Respect for Time is the link that ties all highly effective people together— they capture seconds and minutes effectively to make them matter.
White sand, sunshine, and seagulls— a Florida winter is made of all these things. I lived here for years, and this should feel normal, yet after being away, the process of leaving Portland mid-winter and stepping into a Floridian summer is strange.
I gave up trying to put my finger on why it doesn’t feel normal to wear a bikini when most people are somewhere out there bundled in scarves. Instead, I am spending my time focusing on more evocative matters.
Today I was amused by my brother. He is much younger, but the gap in age does not stifle his ability to stride ahead of me in many ways. He is always teaching me things, opening my eyes to things I have looked at for so long that I have ceased to see them. My current lesson is maximizing the string of current moments which create the span of life. Time maximization. His favorite quotes revolve around the notion that “time is everything.”
Time is such a weird concept and he’s always showing charts to help visualize time more objectively— twenty-four-hour pie charts outlining circadian rhythms, hours of peak alertness and so on. Recently, he came across a chart which outlines the ninety-year life span of a person by depicting each week with a little square. Ninety years may seem like forever, but seeing the years broken down into quickly passing weeks really illuminates the value of each day.
I admire the urgency with which he lives and in order to fit his aspirations into his life, he must. He is always steadfast in his desire to not waste time. By taking advantage of his spare moments in high-school classes, he developed his first business. This seems to be the link that ties all highly effective types together— they maximize their moments because for them, time is everything and when I consider it, it is.
Every highly effective person that I have ever met has a deep respect for Time— they maximize their moments because, for them, time is everything and when I really think about it, life is made up of seconds, minutes, and hours just like this.
