Don’t we all wish we had more time? Time to spend with loved ones. Time to travel. Time to attend that next badass Team Rubicon training event or deployment. Time for self-improvement. Time to enjoy the things we work so hard for. Time to chat with your sick grandparent or visit an old friend.
Time to aid the poor. Time to challenge yourself. Time to meditate or participate in volunteer work. Time to listen to a friend in need or have dinner with your favorite people. Time to be adventurous, go skydiving, time to pray and to play, time to listen to that inner soul, cook creative meals. Time to do everything or nothing at all.
I know I’ve spent a lot of time doing the wrong things, making plenty of my own mistakes. But even so, I’ve learned something from all of it. That, in itself means it wasn’t so wrong after all. I also spent a lot of time thinking of what little time I had and how I wished I had more. Not so good if all it does is stress us out, though.
However, if it compels you to take charge and make a plan for how to reach all those wonderful dreams and goals, then it’s a good thing. I’m getting there, falling and getting up again. “Losing” time along the way. Humor me here for a minute as I fumble through this… Imagine we all had a bank account in which at 12:00:01 AM $86,400 was deposited into that account.
Thats sounds pretty exciting right? The question is how are you going to spend all that money? What would you do? Would you think carefully about how you’d use it every day? Are you going to invest it in your future, pay off bills, take your family on a much needed vacation, feed the hungry, clothe the naked, give it to your favorite charity (Team Rubicon!), go to work like you do every other day, go to class?
Think about all the great things you can do with this money. The kicker is you can’t use any of it in advance and you can’t pile it up and as the clock strikes midnight the entire bank account balance is zero. As quickly as you see the balance is zero, the next second you realize the balance is again $86,400. Like ground hog day this happens every day. Now this is the kind of ground hog day I could deal with!
The encouraging thing about this is we all have this account available to us—except it’s not in a monetary currency, not in cash value its even better then that, it’s in time. We all have 86,400 seconds to spend every day, and at the end of the day, those seconds have been spent.
Does the thought stress you out? Can you see the seconds ticking away? Well, like it or not the seconds will tick away. You cannot hold on to them, but you can use them wisely. And by “wisely,” I am not talking about producing stuff. Well, at least not all the time.
But perhaps you can change how you look at your life when you see it in seconds. Does it make you think of living differently?
We can’t live in the future; we can’t live in the past. We live in the present -using the seconds available to us right now.
Yes, living now involves some sort of planning ahead, but the secret is to invest your time smartly so you get the best possible return in terms of health, happiness, and success.
How you do this is up to you. A few suggestions:
- Plan and organize to create what you want and need.
- If you want to lay in bed all day catching up on R&R, make sure it is what you really want and not just something that happened.
- Evaluate yourself, whether that be physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually, or intellectually.
- Spend time with people who matter to you and who build you up.
- When you have meetings at work that seem pointless, see if you can make them more effective and meaningful.
- If you are in a dead-end job that makes you miserable, do something about it now. You deserve to be happy!
- In the meantime, focus on how you can positively effect colleagues, clients, and the people you meet.
- Find magic on your way to work or during your lunch break.
- Stop dwelling on the past. That is really a waste of time. Learn don’t dwell.
- Become friends with the things that scare you. Invite the fearful moments and see how the scary stuff disappears, or you realize they weren’t that scary in the first place.
- Stop stressing or aiming for perfection all the time.
Think about those seconds every morning when you wake up and ask yourself: Self, how will I use my money (time) today? Keep in mind time will pass, and you should use your account wisely and according to what’s important to you.
I’d like to leave you with a few thoughts as you begin this journey with a new perspective:
- You are the secret sauce you are looking for.
- Each day, complete one task that makes your company better today and your life easier tomorrow.
- No one cares more than you. No one cares more about your opinion, your ideas, your thoughts, your family, your time, your money or your business than you.
- Be passionate, have fun, and most importantly – be you!
