What Is Your Most Valuable Asset?

Some moments only work if you were in the room. You can retell them, but the texture gets lost: the silence, the slight discomfort, the way a group of very smart people suddenly realize they don’t have the answer. This is my attempt to retell one anyway, because the lesson has only gotten sharper with time.

Building 324

It was a bright meeting room in Building 324 on the DTU campus. Lots of glass, clean Scandinavian lines, natural light flooding in. A whiteboard on one wall, a projector on the other. The kind of room that feels designed for clarity.

Every semester, a new cohort of master’s students would start their thesis projects under my PhD advisor, Rasmus Paulsen. I helped with supervision, so I sat in on these kickoff meetings. Ten to twenty students, all sharp, all eager, all convinced they were about to do the most important six months of their academic lives. They were right about that part.

Rasmus had everyone introduce themselves. Then, without much ceremony, he asked the room a question:

“What is your most valuable asset?”

He didn’t offer hints. He just waited.

The silence was always uncomfortable at first. Then the guesses started. “My coding capability.” “My computer.” “Intelligence.” All reasonable answers from a room full of technical people who had spent years being selected for exactly those traits.

Rasmus listened to each one. Nodded politely. Waited some more.

Someone always got there in the end.

Time.

Your most valuable asset is your time. It is yours to give, but you can never get it back. There are very few things you possess with that property. Money can be earned again. Skills can be rebuilt. Knowledge can be relearned. Time just goes.

Why It Worked

Looking back, I think this was a genuinely great leadership moment. Rasmus knew exactly what he was saying and what it meant in that context. These students were about to start a demanding six-month project. Many of their peers at other universities would drift for weeks before finding direction. Procrastination is the default mode of thesis work.

But he didn’t lecture them about deadlines. He gave them something better: a reason to care about structure. He followed it up with a tight weekly delivery schedule, and most students locked into a productive rhythm early. The question wasn’t a trick. It was a gift disguised as a riddle.

He also let the room sit with the discomfort of not knowing. He didn’t rush to the answer. That restraint gave the moment weight. When the answer finally came, it landed differently than if he had just stated it upfront.

You had to be in the room to feel the full effect. But the message travels fine on its own.

The Question Has Gotten Harder

When Rasmus asked that question, the implied follow-up was simple: don’t waste your thesis months. Plan your weeks. Show up to meetings with something to discuss. Respect your own time by using it with intention.

That was good advice then. It is harder advice now.

Today, we have tools that compress the production part of knowledge work into a fraction of the time it used to take. You can generate a first draft, a prototype, a data pipeline, a literature review faster than ever. The bottleneck has shifted. It is no longer about how fast you can produce. It is about whether you can understand, review, and take responsibility for what you deliver. Speed without comprehension is not productivity. It is risk.

This shift makes the time question more urgent, not less. If you can do more per hour, then what you choose to spend your hours on matters enormously. The old excuse of “I spent all week just getting the code to work” is disappearing. What replaces it is a more demanding question: given that the mechanical friction is lower, what are you actually choosing to work on? And is it what you want to be doing?

That is the real lesson I take from that bright meeting room in Building 324. Not just “don’t procrastinate,” though that remains solid advice. The deeper point is this: your time is the one resource that only flows in one direction. You feel like you have plenty of it when you are young and your calendar is mostly your own. Then responsibilities arrive: careers, mortgages, children, obligations that are good and meaningful but undeniably heavy. The window where your time feels abundant closes gradually, and you barely notice until it has.

Decide what you want to spend it on. Then protect that decision.