Invest your time
Life is not forever, and the time you have can end at any moment. Wouldn’t life be more fun if you could be happy every day? You can have fun and smile every day. You can grow and get married, have kids, buy a house, get a job, earn money. All these things just add to you, and you are happy every day as it goes along. You see, when happiness is a goal, you never achieve it and end up chasing it like the donkey with a carrot on a stick leading the way. Happy is something you deserve every day. You can enjoy your dinner, a television show, a conversation with a friend, a book, and all that life has to offer you every day.
I once read a story about time. It went something like this. What if you had a bank account with a million dollars in it, but there’s a catch. This bank account starts every day with a million but whatever you don’t spend that day you lose forever. But this is a magic bank account, so each day you start your day with a new million dollars. Remember, whatever you don’t spend is gone forever. Well what if? Considering you lose whatever you don’t spend, wouldn’t you spend as much as you could every day? At the end it said that you already have this bank account, but instead of money, it’s called time.
It’s an amazing thing that every day you wake up. You didn’t die in your sleep; you have another day to go out there and live. You have another day to find fun, find joy, laugh, smile, eat, love and have fun. Every day you have another million dollars to spend. It’s your time, and you never get back what you let pass. You have your time, and you have to use it for yourself and spend all you can. Live every day to be happy!
Time is also like money; when you invest it well, it pays you dividends in the future.
The first step in achieving your goals is to know where you want to go. What if you lived in New York and decided you want to move to Los Angeles? Moving to Los Angeles becomes your long-term goal. There were many short-term goals that I had to achieve in order to make that long-term goal happen. In the end, it’s the sum of the success of short-term goals that makes the long-term goal happen.
When you learn about goals and how to make them happen, what you find is that you never work for the long-term goal. You work at the short- term goals, and they add up to and make the long-term goal happen. The Law of Accumulation results in the goals you want. While you work for your goals, both long-term and short-term, you should always enjoy the everyday.
If moving to Los Angeles is our long-term goal, what are the short-term goals? Packing, shipping your furniture, etc., and then the immediate goal is to get to Los Angeles. In this example, you decide to drive to Los Angeles. This is an easy way to explain short- and long-term goals. The destination of your drive now is the long-term goal.
The preparation for your trip and the ability to drive are your tools. The route that you plan to drive defines your short-, medium- and long-term goals. Your car gets three hundred miles to the tank, so your short-term goal is to reach each gas station along the way. Your medium-term goals are finding a place to stay at the end of each day of driving. Remember, your long-term goal is driving to Los Angeles, but you’ll never make it there on one tank of gas. It’s the success of the short term-goals added up together that allows you to reach Los Angeles. You never accomplish your long-term goal; it’s always the result of the short-term goals accumulated.
What’s also important in understanding this is that human psychology needs a sense of accomplishment. When you don’t understand the success of the short-tern goals, the long-term goals may seem too far out of reach, and then you can be disillusioned and give up. Then you’ll never accomplish your goals. You need to feel as if you’re making progress, and then you can have mini-celebrations and mini-rewards.
It’s a series of little successes that give you the momentum to accomplish the big successes. As you reach each gas station, you feel as if you’ve succeeded, and maybe you reward yourself with something to drink or eat. Then, as you get to the medium-term goal—a place to sleep—you feel good about it, watch a little television, and then you’re ready to get going the next day. As you reach each gas station, you visualize and feel that the next one is not that far. You feel as if you can make the next one, and when you do, you feel good again. You can’t visualize your long-term goal; it’s too far and feels too far for most of the trip. The way to make long-term goals happen is to understand what the short- and medium-term goals are. You can also be happy along the way as you accomplish the short-term goals. Understanding and using short-term goals to propel you to accomplish your long-term goals is one of the true secrets to success. Learning this will give you the ability to re-create your life and make it whatever you want it to be!
If we don’t teach our children how to set short-term goals, accomplish them, feel good about them, and feel successful all through life, they’ll get disillusioned, frustrated and angry. They feel lost and think that the trip to California is impossible. Once you feel you can never make it, the results are negative, and we see that in many areas of our society today. I agree with teaching math, reading and writing. It’s the same thing as teaching driving. It’s a skill. The skill of driving does not get you where you need to be; learning how to set a destination, select a route and find your gas stations in life will allow you to use the skill as a tool to get you where you want. One without the other serves no purpose. We need to teach everyone that success is no secret, that goals can come true and that life is worth living every day. It’s not worth it only when you “make it,” whatever “making it” is. It’s worth it every day, and you need to take advantage of your million-dollar bank account every day.
Becoming a doctor or a lawyer or a teacher may seem like you have to be in school forever, and it may seem impossible. In order to make that long-term goal, you first have to make the short-term goal of high school. Reduce it to one semester at a time. Reduce it further to one week at a time, one class at a time. Getting to the class on time is a goal. Study, do homework and after you accomplish all the little goals, one day you are Dr. So-and-So.
Many travel to Hollywood with the dream of becoming a star. Again, this is not a goal but a result of a goal. Actors need to break it down to first learning everything they can about the skill of acting, then learning the skill of auditions, then having medium-term goals like being in a small theater production, getting commercial work and playing a small role. As they accomplish these things, they need to feel good along the way. If they think the only time they’ve made it is when they’re a star, then as time goes by they’ll feel embarrassed about the smallness of their successes and quit. Most will not have concentrated on the skills themselves and then wonder why they’re not chosen. They will blame it on bad luck or on being the victim of a system. However, without the skill, they are their own victims.
Set your goals, learn your skills, get on the road and find your gas stations.
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