PRODUCTIVITY? FINANCE?
How To Invest Your Time.
Trust me â this works like a charm.
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Think back to when you last missed a deadline. Howâd that end up? Maybe you got a stern warning or a slap on the wrist. If you really screwed up, you mightâve lost some trust or a great opportunity. It probably hurt for a while, and you probably hated yourself for it.
But, after all that, youâre fine now. Thereâs a good chance that you barely remember that it even happened. Looking at the big picture, that deadline was nothing more than a tiny blip.
Thereâs just one exception.
Whoever you are, you have about 24 hours a day, and about 30,000 days to do everything you want to do. No excuses or retries on this one. Once the timeâs up, youâre (literally) dead:
If thereâs anything you really donât want to procrastinate for, itâs your life
Every once in a while, you look at the mountain of things you want to do, and you canât help but wonder how youâll ever get to the top.
Just take a moment to think about the all the things people did and created with that same amount of time. Some of us sent 1000-ton hunks of metal into space, others conquered half the Earth, and a few of us became wealthier than entire continents. You name it, and thereâs a good chance someoneâs done it.
Every one of those people had something in common. They knew what they wanted out of their life, and chose to spend their time doing certain things over others. Itâs really that simple. Where you get in life isnât a question of how much time you have, but how well you spend it.
In one of my articles from a few weeks ago, I mentioned the hugely underrated idea of investing your time like youâd invest your money. Itâs just another way to think about how you get the best returns on the time you spend doing something.
âConsistently spend your time in the right places for a long enough time, and youâll eventually get the results you want.â
Anyone can do the same. The million-dollar question (literally) is how.
But donât worry â Iâve got you. I spent the past five years of my life to figure out where and how I could spend my time better. Hereâs what I wish I knew.
Donât Sprint In A Marathon.
Iâm going to make a quick guess and say youâve heard this quote being tossed around before:
âNothingâs impossible.â
Or some other variation of the same thing. Iâve got to say that itâs one of the stupidest things Iâve ever heard. And Iâm guessing youâre wondering if âstupidestâ even counts as a real word. Well, I donât care, because thatâs how mad I am right now.
I see why people try using it to cheer themselves or others up, but itâs like they cropped out the best part of a photo. The real quote goes something like this:
âNothingâs impossible with enough time.â
Bringing time into the equation changes everything.
What makes me so upset about the more popular version of the quote is how people actually believe it â even though they know itâs not true. If you want to become a millionaire, of course thatâs possible. If you want to get a six-pack, go for it. If you want to rule the world, itâs going to be tough going â but it sure isnât going to be out of your reach:
But you know whatâs completely insane to me? Thereâs people who actually try getting these miracles to happen in a month. The worst part is how they get disappointed when they fail. No kidding. In reality, if you want to get (and keep) many of these things, itâs a lifelong process. Iâm talking about consistent work and progress till the day you die.
Difficult things take time. Lots and lots of time.
What prevents some of the most talented people in the world from reaching their potential is usually some combination of trying to do everything on their own, and expecting that lifeâll let them take the shortest route to get there.
What you can do about it: If youâre the hyper-ambitious type, give yourself just a little bit longer to finish your goals than youâd first thin. Youâll be doing yourself a bigger favour than you can imagine.
Finding Focus.
About two years ago, I was given the beautiful nickname of butterfly. As much as that confused me back then, my best guess now is because I used to fly around between different thoughts and things like it was my last day on Earth.
I suffered from a complete lack of focus, and I hated it. I kid you not when I say that my âflow stateâ was any time I could focus for more than six minutes on something:
If youâve been through anything similar, you know how just how annoying that can be. You start to wonder if thereâs something wrong with you â especially if you know exactly what you should be concentrating on, but canât. Iâm glad to say things changed for the better, but it wasnât exactly a smooth ride.
Earlier on in this article, I forgot to share an important insight. Itâs that the next largest factor that prevents talented people from reaching their potential is a lack of direction.
Diversifying your money is one thing. Spreading out your willpower, focus, and energy too much eventually makes you collapse.
Good things tend to happen when youâre using your capabilities to push one thing forward in your life. The fewer things you spend your energy pushing, the further youâre able to take them.
The longer you go, the more you realize that youâll have to leave things behind that arenât headed in the same route you are:
Many of the people I talk to get intimidated by all the extreme things they think they need to be focused. From what Iâve done, though, Iâm confident you donât need anything at all. If focus is all weâre taking about, then youâd be surprised at how far you can get â just by taking away whatâs unnecessary.
If you really want to turn your life around, find everything that takes you off the track you want to follow and get rid of as many of them as you can.That way, youâll leave some room for what really matters.
What you can do about it: Next time you do something, think about why youâre doing it, and who youâre doing it for. If youâre not happy with the answer, cut it out and use that time for something better. Donât make your life any harder than it needs to be.
Practice Pottery
Donât click away â itâs an analogy.
One of the many ways you can imagine your time is by seeing it as clay, and thinking of yourself as an artist thatâs trying to make something meaningful out of a nonsensical lump of it.
What this is trying to get at is that time alone is worthless if you donât use it. Just like money or health, itâs a tool you can use to open new doors that you wouldnât be able to without them. Time gives you the power of potential.
I donât care if youâre broke, lazy, and have no idea of purpose. If youâre anywhere near your twenties or thirties, you have so much potential that you can make a masterpiece out of yourself by the time youâre done â even if you havenât even started yet. I mean that more than anything.
Thereâs people in their sixties and seventies that people would kill to switch their lives with. Whereâs their potential? Thatâs right. Itâs gone.
As you begin creating your pot with a tiny piece of clay, thereâs full possibility for you to redirect your clay and keep transforming what you make. After all, you still have so much clay you can use to work your creation into anything you want:
As you keep going, you get a clearer idea of what your potâs going to look like â but at the expense of the freedom you had earlier. All you can really do near the end is add a few details with the leftovers.
Lifeâs your journey of focusing and converting your raw potential into something real. Itâs your life, and itâs your choice what that âsomethingâ is, how much clay you use, or if you even use it.
Of course, you can make a larger pot with more clay, but it makes no difference if you donât know how to handle making an average pot with an average amount of clay. Doing thatâs a big achievement on its own.
Itâs why people like Alexander the Great shook humanity before dying in their thirties, while thereâs some 100-year-olds that are mostly just known for how old they are. No offense to the elderly.
Trust me, you donât want to be known just for how much clay you have. You want to be known for what you turned it into. The point is that you have to start somewhere if you want to shape your potential better. You do that by taking a small amount of your time and working with it:
A good first step is to spend time working on managing your time. It counts as an upfront investment to make the rest of your life a whole lot easier. Iâm not talking about watching a productivity video on YouTube, or reading books to gain knowledge. Those resources are made for everyone in general, but for no one in particular.
The only way you can really learn any of this is by trying. Spending your time wisely is a muscle you can train, and no amount of videos is going to train it for you. The only real way is to fail, grow, and learn to create your own style of doing things.
What you can do about it: Give something you find interesting a shot today by spending some of your time on it. If itâs not for you, switch until thereâs a âzingâ. Try out if a new time management method makes you more productive or makes you want to hide in a hole and cry. Any improvement equals success.
Closing Notes.
Thereâs some things in life we tend to seriously overcomplicate. Iâd argue that life itself is one of those things. With all the meanings weâve tried giving it, the real deal comes down to what you make of yourself with the time you have. Unsurprisingly, weâve complicated that, too.
If you have any sizeable amount of time left, you should be the happiest person alive. Watch where you spend it, and donât let it go to waste. Timeâs happens to be one of those things youâll always want more of in the future.
Thatâs why you shouldnât be using to do things you donât want to do and spending it on people you donât care about. Life really is too short for that.
Other than, the only real piece of advice I can give you is to keep doing and evolving. No matter what you do, youâll end up closer to where you want to be â even if you donât know what it is yet. With that, I wish you the best.
Happy living,
Aaryan