PART 8 OF A 10-PART SERIES TO HELP YOU ACHIEVE YOUR GOALS

I just don’t have the time!

Okay, so that’s your excuse … how original! 😉 We all have our reasons for shirking the things we really want to do, and sometimes desperately need to do, but this is an evergreen. You don’t have the time. Wow!

Actually, let’s just be specific about this – are you saying your time is severely limited in some way? Like, the rest of the world manages on 24 hours a day and you, a special case obviously, you only have what, 18 hours a day? 12 hours? How did that happen? Was it some kind of unique cosmic intervention that caused you to only have a fraction of the normal allotment of 24 hours per day, and to result in your suffering so catastrophically from lack of time?

Sorry, that excuse just won’t wash. Nobody really suffers from lack of time … unless they just let it happen. Last time I checked, everyone gets 24 hours each and every day to use as they see fit. They get it whether they’re rich or poor, whether they’ve been good or bad, and whether or not they deserve it. Some people manage their time quite well and get all kinds of things done, while others (who tend to be excuse makers) don’t fare quite so well. Although they do pretty well at coming up with reasons to explain the fact they don’t get much done. Their inventiveness in this department doesn’t appear to be diminished in any way by their lack of time 🙂

Some people achieve amazing things with their time

All the great achievements in history came about because people did something. They found the time to get busy and do it! They took action! They didn’t sit back and moan about a lack of time. And today’s great achievers, such as Sir Richard Branson, somehow manage to find the time to do an enormous amount. Branson takes a long swim each morning, around the perimeter of his island actually, and during that exercise time he mulls over things that are in his mental ‘in tray’. By the time he’s showered and changed he’s ready to carry on overseeing one of the most amazing business empires of modern times. And he’s not well known for complaining about lack of time. No, he’s too busy taking action instead!

Thomas Edison transformed the world with his inventiveness. His work and ideas led to world-changing inventions and literally thousands of patents (over 1,000 US patents, and well over 2,000 worldwide). His industriousness is largely responsible for the world we live in today. Did he see all this as hard work? Not really. Did he bemoan his lack of time? Hardly! He was too busy taking action to even consider it work. When someone remarked that he must have worked hard all his life to amass so many patents and inventions, he replied that he’d never worked a day in his life … it had all been fun!

Michelangelo was still busy being wildly creative till shortly before he died, at just short of 89. He was so busy he never even thought about a lack of time, except maybe to ponder that , at nearly ninety years of age, his days were numbered.

Widely regarded as one of the greatest and most influential artists of all time, amazingly enough he somehow managed on a paltry 24 hours a day. By the simple expedient of repeatedly taking action he created some of the most magnificent works of art the world has ever seen.

Michelangelo was just 25 years old when he carved the Pieta, a sculpture of the Madonna holding the body of Jesus after the crucifixion. Even at that young age he was able to carve a thing of such great beauty from a single piece of white marble, and make the fabric of Mary’s garments appear almost real it was so incredibly well sculpted. Could he have achieved such mastery if he had spent his time worrying over a lack of time? Of course not, he was far too absorbed in the indescribable joy of creating something truly magnificent.

Even today it is revered as an awe-inspiring work. And he managed to create it with only 24 hours a day at his disposal. Truly amazing!

We all have time … some actually use it!

Am I encouraging you to try to become a great artist? Or a great inventor? Or an entrepreneur of the calibre of Sir Richard Branson? No, of course not. I’m just pointing out that these individuals made the most of the time allotted to them. The got up each day and made a commitment to themselves that they would take action and get things done. And then, instead of just thinking about it, they started betting things done! And each one of us can do the same. We may not become world famous, and people may not whisper our names in reverential tones hundreds of years from now, but we can still make a difference. Not on the world stage perhaps, but where it matters infinitely more … in our own lives.

If we make that commitment and take action on it, who knows what we might manage to do? We might achieve things we can hardly imagine yet, since one thing leads inexorably to another, and not always by the imagined route. The only thing we can be certain of is that if we do nothing, we will achieve precisely that … nothing. If we moan and complain and invent excuses, all we’ll manage to do is dull the pain of facing up to the fact that we didn’t really make enough effort.

Make taking action a daily habit!

I’m not saying you should take off at full speed and thrust yourself headlong into the future in an effort to become a great business owner, or a great artist, or engineer, or inventor, or anything else. I’m just suggesting that you should, once and for all, realise that you have 24 hours every day to use any way you please. And if you start to create a habit of taking action every day you’ll probably surprise yourself with what you achieve. And it’s likely to be a lot more than if you just settle for more moaning and complaining.

And I’m not even talking about taking HUGE action. Many things that you might want to achieve seem almost impossible when you take the wrong perspective. There seems so much to do, and so much to learn before you can even really get started, that it’s easy to be put off.  All I’m saying is take action every day.

And that action, in isolation, might seem quite small, but it gets you moving in the right direction. And small actions, often repeated, keep you moving in that direction. Just make sure you don’t fall victim to Paralysis by Analysis! As long as you keep doggedly on, you can actually creep up on your goals stealthily, breaking things down into smaller constituent parts along the way, and taking action on each of them. By nibbling away stealthily at your goals, bit by bit, you can achieve things that would have seemed practically impossible from a different perspective.