Think about every person you admire. Everyone who is producing work you aspire to. The people who are doing the things you wish you could be doing.

They are not innately “better” than you. Most of them operating with the same raw materials:

Time and choices,

Time is not something you “find”.

You can’t “find” time. Everyone is limited to the same number of minutes and hours. We don’t know what the future holds and there’s nothing you can do about what’s already past. Tomorrow will always be tomorrow. You have the same 24 hour days as Leonardo Da Vinci, Steven King, and Beyoncé.

All you have is now.

If you are doing something you don’t want to be doing right now, it’s because you made a choice at some point. You said “yes” to something, and “no” to something else.

This is super simple.

But it’s not.

Our cumulative “yeses and nos” complicate things throughout our lives. There are consequences to choices. Sometimes we are living in backwaters of choices made by other people from other generations.

But what we have is what we choose now. There may be certain things we no longer have any control over.

But you and I have way more control than we probably know.

Here’s a good place to start:

Do a time audit.

Figure out how you spend the precious time you’ve been given every day. Exactly how many of the limited hours in your day do you give away to people and things you actually don’t care about?

Track it. There are apps you can use. But I recommend using a simple sheet of paper.

You have 96 15-minute time blocks every day.

What do you do with them?

The results of this exercise could change your life.