When asked what's the biggest mistake we make in life? The Buddha replied, the biggest mistake is you think you have time. Time is free but it's priceless. You can’t own it, but you can use it. You can't keep it, but you can spend it. And once it's lost you can never get it back. The average person lives 78 years. We spend twenty eight point three years of our lives sleeping.
That's almost a third of our life but thirty percent of us struggle to sleep well. We spend ten point five years of our life working but over 50 percent of us want to leave our current jobs. Time is more valuable than money. You can get more money but you can never get more time. We spent nine years on TV and social media.
We spend six years doing chores. We spend four years eating and drinking. We spent three and a half years in education. We spent two and a half years grooming. We spent two and a half years shopping. We spent one and a half years in childcare and we spent one point three years commuting.
That leaves us with nine years. How will we spend that time? Steve Jobs said “Your time is limited so don't waste it living someone else's life” So there's good news and there's bad news. The bad news is time flies, the good news is you're the pilot. Imagine you wake up every day with $86,400 in your bank account and at the end of the night it's all gone whether you spent it or not.
And then the next day you get another eighty-six thousand four hundred dollars ($86,400). What would we do with it? Every day 86,400 seconds are deposited into your life account. At the end of the day once they're all used up you get a new 86,400 seconds. We would never waste it if it was money, so why do we waste it when it comes to time? Those seconds are so much more powerful than dollars because you can always make more dollars, you can't always make more time. To realize the value of one year. Ask a student who failed a grade. To realize the value of one month, ask a mother who lost their child in the final month. To realize the value of one week, ask the editor of an online magazine. To realize the value of one hour. Ask the couple who's in a long-distance relationship.
To realize the value of one minute, ask the person who just missed a bus, train or plane. To realize the value of one second, ask the person he just missed an accident, and to realize the value of millisecond, ask the person who just came second at the Olympics.
We think that it's people wasting our time but it's really us giving them the permission to do that and in reality, these two people live inside us. Don't let someone be a priority when all you are to them is an option. Some of us lose the people most important to us because we don't value their time.
Some of us don't recognize how important someone is to us until they're gone. Inside all of us are 2 voices, 1 voice that wants to uplift, 1 voice that wants us to expand, 1 voice that wants us to grow and then there's the other voice. The voice that holds us back, the voice that makes us lazy, the voice that makes us complacent, the voice that restricts us from our potential.
Every day from the moment we wake up to the moment we go to sleep, inside of us there's this battle between the 2 voices. And guess which one wins? The one that we listen to the most. The one that will feed. The one that we amplify. It is our choice of how we use our time. Life and time are the best to teachers, life teaches us to make good use of time, and time teaches us the value of life. And as William Shakespeare said “Time is very slow for those who want, very fast for those who are scared, very long for those who are sad, very short for those who celebrate, but for those who love, time is eternal”.
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