The Weight of Time: How I Chose to Invest My Last 10,000 Days

Prologue — The Weight of Time

A reflection on how the finite measure of days defines the worth of one’s life.

If you could condense your entire life into 10,000 days — how would you spend them? Some exchange them for mansions, stocks, and glory. Others lose themselves in endless busyness, forgetting what they are truly chasing.

As for me, I want to use my remaining 10,000 days to leave behind something more precious than wealth — wisdom.

The Beginning on Wall Street — The Illusion and Truth of Wealth

Where my journey through the towers of finance began, revealing both brilliance and blindness.

I once worked on Wall Street — a city woven with light and desire, its financial heartbeat echoing between skyscrapers. Each market opening was a collective gamble.

Over fifteen years, I witnessed countless journeys from the ordinary to the brilliant, as well as many falling from peaks into abysses. Those seemingly cold numbers represented glory, status, and even survival.

I led over $14 billion in IPOs and M&A deals. Every flashing value on the screen could change a company’s fate. At the time, I thought I had mastered the world’s secrets — entranced by market rhythms, performance curves, and the illusion of controlling numbers.

Until one day, I realized: we made money, but lost our direction.

Many around me gradually lost themselves. Their smiles became formulaic, conversations reduced to yields and valuation models. One late night in the lit-up Manhattan office, I felt true fatigue for the first time.

I began to question: Is this the life I want?

I grew tired of working only for numbers, realizing that if wealth cannot be shared, it will ultimately lose its meaning.

I decided to leave that efficiency- and competition-shaped world, heading into the unknown in search of wealth’s true meaning.

Dialogues with the World — Cognitive Awakening

The departure from Wall Street became the start of a global conversation on what wealth truly means.

Watching Manhattan’s towers fade into the distance — from entering investment banking to leaving Wall Street — those buildings witnessed my transformation from youth to middle age. Leaving wasn’t just departing a city, but an old world defined by numbers, speed, and greed.

I began conversations with people around the world on Facebook, Twitter, Google, and Microsoft communities: entrepreneurs, teachers, young people in small-town supermarkets. These exchanges — sometimes honest and wise, sometimes prejudiced or hostile — expanded my horizons.

I realized that many people’s aversion to “investment” was rooted in fear and confusion about money, not simply resentment.

Poverty is fundamentally a waste of cognition, not just a lack of money.

Wealth education should be a universal social energy, not a privilege. These dialogues made me understand: wealth anxiety is not just a financial problem, but a psychological structure.

Many spend their lives chasing money, not because they don’t work hard, but because they lack wisdom about money. They make decisions emotionally, avoid risk out of fear, and mask long-term chaos with temporary satisfaction.

They don’t lack opportunities — they lack the ability to see opportunities.

That’s when I truly understood: wealth is not a game of numbers, but a form of understanding the world.

Cognitive upgrading is the true rebirth.

Wealth is just the result — awakening is the starting point.

The Story of Trust — A $200,000 Decision

A single act of trust revealed the deeper logic behind wealth and faith.

During these dialogues, one person left a deep impression: a retired goalkeeper who had undergone a heart transplant and wanted to launch a life-inspired brand.

He had no team, no business plan, but his sincerity moved me. He said, “Jenna, I don’t want sympathy. I want to use my story to tell people that being alive is worth investing in.”

That moment silenced me. On Wall Street, I’d heard countless funding pitches, all about ROI, models, and expected returns. But this was the first time I heard someone wanting to use “the dignity of life” as an investment rationale.

I was moved — not by logic, but by sincerity. So I made a decision that surprised even myself: I invested $200,000 for him upfront.

People asked, “Jenna, are you crazy? How can you make such a decision without data or a plan?” I smiled. Because I knew — that wasn’t an investment, that was trust.

That $200,000 never earned me interest, but it gave me a deeper realization: wealth’s real value emerges when you use it to trust someone — you’re also reaffirming your own beliefs.

I’ve helped nearly 20 people I consider “truly deserving of wealth” — not because they’re smart, but because they’re sincere, reliable, and have perspective.

I’ve always believed: wealth is not a reward for luck, but a return on cognition, perspective, and character.

The Limits of Charity — From Giving to Enlightenment

Real charity begins when giving turns into awakening.

I continued helping others — donating money and resources, supporting students and entrepreneurs. I thought that was the entirety of “goodness.”

Until I saw a statistic: people waste an average of 4–6 hours per day — 25 hours per week, 100 hours per month — which equals wasting half a year of life annually.

That shocked me. The most expensive thing in the world is not money, but time. Jordan Peterson said: “Time is your most expensive currency.”

I realized: poverty is not just lacking money, but wasting cognition.

In many charity projects, people received donations but returned to square one months later. Children were sponsored to attend school but still didn’t know why they were learning. Entrepreneurs received funding but didn’t understand capital’s true cost.

I began to think: If we only give them “fish” without teaching them to read “the direction of the tide,” we’re actually delaying their growth.

I slowly understood: education is the deepest form of charity, because it allows people to redefine what’s possible and become self-rescuing rather than just being rescued.

I no longer simply donated — I designed courses, gave lectures, recorded content, using my 15 years of Wall Street expertise to demystify financial structures, market logic, and risk patterns.

I wanted more people to know: wealth is not a product of luck, but a result of cognition.

Someone once asked: “Jenna, why do you treat education as charity? It seems more like a commercial activity.”

I replied with a smile: “Because education is the only way to ensure people never need to depend on charity.”

That’s when I first heard the term “financial inclusion” — words that would become my next turning point.

Mentors and Inspiration — Awakening to Financial Inclusion

How one encounter reframed finance from privilege to empowerment.

In spring 2025, I attended the Global Financial Sustainability and Inclusion Summit in New York. There, my mentor Holly O’Neill, President of Consumer, Retail & Preferred Banking at Bank of America, spoke with familiar power:

“Finance’s future is not in balance sheets, but in the lives of ordinary people.”

After the conference, we reunited. She looked at me and smiled:

“Jenna, to make your life’s value visible, you must stand at a higher place and speak.”

That sentence struck me like light.

She introduced me to the U.S. Treasury’s Financial Inclusion Strategy Research Group. For the first time, I truly understood what “financial inclusion” meant — it’s not subsidies or slogans, but a cognitive revolution.

I saw how policies drive structural adjustment, how government and business collaborate to provide safe, transparent, affordable financial services to ordinary people. More importantly, I saw those who’d been overlooked — working families, immigrant entrepreneurs, single mothers, retired workers.

They weren’t lacking money, but lacking the opportunity to understand wealth.

Combining my 15 years on Wall Street, I solidified a belief:

True financial inclusion is not charity, but education.

Because when someone understands investment fundamentals, even with just $100, they can make family, business, and society’s cycles more orderly.

The Expansion of Education — From Classroom to Action

When knowledge becomes movement, and learning becomes legacy.

After that 2025 New York summit, I returned to America with clear conviction and burning purpose.

Birth of the Investment Awakening Class

I founded the Investment Awakening Class.

In the classroom, we don’t discuss speculation, only cognition.

We don’t look at credentials, background, or resume — only two metrics: depth of cognition and speed of action.

I firmly believe: Only those who truly learn and understand investment deserve to possess and preserve wealth.

We don’t teach “how to make money” — we teach “how not to be harvested.”

We study risk, cycles, and behavioral psychology; learn to judge trends and identify structural opportunities; discuss capital’s underlying logic and the true meaning of “freedom.”

Extension of Thought: From Individual to Community

Education cannot stop at the classroom. Thought needs space; cognition needs community. So I created the Elite Enlightenment Club — not an investment group, but a community of self-aware souls.

Only three types of people stay:

Those willing to grow

Those willing to embrace the future

Those willing to take responsibility for themselves

Here, we don’t sell dreams.

We teach how to judge risk, bear consequences, and hedge against future uncertainty.

The Meaning of Enlightenment

Some have used proper investment enlightenment to change their family’s destiny.

Some have redefined the essence of “labor → wealth → freedom.”

Some finally understood the world logic behind financial statements.

They stopped asking: “How much can I earn?”

Instead, they ask: “How much can I bear?”

Money is the result; cognition is the starting point.

I often tell them: “We’re not learning finance — we’re learning clarity.”

Facing AI: Education’s Ultimate Mission

Robots may replace jobs, AI may replace skills — but it can never replace human judgment, insight, and independent thought.

That’s my classroom’s original intention: to help more people maintain their sharp self-thinking in an era surrounded by intelligence.

The Divide of the Era — AI and Human Value

At the frontier of intelligence, we rediscover what makes us human.

We live at a “threshold” era. For decades, humans relied on diligence, accumulation, and expertise to earn wealth and status. But now, everything has changed.

AI’s emergence has fundamentally shifted the world’s logic. Many panic — fearing their jobs will be replaced by algorithms, fearing machines will become smarter than humans, fearing effort will become “meaningless.”

But I want to tell them: AI won’t replace you. It replaces mediocre cognition.

Machines can analyze data but cannot feel trust.

They can calculate probability but cannot understand the “humanity” behind risk.

They can generate language but cannot generate “intention.”

AI has algorithms but no beliefs; speed but no soul.

I firmly believe: AI is not a threat — it’s a mirror that reflects human laziness and complacency.

It forces us to ask: What do we have that’s irreplaceable?

In my classroom, I often ask: “

If one day AI can make all decisions faster than you, what value do you have left?”

The room often falls into brief silence. Then someone softly answers: “The ability to think.”

Yes. True value is not in possessing tools, but in mastering judgment.

AI can help you be more efficient but cannot help you be more clear.

It can help you execute faster but cannot teach you why to act.

Information barriers have been broken, but cognitive barriers have actually become higher.

The future belongs to two types:

those led by algorithms as executors, and those who can harness algorithms while maintaining independent thought — the latter are the true “new elite.”

The Last 10,000 Days — My Choices and Mission

As the countdown begins, only clarity and faith remain.

If I have only 10,000 days left, I want to leave wisdom, not just money.

Money amplifies both greed and goodwill.

Fate is shaped not by wealth itself, but by how we use it.

My Mission:

Use wealth for education

Make finance a force for good

Help the overlooked embrace — not fear — money

Investment is not speculation but long-term practice.

Wealth is not a goal but a by-product of clarity.

My legacy is not applause, but awakening in others — making education new capital and thought the new currency.

Epilogue — The Investor of Time

Time — the only currency that never devalues.

Time is the only truly fair currency. We all spend it — some on anxiety or evasion, others on creation or change.

I hope at my last grain of sand, I can say: I made the right investments this life.

Looking back, wealth, honor, and titles fade — leaving only belief.

I spent my early years seeking to possess; now I seek to give.

True security comes from a clear mind, not money.

Success is not the peak, but lighting the path for others.

The Final Line:

“Wealth never rewards greed, only clarity and reliability.”

“Success is not reaching the peak, but lighting others’ way.” “Wealth is not a prize, but a reward for cognition and conduct.” “Time is not consumption, but evidence of how wisely you have invested.”

10,000 days — may I leave not only wealth but an echo of wisdom.