Money and time are often compared and contrasted. Money and time are different, because unlike money, time can't be saved only spent. Money and time are the same in that there never seems to be enough of either.
Recently I was in North Battleford visiting my parents. While there I dropped into one of my favorite budget eateries, Mc Donalds. This particular establishment has been around for over 20 years. In fact, it is the same restaurant me and my friends used to visit when we were in our teens. As I stood in line to order it struck me that it had been almost 25 years since the last time I stood in that same spot.
Twenty-five years! Where had it gone? Like large quantities of money, large quantities of time are hard to comprehend. Twenty-five years works out to 300 months, 1200 weeks, 9,125 days, 219,000 hours or 13,140,000 minutes. When you realize that twenty-five years represents over 13 million minutes, only then do you realize the quantity we are dealing with.
Of course, this chain of thought led to an analysis of how wisely I had spent this vast endowment. Not so well, as it turns out. I felt like someone who won 25 million dollars and rather than putting together a spending plan just spent recklessly from day to day feeling that it would last forever. The investment of 25 years produced the typical middle class north american lifestyle. A university degree, a stable well paying job, a marriage with two children. A suburban house of average size. Nothing nearly so glamorous as my childhood dreams imagined.
This whole experience has taught me three lessons:
1) Time flies by very quickly. One day you are young with your whole life ahead of you, and the next you have become a Bob Seger song.
2) Because time goes by so quickly, you need to figure out what you want and begin moving towards it very early in life. Peak performance researchers have found that it takes 10,000 hours of dedicated, results-focused practice to attain expert performance in any field. Given a typical practice schedules of elite athletes or artists this works out to about ten years. Starting young has many benefits. You have higher energy, a better ability to concentrate and fewer responsibilities and distractions. Delaying your start until you are in your twenties will likely mean that you will never reach your potential. It's much harder to practice when you have to study, work and raise children (as I write this I have a 4 year old who is pestering me for a snack). Examples of child prodigies include Tiger Woods, Wayne Gretzky and Stephen King who all started practicing their chosen interests before the age of 7.
3) Whatever you do, it has to be something that you are passionate about. It is unfortunate that passion is so over used that it has become trivialized. Too often, passion is one of the last of our priorities when considering a career. The first considerations are usually how strong the potential job market is and how big the salary will be. Passion is seem as a fluffy, insubstantial reason for choosing to do something. Is it any wonder that so many people hate their jobs? And yes, I count myself as a member of the job-loathing group. There is a feeling that doing what we love will require us to take a vow of poverty, but ironically, the opposite is almost always true. As successful as you may be doing something you either dislike or are indifferent to, you could be much more successful if you chose a profession you were passionate about.
When Arnold Schwarzeneggar started body building in Austria in the mid 1960's he had chosen a profession that was held in the lowest disdain. Bodybuilders were dismissed as homosexuals and narcissists. When he announced his passion to his parents there were mortified and pleaded with him to pursue a "respectable" profession like medicine or law enforcement. Thankfully, he was not dissuaded. To everyone's amazement but his own, he defied the odds and raised the profile of bodybuilding and became a multi-millionaire through success in bodybuilding, acting and eventually politics. A pretty impressive track record for someone from a small town in Austria.
So, what do you want? What do you love to do, but choose not to do because of a lack of support, or a fear that if you do it things will not work out? The time has never been better for a person to follow their dreams. People everywhere are starting home-based businesses using the tools offered by the internet and personal computers. In the process they are frequently earning more money than they ever could if they had taken the more traditional approach of a salaried position with a company.
If you have not followed your dreams it is most likely because of fear. Fear is the opposite of love or passion. It is the 10,000 pound elephant that everyone sees but no one talks about. It is all the stories of "so and so tried that and now they are broke" that people will tell you when you try to share your dream. But here's the thing about our fears. The risks (fears) that we face are almost always smaller or more manageable than we believe them to be. Henry Ford said "do the thing you fear and the death of fear is certain" and he was right. Fear is a bully. If you stand up to it, it will back away. Also, like a bully, fear grows more confident the more we run from it. The habit of running from our fears can follow us for a lifetime. I know because this has been the story of my life.
