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You have plenty of time

Whenever you tell yourself that you don't have enough time to fulfill your dreams, you're lying to yourself.

I'm not saying that achieving whatever you desire to achieve doesn't take lots of time, effort, hard work, and sacrifice. I'm not saying it does, but I'm not saying it doesn't, either.

But have you ever found yourself working on something that ended up a waste of time, because you abandoned the project half-way through?

I bet you have.

So would you agree with me that if you were able to make better decisions about how to use the time you have available, in whatever quantity it is available to you, you would have more time to do the work that actually leads to fulfilling your dreams?

Remember the 80/20 rule? That 20% of the effort leads to 80% of the outcome?

If you were able to correctly identify and focus only on the 20%, then surely you'd have all the time you need to achieve your goals.

It's an easy trap to fall into, believing that you don't have enough time. It's a convenient excuse to not follow through on your dreams.

It's also a convenient way to stick with your old habits and patterns and not break new ground.

I used to believe that I was in such a hurry to get somewhere.

Now that I'm 36 I'm starting to realize that strategy didn't serve me so well. Always being in a hurry means you're never really where you are. Always on your way someplace else. But life happens now. It doesn't happen in the future. Being in a hurry is bullshit.

Right now, I'm cooking breakfast for myself. I'm taking the time to do it properly. Normally I'd be stressed over all the work ahead of me, all the code and text that needs to be written, and hurry through the breakfast part, perhaps cutting myself with the knife in the process.

But I realize now that there are things that, deep down, I know I need to do, and that I'm unconsciously terrified of doing, and those are the 20% things that get the 80% results. Or even the 8000% results. We're talking several orders of magnitude here.

Being in a hurry is an all to easy, all to common, all too acceptable, unconscious strategy to avoid that inner voice and that deep-seated fear.

1 comment

Mark Aufflick
 

I recently re-read an old Change This manifesto, and it contained the following gem: We overestimate what we can achieve in a day, but underestimate what we can achieve in a year.
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