Every day we make choices about how we live. If you are committed to becoming wealthy, then you have to be willing to change your habits. And that means two things: analyzing your spending habits and analyzing your time habits.
Recommended Reading
Kevin Kruse, “15 Secrets Successful People Know About Time Management“, (2015).
Thus far we have been analyzing your spending habits – income and expenses – to deterimine how much you are spending and whether you are living within your means.
But time is just as important of an issue. Let’s face it, if you are working forty to fifty hours per week, how are you going to find the time to meet your goals? How are you going to get to the type of work that you have been wanting to do? What’s your plan? You cannot just say “Oh well, I just do not have the time.” That will just keep you where you are right now.
So here is the next question. Between the life you currently have and the life you want, what do the two lives have in common? Are there aspects of your current life, that have cross over to your ultimate goal? What are you already doing that qualifies you to do the second kind of work in your desired industry?
Start writing what I call the Some Day is Already Here document. This will be the foundation for all the stuff that comes later — the mission statement, the resume, the bio, the sales pitch, the business plan, etc. Get a move on and start writing the Some Day is Already Here document. Write down all your current skills and analyze where there is cross over to the work that you want to do.
Keep editing as you slowly start to add your accomplishments; ie., the completion of a course, the volunteer work, the internships, the initial gigs, the seminars attended, the ideas you have on the topic, etc.
Just get it out of your head and onto the paper. If you keep it in your head, it will stay in your head. By putting it on paper, you are creating the first evidence in the real world of how you are going to meet your goals and realize your dreams. The full image of you following your dreams will start to emerge; its gaps and its paths will become clearer. This document will show that you have already spent a significant amount of time in your industry of interest, whether you realize it or not.
Next, just like you did with money, you have to do an analysis of where your time goes — finding small amounts of time that you are spending, which substantially eat up the time you need to accomplish your career goals.
Here is a fantastic habit that nails down what is really going on in your life. When you first wake up or right before you go to sleep, your unconscious mind is most open and in a grey clearing. Your conscious mind, the chattering mind that is always telling you no, is not engaged. In these grey moments, go through, hour by hour, your most recent day and remember what you did. At first, remembering is hard, but remembering quickly becomes easier.
In these grey moments, you will realize the you are in a similar pattern every day. You will start to see where you are wasting small blocks of time every day. You will realize that you go down to lunch and burn up your extra time with your friends every day. Or you watch tv or surf the internet more than you thought. Or you have a commute that you allow to be unproductive.
And in those grey moments, switch the script and see yourself doing your intended work instead. Imagine yourself doing the very thing you need to do, in the usually wasted block of time. You will find that you start actually making the change, because you uncovered the wasted time slot, and slipped the new you into that block. If you consistently do this, your dreams will start to come true.
Your Universal task is to eliminate time wasters. Be on the look out for them. Wasted time can be re-directed to getting yourself on the road to a new future. Open your eyes to a new kind of life.
There will be people who do not want you to change; they will want you to continue wasting your time with them. But you do not want to live like that, do you? Figure out a strategy to protect your time. The eternal law is that God gives everyone the exact same 24 hours. What will you do with yours?
In fact, time and money are actually the same thing. Ask yourself, what does it mean to be wealthy? You are wealthy if you have complete control over how you spend your time. If the money from investments (real estate, stocks, bonds, pensions, currencies, commodities, private equity return on investment, intellectual property royalties, etc.), cover your monthly expenses, without your having to work, then you are wealthy.
Notice that the underlying focus of wealth, then, is the defined in terms of time. Hey, hey — what do you know about money now?
Let’s take a look at how to manage the other important overhead in the next article.
Be sure to check out the book under Recommended Reading called “15 Secrets Successful People Know About Time Management”. The basic idea that helped me the most from this book is the since you have limited daily time, you absolutely have to identify the Most Important Task (MIT) for each day and hit that one as hard as you can. This one principle has helped me tremendously. The author has a lot more insights to offer and I keep this one on the comfy couch side table.
Recommended Reading
Kevin Kruse, “15 Secrets Successful People Know About Time Management“, (2015).
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