Riddle me this.
I am something you can give, but you can never keep. I am something you can waste, but you can never buy. No one knows how much of me they have left.
The answer is obviously … time.
Yes, I could use more. We all could. There never seems to be enough time to do all of the things we want to do, to go where we want to go or to say what we want to say. Pretty much everyone who has ever lived would say the same thing. Just search for quotes about time and you’ll see that a lot of successful people had a keen insight into the best use of time:
- “If you love life, don’t waste time, for time is what life is made of.” – Bruce Lee
- “The key is in not spending time, but in investing it.” – Stephen R. Covey
- “It’s not enough to be busy. The question is, what are we busy about?” – Henry David Thoreau
- “Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.” – Stephen King
- “You may delay, but time will not.” – Benjamin Franklin
- “If I had six hours to chop down a tree, I would spend the first four hours sharpening the axe.” – Abraham Lincoln
- “The shorter way to do many things is to only do one thing at a time.” – Mozart
- “If you want to make good use of your time, you’ve got to know what’s most important and then give it all you’ve got.” – Lee Lacocca
So, could I use more time? Sure. But even if I magically had 25 or 30 hours in a day I would still probably find myself asking for more time. The key isn’t getting more time. It is, rather, getting more out of the time I already have. I’m sure I would be heartbroken if I did an inventory of the hours I wasted just in the past month, let alone in my lifetime. I’ve always fantasized about being a best-selling novelist, but I’ve written just one book, and that one still needs to be edited. My guess is that with a fraction of the time I’ve wasted in the past 30 years or so I could have written a small library.
Instead of wishing for more time, I hope I can spend the next 30 years wasting less of it and seeing what I can do in my life’s second act.
