Transcription
Imagine yourself at 80 years old looking back at this moment right now. Would you be proud of how you spent today? Would you even remember it? Would the thing you're about to do with the rest of your day, the scroll, the show, the errand, the work, would you be proud of that?
I'm literally begging you to manage your time because one day you are going to be out of it. And the time that you wasted, you cannot get back. This is one of the top regrets of dying people. It is wasting your life. It is not going out and doing the things because you're too busy doing stuff that doesn't matter. So, you never write the book. You never get out of that bad relationship. You never start the business. You never travel. You never do any of those things because you don't value and manage your time. People who do great things don't wait till the time is right. They make the time.
All right. Here's the thing. The math does not lie. Here's a number. 86,400. That is how many seconds are in every single day. Not hours, seconds, not minutes, seconds. I think it's incredibly important to stop thinking about days as in hours. And start measuring them in minutes or seconds. Because in those minutes, and in those seconds, that is when life actually happens. The future never comes. Life is always now. It's in this present moment. And yet, most of us do everything we can to try to distract ourselves or escape those seconds and those minutes.
Most people feel like they don't have enough time, but in reality, they have a lot of time that they just haven't accounted for. You have these little pockets of 30 seconds here, 5 minutes there, waiting in line for your coffee, you have to burn an hour after work before something happens. There are these pockets of time spread throughout our day that we're literally just wasting parts of our lives on.
In fact, there's this book called Someday Is Today. This guy wrote a bunch of different books. He's a teacher. He has his own business. All this type of stuff. And you look at people like that and you're like, "How are you so productive?" Well, one of the books that he wrote, he actually wrote over the course of two years while he was in meetings because there's a lot of wasted times in meetings. And so, he would take the 5 minutes here, 10 minutes there, write down little chapters, little sections of this book, and created a whole book while he was in meetings. Those little pockets of time really add up.
In fact, I read this book in those little pockets. I had an audiobook in and while I'm driving to the gym, while I'm at the gym, when I'm just walking around my house cleaning up at night instead of just listening to music, I learn things. I educated myself and by taking those little pockets, I've read over a hundred personal finance and self-improvement books over the course of the last 10 years just from taking that wasted time and using it to better my life. It would be much easier to take that exact same time and listen to music, scroll TikTok, scroll Instagram.
I feel like the question is not whether you have enough time to do the things you want to do, but whether you are willing to reclaim that time to take control of that time and use it to better your life. And I think it's important to do this in a couple of different ways.
First of all, there's this idea of the eagle and the mouse. The mouse is a lot of us, especially if you're a creator or or you're making something. The mouse is on the ground. It is absorbed in every little detail, everything it sees directly in front of it, but it has a very small circle that it can see. It is detail-oriented. It is trying to be perfect. But then you have the eagle. The eagle is high up above the ground. It can't even see the grass. It can't see the details, but it can see the big picture. Maybe it sees that that grass doesn't matter because when you zoom out and see the big picture, you realize how some of those little things just don't improve your life at all.
The day-to-day things that a lot of us deal with, we stress over, we're obsessed about, we get depressed about, we focus on, literally, we will not remember the next day. Definitely 3 days from now, definitely when you're 80, you're not going to remember this little argument, the person cutting you off. You're not going to remember a lot of the stuff that most people spend most of their time obsessing about, getting stressed about. It just doesn't matter.
There's a quote from this book that says, "Life is not lost by dying. Life is lost minute by minute, day by dragging day in all the thousand small uncaring ways." But don't get me wrong, sometimes we need details. Like it's important occasionally, but most of the time I've been shifting my perspective to I don't want to regret the days. I don't want to regret obsessing about something stupid or about something that happened that is outside of my control or about politics. I want to look back and be like, "Yes, I built that thing. I wrote that book. I created that business. I talked to that girl. I married that girl. I had multiple kids. We took the vacations. We did all of the things. I chased the life of freedom, the life of my dreams. I chased that. I gave it my all. And I did the things."
And the only way to get to all of those is taking back those minutes from from being wasted, from consuming, and putting them into creation, putting them into being present in this moment, which is the only moment we have.
I think it's also important to remember that there are certain things that do not deserve our time. And if you can cut these out, your life will change. And this is why I love breaking the rules. To be honest, if you follow the rules, you'll sit in that 2-hour meeting and waste your time. You'll be content with a job that you hate for 40 years so that you can enjoy seven years of retirement. Literally the stupidest trade in history is normalized. That is average. And so if you're working the best years of your life for the next 40 years to make somebody else rich while you enjoy 2 weeks of vacation, you miss seeing your kids all day. You don't get to go outside when it's bright out. Like literally just insanity. And then you get to the point where you're 65. You can finally retire. You have 7 years till the average person dies that you can enjoy your retirement when you're the least healthy you'll ever be. It's like literally insane. And that is normalized.
And the reason that's normalized is cuz that is the absolute easiest thing it is to go to work to waste hours at night. The average person watches about 5 hours of television. They spend hours a day scrolling on social media. They are consuming like crazy and never building an escape hatch. They're never breaking the rules saying that I can have freedom. I can do this. I can change my family's life. I can create generational wealth. I can do any of those things. They never get there. And instead, they distract themselves because their day job sucks so much. Because that is what is the normal path.
Just because everybody's watching the new season of Stranger Things or whatever the new show is now doesn't mean that you need to spend 10 hours of your life trading it for that. For some people, it might be a great trade, but when you're 80, are you going to be like, "Man, I wish I had rewatched Friends one more time." Like I think that would have been a great use of another 30 hours of my life. I just wish I had re- No, you're not going to do that. But you could take that same time, you could start a business, you could learn to play piano, you could literally do anything with that same time that most people are wasting.
And so I'm not advocating for some perfect color-coded system where every block of your day is scheduled like crazy or these beautiful morning routines that take 2 hours of, you know, shoving your face in cold water. There's all this like crazy time management advice that I don't think matters all that much. Instead, look for those seconds throughout your day. Look for those times. Have something that you are working towards that when you have that free time, you can put it into something productive, something that maybe it's only 10 minutes a day, but if you write a page of a book every day, which you can do in the morning instead of having some giant morning routine, you can write a novel inside of one year. Maybe it's not the best, but you always thought about writing that book. You can write it one year. And yet most people, since they don't have this perfect setting, they don't have, you know, the the coffee at at 10 a.m. in a coffee shop, this perfect setup for writing and whatever, they never start.
You can write a book during meetings, you can write a book in the mornings, you can start a YouTube channel in the mornings. You can start that business. You can do push-ups. Anything that you want to do that, looking back, you'd be like, "Man, I'm really glad I built that thing. I'm proud of myself. I I pushed myself. I bettered my family's lives." All of those things can happen in the cracks of your life.
But honestly, for most people, I think there is one ginormous thing that is your biggest problem. But before we get to that, I want to give you a quick habit that I have been doing literally every day for like three years now, I think. And that has been making sure that I know what I'm supposed to be doing. So, like a lot of the reason why we don't fill the crack of our lives with something positive is because we don't know what that positive thing is. Is it reading a book? Is it starting a business? Is it writing a book? Is it creating a YouTube channel? Like what is it that we're supposed to fill our lives with?
And so over the course of the past 3 years, I have been keeping track of the one thing that if I get it done today, it'll make my day feel like it's a success. The tool that I use for this is a finishers journal. I've done whole videos breaking down exactly how I use these. Pretty much each day I know what my most important thing is, my secondary tasks, and then just other things that need to get done. And because of this, when I have the downtime, I know what I can be working on. I know what I can be building.
So, like I actually wrote kind of the script for this video in the cracks of my life over the past 2 days when things would come to me when I had some downtime. I would just think about this subject and the habits that I've been doing and I I would kind of write down an outline of what I wanted to talk about. And I did it because I knew what I was supposed to be thinking about. I knew what I was supposed to be working on. And one of the things I like about this journal is that you just pick these 90-day goals and then some action steps in order to get there. And then each week I can make small progress towards the larger goal. And that's how I built this YouTube channel. It's how I built multiple other YouTube channels and businesses. It's how I got my rentals. It's how I stay on track with with staying in shape. Everything is just broken down. If I know where I'm going and I can break down the steps to get there, then I know that each day what I can fill the cracks in my life with to get to my dream outcome, my dream result.
And so, this is a really cool tool that I've been using for years. I actually have full in-depth videos of like exactly how I do goal setting and and that type of stuff. If you want to check those out, I'll leave a link down in the description. There's a discount code. They are one of my favorite partners to work with because I've literally used them so long. It's like the perfect goal setting template that like if I was to create something, it would be this. And so, thank you to Finishers for partnering with me. This has literally changed my life. If you're having trouble coming up with goals and sticking to them, maybe check one of these out instead of like going out to lunch once you could buy something that could hopefully change your life. There's a link down below. We'll go back to
See, I used to clean office buildings making around $11 an hour and also did stamp concrete and that was a much higher value skill. So that one I would actually earn about $300 an hour. I'd have to work from about 5:00 a.m. to like 3 or 4 doing really hard manual labor, but in that time I would earn more than I would earn in a week cleaning office buildings. And I started to realize some skills are more valuable than other. And if I continue to trade my time, my life away, these are the big blocks. These aren't even just the seconds that you're wasting throughout the day. This is like the biggest chunk of time that most people waste. If I'm not doing my absolute best to trade that for the most amount of money possible, then I'm doing myself and my family and my health and my future and everything a disservice. I think this is when I first realized that not all time for money trades are equal.
And then also to take that a step further, trading time for money is the trap that destroys most people's lives because the more skilled you become and the more leverage that you have, the less time you have to trade in order to make money. In a productivity sense, this really changed for me. Am I being productive? Which like yes, you could be productive. You could follow all the methods. You could take this giant calendar thing, but like are you being productive in the right thing? You could be the most productive person at your job or you could be like averely productive or spend half the amount of time at a different job that just pays you more. And so much like with decluttering your house, organizing your crap is not the answer. Sometimes you need to declutter half the stuff that you have. And you could just organize and organize and organize. Your house is always a mess because you just have too much crap in your house. And the same thing can be true with your job. You can be as productive, use all these checklists and systems and whatever to get as much done as as humanly possible. And you're tracking all this with color coding. Are you doing the right thing to start with?
And so for me, there's a bit of a balance. And you can do this exercise yourself, but I realize that I want location freedom. I like to travel. We're literally about to go to Florida in a couple days, be there for a week, and I have multiple other trips coming up. We've traveled for months at a time. I enjoy that. I enjoy that. Something I've always wanted since I was a kid, was never really able to do, and like I I want that. So, I need location freedom at my job. And therefore, that just rules out like 80% of jobs that don't have location freedom. I'm just not willing for any amount of money to trade for that.
Next up, I want to have time to spend with my kids to be able to like never have to worry about if I'm sick, I just won't work and I'll still make money. If my kids are sick, I won't work and I'll still make money. I want to make sure that my time is not directly tied to the amount of money that I make.
Then I want to have leverage. When you have leverage at your job, that is where you can create wealth. For instance, if you're an employee, the company owner has leverage on you. They are paying you whatever $20 an hour so that they can earn $40 off of your hour. So, they are leveraging you to make them more money. And the more you use that they can get, the more money that they can make and they don't have to work any harder. And so if you're always on the receiving end of that, you will never be wealthy. Mathematically, it's just not going to happen for 90 something percent of people. And so that's why I always want to be on the other end of that leverage. I want to have a job that I can put out and it can go out to the internet. It can go out to as many people as there are. This can be creating a product, maybe even a book. You write it once, you can sell that for the next 20 years. Maybe it doesn't make a lot, but you can still sell it for the next 20 years. Maybe you make YouTube videos. Maybe you make some type of digital product. Maybe you help people do something online. You create a subscription. Like there's so many different things that you can do that you can build it once or put in a minimal amount of work and then either outsource to the internet to code to software or to other people so that you can be on the receiving end of that leverage and you can have the life of your dreams instead of building that for somebody else.
Honestly, I think the biggest trap that a lot of people fall into is not hating every minute of every day. Your job's like, "Okay, it's not bad. It's not terrible. I'd like to escape sometime." And because of that, you waste those cracks in your life. You don't create things. You don't have this need to escape. That's one of the things I'm most grateful for at that cleaning company is I had a need to escape. I was like, I cannot be doing this a year from now. Like there was this time in the car where I was just freaking out Christmas Eve night. I had to leave to go cover for somebody and I got to that breaking point of like, I just can't do this. No matter what it takes, I can't do this.
>> Yeah, I'm pretty done. Pretty done.
>> I filled those cracks. I took those chances. I did the things that got me to freedom within a year of making that video. But the reason that most people get stuck is it's not that bad. And because of that, most people will distract themselves. They'll never travel as much as they want to. They won't have as much time with their kids. They won't live the life of their dreams. They'll never have scalable income that can double every year. It'll just never happen.
If you fill the cracks in those minutes with consuming instead of creating, someday is a false and insidious notion that simply allows you to waste the precious time until it's too late. Someday is today. Please go make something. If you just got motivated out of this and you take no action, you just wasted even more time. So, I'm really begging you just take a few minutes and and take some action on something.
I'm about to set my new goals for the next quarter while I was editing this video. So, I thought I would just kind of share whether you use a piece of paper or this journal. Having clear steps to get you closer to your dream life is something almost nobody does. Everybody dreams about it. They get motivated. They never take action. And like I said before, this is a really cool tool that helped me take action. They have like a limited edition uh version right now, which is really cool. But regardless, it's the insides of this that matter. It's the outcome goals. It is the daily steps that get me closer to those goals that have literally changed my life. So, please, please, please just make clear goals with action steps to get there and daily actions that you can stack. And literally, 90 days from now, you should not be the same person. If you are, you screwed up. Again, there's a link for this down below, or you use a piece of paper. I don't care. Please don't let your life go to waste.