An oft-repeated adage describes three kinds of people in the world: those who make things happen, those who watch things happen, and those who wonder what happened. There’s far more to that sly smidgeon of observation than first meets the ear.
Why does that old quote still ring true? After all, time is a known and binary commodity. Everyone gets exactly the same amount per hour, day, week, month, and year. The rules of time’s passage are simple but unyielding: it comes, it goes, it has no backup lights nor allowance for do-overs. This of course begs the question, “With time such a known and equal constant, why do some achieve remarkable things while others can’t manage to sweep out the garage?”
Life spans are lengthening and projected to continue doing so. In classical Rome and Greece, the lives of the citizenry elite averaged 28 years—barely 10,000 days. Many of our distant ancestors kicked the bucket before reaching our modern legal drinking age due to a formidable roster of threats: bacteria, predators, accidents, weather extremes, and a lack of reliable food and water. For the most part humans led short, dirty, brutal existences. And that, of course, was only if they survived childbirth, since infant mortality rates ranged from 300 to 400 deaths per 1,000 live births as recently as the 18th century. Today babies fare much better; infant mortality has decreased to seven per 1,000.
In our increasingly modern world of air conditioners, tidy housekeeping, clean and treated water, medicine and booster shots, the world’s average life expectancy has climbed to 63 years. The Japanese, at 80 years, enjoy the world’s highest projected life expectancy. American men currently live about 73 years (26,600 days). Women average six years longer (just under 29,000 days). Good for the women, they deserve every moment!
But regardless of our country or time in history, each of us has the exact same amount of time each day to achieve more or less than those in our peer group. The time decisions we make heavily influence whether we do or don’t.
Assuming we sleep eight hours per day, each of us has 112 waking hours each week (16 per day X 7 days) to capture whatever we chase. Those 112 waking hours will pass one of four ways: They will be wasted, spent, invested, or cherished.
In other words, each of us wakes to a daily pie that our time decisions will cut into four various-sized slices. The size of each is determined by what portion of that day is wasted, spent, invested, or cherished. The size of one must influence the other three.
Over time each of life’s slices will average out to its appropriate size. Low performers and underachievers will have large slices of wasted and spent time, with smaller slices of invested and cherished time. High performers’ slices will be the opposite. What makes meeting with high performers so interesting to me is how each approaches his or her daily time decisions. Great performers—lifelong achievers—maximize their investment and cherish time while wasting and spending as little as possible. Some are fanatical about it.
In addition to better time decisions, top performers also live and work with urgency. They are output-oriented with a driven need to accomplish more than others. How they go about that varies, but the end result never does.
A senior executive I am tremendously proud of, Boris Vujicic of Serbia, embraced this concept and tracked his time for a month. Boris wanted to know precisely how large or small each of his four pie slices were. After that month, armed with data, he made a series of behavioral decisions that enabled him to waste less time and invest more. Boris is a great talent, a self-motivated man of inordinate drive and ability. But having gifts and maximizing them are two different things and Boris attacks his with dynamic desire. He continues to propel himself to an amazing life, spotlighted by a working awareness of how specific time decisions impact each day.
Each of us is empowered to make smarter time use decisions that propel us toward fulfilled lives of greater achievement. Whether or not we do (or don’t) is a personal choice. High performers integrate, execute, and protect smart choices into daily living. Mediocre performers rarely think about it. They confuse busy with productive and tread more water than they swim through.
Life is wonderful; we owe it to ourselves to maximize every moment we’ve been gifted. How you choose to do that is up to you. Own your waking hours; treat minutes like gold dust and hours like ingots. They are worth far more than that…but you are the one who determines how much.