr. Walton was 74 years old and fighting cancer at this point–he probably only worked a fraction of this amount.

Hourly wage is calculated by dividing salary by hours. So if we divide $18.7 million by 2000 hours, we learn that during the last year of his life, Sam Walton was worth at least $9,350 per hour.

We don’t know exactly how much time Mr. Walton spent to complete that book, but even if we say that it only took him three work weeks from start to finish, that 120 hours of his extremely valuable time. 

Or in other words, paying Sam Walton to write his book for you would cost somewhere around $1.12 million.

But you know what? You can get this book for less than five bucks on Amazon. Or better yet, free at the library.  

A Musician’s Life Work 

If there is something more valuable than money, it’s time. You can’t always put a number on the worth of someone else’s time, but you can always put a number on your own.  

Benjamin Zander is a musician, composer, teacher, and public speaker.  To name just a few of his accomplishments, he is the conductor of the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra, his work has been nominated for a Grammy, he has spoken at the World Economic Forum, he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by the New England Conservatory, his book on positive mindset has been translated into 15 languages, and he has been teaching for 4.5 decades.

His life work has revolved around music and the core of leadership–inspiring others.  

On your own, you’d have to live his life to learn his lessons.  But thankfully, there is a better way: in February of 2008 Benjamin Zander spoke at TED, sharing his life-changing passion and ideas with all who would listen.

If we were to assign the average music professor’s salary to his 45 years of teaching, we would come to $3.2 million. Add in the experiences he’s had speaking and conducting orchestras, and the revenue from his book, and you have a much higher number. 

Everything in his TED talk is the result of his life work. Although you don’t get the monetary value of everything he’s done, it nonetheless cost millions of dollars to produce him, his ideas, experiences, passions, and therefore his TED talk.

What do you have to pay for his best ideas? 20 minutes.

Capitalizing on Your Unclaimed Fortune

Knowledge is incredibly expensive—both in money and in time. But thanks to the efforts of past generations, and the wonders of the internet and modern education systems, society has already paid the price.  

If one research article costs $100 thousand, consider the hundreds of thousands available online.  

If one book can cost $1.12 million, consider the thousands available at your local library, and the millions available elsewhere.  

If one TED Talk can cost $3.2 million, consider the thousands of others on YouTube.  

All this and more is yours for the taking. The only requirement: a little bit of time, a little bit of effort. A literal wealth of knowledge exists around you; all you have to do is claim it.  

You don’t have to do a cost benefit analysis to see that there are few things in life more worth your time.