Own Your Time, Make Your Money

"How do you make money talking about time travel?!"

This is one of the most recurrent questions I hear, and the answer often surprises people. One of the first times I heard that more than 10 years ago was from Débora Emm , founder of Inesplorato in Brazil, suggesting I should teach PhD researchers after their years of deep dive in a theme but lacking skills to translate and communicate relevance to their market fields. I was leading a big course on zeitgeist to brand managers and their business ecosystem as an effort in Latin America that started in Brazil.

In my early years studying our relationship with time in society I understood different cultures perceive and prioritize time in different ways, and I didn't choose the way I was relating to time or to money, it was imposed to me. To all of us. Understanding the cultural influences of colonization and what were and are the counter narratives in the past and in the future expanded my worldview and gave me new lenses, new tools, and new allies. Afrocentered and afrodiasporic cultures taught me that the current state of the world is a political project, the good for some and the bad for others. Thanks to my friend Morena Mariah Couto, founder of Instituto Afrofuturo in Brazil, to name this contrast first to me years ago, alongside many others that joined after. The indigenous cultures taught me that questioning our values based on how much assets we have is the same as comparing nature as resource. Thanks to Ailton Krenak, from the Krenak People and a master from indigenous thinking, to name that again and again as an echo from an ancestral future. Life is not useful and is not meant to be. Nature is alive and we are nature. Remembering our past is how we remember who we are meant to be in our future.

This made me go from a strategist researching the zeitgeist, the ideas shaping the spirit of the time, to someone identifying what is the zeitgeber, the core of influence shaping those expressions and ideas. A brazilian bringing German concepts to explain this bridge between colonial and decolonial concepts of time and money can sound weird at first sight, but is a real expression of this story. I was helping to develop a business concept around a heritage innovation project in the same city the German sociologist Georg Hegel wrote about these concepts when I realized the full circle. And I keep bridging these bridges in between north and south, working with leaders and institutions all around the world.

Being a worldbridger is to 1. Listen deeply what wants to emerge. 2. Map setbacks. 3. Say no often and choose wisely. 4. Project alternative timelines. 5. Master how to focus the available energy. 6. Be hopefully optimistic but act accordingly to build that within the current reality. 7. Bridge alliances that inspire you and that you are inspiration as well. 8. Remember who you are and where you come from. 9. Set your intentions in every action. 10. Celebrate the victories but keep refining the next steps. 11. Know when to let go. 12. Share the learnings with others. 13. Appreciate your journey until the end, that prepares you for new beginnings.

What took me longer to admit and even longer to say out loud is that understanding time and understanding money required the same medicine: unlearning. The colonial model of time and the colonial model of money are not cousins. They are twins. Both teach you that value is scarce, that it must be extracted before someone else does, that it expires, that your worth is measured by what you accumulate or produce within a given window. Once I saw this, I couldn't unsee it. And the question shifted from "how do I earn more?" to "what am I actually in exchange with?". People choose to exchange money for products and services they value, preferably from people with origins, identities and cultures they resonate with. Companies are not abstract entities making business decisions, but people that want to build something valuable with partners they trust. And how this dynamic starts is usually a good reference point of how it will progress towards the end.

I studied how different cultures hold economic relationships as living practice. Gift economies, relational reciprocity, the concept of ayni in Andean cosmovisions, where what you give flows forward and returns transformed. I learned from the commons traditions that value is not destroyed when shared, it multiplies. I learned from the Black feminist intellectual tradition that care work, emotional labor, and knowledge transmission have been deliberately devalued to keep certain bodies in certain places. All of them carry political insights but also financial ones. They changed how I price, how I pitch, and who I choose to work with.

At the same time, I had to get literate in the tools of the world I was operating in. The one where invoices exist, where contracts matter, where cash flow determines whether an idea survives or disappears. I built a consultancy. I learned to read a pipeline. I learned to hold the tension between a decolonial ethics of exchange and the very real need to sustain a practice financially, in a world that still runs on dollars and euros. Learning to charge what my time is worth was itself a decolonial act. Because most people who do the work I do come from traditions where knowledge was never meant to be a commodity, and that can make pricing feel like a betrayal. It is not. It is a translation.

What I apply today is a layered literacy: I track cycles as more important than quarters. I look at where energy concentrates before money does, because money follows attention and attention follows meaning. I distinguish between revenue that drains and revenue that renews. I notice when an opportunity is pulling me toward a future I actually want to build, and when it's just paying me to maintain someone else's. None of this replaces spreadsheets. It coexists with them.

Like this I learned to set a frame to own my time first. To walk my own journey. To understand who does make part of it and who doesn't. Prioritizing my relationship with time I was able to also learn what to prioritize in the lenses and tools about my market, business and money without getting lost in the colonial worldview of money. In this planet we live in many worlds. World is a concept that already had the meaning of your country, of your continent, or of the whole cosmos. It is your perceived reality. But "a" perceived reality and not "the" reality itself. We can bridge worlds. And this is what I've been inviting time travelers to do with me. If that resonates with you, here is the link to how we can directly talk.