Did you ever stop to think that most of the world’s great men achieved their life work, not in their day job, but in their spare time?

I had not.

I thought they were privileged and could work on their passion all day, every day.

I was wrong.

Just like you and I, they had a day job that paid the bills and put food on the table. They made the most of the little spare time they had and changed their lives (and ours)

Abraham, Edison, and Alexander

After a long day of hard work, while his fellow workers slept or goofed off, a tired rail-splitter spent his evenings studying his worn-out books by the light of a candle or fire. Abraham Lincoln cut out his path to immortality in his spare time.

Despite being overworked and underpaid, a telegraph operator with unwavering faith in his fantastic dreams gave up precious hours of sleep or leisure time at night to bring them to fruition. The world is now reaping the benefits of what Edison accomplished during his spare time.

An instructor in a little-known college, burdened by the tedious work he despised, found comfort in tinkering with a strange device during his evenings and holidays, much to the amusement of his colleagues. However, Alexander Graham Bell ultimately went on to invent the telephone during his spare time.

There's not enough time. Period.

There is never enough time to do everything. But there is always enough time to do the most important things. – Brian Tracy

If you are waiting for when you have enough time to do stuff you want to do, you are going to wait your entire life.

Time is a constraint we have to learn to live with.

Time is valuable and scarce.

We don’t make spoons out of diamonds (unless you are filthy rich and bored), do we? That is because diamonds are valuable and scarce, so we use them wisely, we don’t waste them.

Our time is way more important than diamonds. But we are still eating breakfast with a diamond spoon.

It’s all a matter of priorities and systems.

The 2 things you can do about it

I started writing online a couple of months ago.

I met Leo on Twitter, he is 43, has a full-time job, a wife, 2 boys, and still finds the time to crush it online by talking about his passion(growth strategies)

He probably has less free time than you or me (unless you have 2 jobs and 3 kids)

How did he achieve such exponential growth on Twitter in such a short time?

1. Prioritized: He wrote every single day since November (9.757 tweets so far)
2. Systematized: He created a system to help him write faster and better even when he doesn’t feel like so I have a tone to learn from Leo.

That’s the only 2 things you can do about your time (not including wasting it).

1. Prioritize the things that’ll help you achieve your goals.
2. Create systems to make it easier to keep consistent.

It’s one of those things that are much easier said than done (like most important things). I struggle with prioritizing every day. I have bad days, lazy days, sick days, and normal days when I don’t feel like writing (or have no ideas to write about). That is how life is. But we can do better, our future selves will thank us.

The person you’ll be in 2 years is the sum of what you’ll do every day for the next 730 days.

What are you going to be better at?