I’m slowly realizing that if there’s something you want to do, write the script, start your YouTube channel, build your website, hire your first employee, there’s truly no time like the present. It’s easy to put off certain things until we have the PERFECT amount of time allocated for it, but what if there’s no such thing? What if we didn’t wait for the “right moment” to do the things we wanted to do?
I came across this excerpt from a book called Someday is Today by Matthew Dicks that I’d love to share with you below:
I’ve written eleven books and published nine over the past dozen years because I don’t wait for the right moment to write. I don’t waste time on preciousness, pretentiousness, and perfection. Yes, it’s true that in the summers, when I’m not teaching, I have much more time to dedicate to writing, but I don’t wait for July and August to get to work. I write all year long. I write in the early- morning hours before my kids tumble down the stairs. I write at lunchtime if I don’t have any papers to correct or lessons to plan.
I’m actually writing this very sentence on a Friday during my lunch break. I write while waiting for the water to boil for spaghetti. I write while the mechanic changes my oil at Jiffy Lube. I write in the first few minutes of a meeting that has failed to start on time.
Are these ideal times to write? Of course not. But unless you’re blessed with a patron who is willing to support your every earthly desire, you need to make the time to write. Even if blessed with a patron, I still might be writing in these cracks of my life. I’m filled with stories and the desire to share as many of them with the world as possible. Why restrict my creative flow to midmornings? Minutes matter. Every single one of them matters.
The problem is that so many of us discount the value of min- utes and overestimate the value of an hour or a day or a weekend. We dither away our minutes as if they were useless, assuming that creativity can only happen in increments of an hour or a day or more. What a bunch of hooey.
The one commodity that we all share in equal amounts is time: 1,440 minutes — 86,400 seconds — per day.
I want you to stop thinking about the length of a day in terms of hours and start thinking in terms of minutes. Minutes matter.
People making things — entrepreneurs, artists, writers, musi- cians, comedians, sculptors, furniture crafters, potters, knitters, gar- deners, video-game designers, YouTube creators, podcasters — must utilize these minutes more effectively, because unless you have a pa- tron or a trust fund, you’ll probably need to carve out time among life’s many other demands in order to pursue your creative passions. At least for a while.
Most creative people are holding down another job (or two or three) while waiting for their passions to pay off. The tragedy is that creative people (and people who dream of being creative) often use their time less effectively than most, and more often than not, they spend their lives waiting for the right moment instead of making the time.
The trick is to utilise your time effectively. To value every min- ute of the day equally, regardless of how many other minutes are attached to it. Once you have chosen to value every minute, you can begin to create systems by which those precious minutes can be used.