The best habit to extend your TIME and live a more successful life.
Time is relative and our most precious resource. Your attention should be considered the tool that gives you the control to make it yours. To make it more.
Habits among successful people such as Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Richard Branson can be summarized and understood quite easily.
With logic habits such as getting up early in the morning, meditation, eating nutritious food, keeping neat schedules, networking, reading a lot of valuable books, daily exercise, and so forth. It’s no rocket science to understand the value of such habits. But in my mind, successful people often have one more important quality in common that one seldom talks about. The ability to add vigorous attention to everything they do. With one’s full attention to every task, time seems to slow down and become more valuable. Remember, time is relative and you can do more with yours than others if you understand the value of your full attention. Attention is the most powerful tool to add quality to time and extend one’s time without adding time itself. Making it more.
Time is our most precious resource. Some would consider money the more precious of the two but money in my mind only has worth when it purchases and adds quality to time. For instance, money purchases food and replaces the need for each one to farm their own. Everything else would in my mind be considered a luxury and not to be considered valuable in the same regard.
One easily thinks of time as something measurable one could expect. But time is a cruel mistress who will not take one’s will into consideration. Time is all-knowing, the power that creates, who breaks down, who preserves, the one who remembers and you are in her company forever present. One would be foolish to take time for granted or think one could add more of her raw essence later in life. Foolish to trust in space and time to be forgiving, not to leave one with regret for time passed without attention or experience.
To add more to one’s time.
With vigorous attention, add more quality to each moment of each hour of each day. Performing in every moment with one’s finest attention, performing in all tasks as it could be considered the last. Leaving one with nothing but pride in one’s ability to act with a conscious choice and mind in each moment, in each matter. Making time longer by adding quality of time rather than time itself. One of the greatest Roman emperors Marcus Aurelius talks a lot about the value of attention in his Stoic book The Meditations.
“ Every hour of every day give vigorous attention as a Roman and as a man, to the performance of the task in hand with precise analysis, with unaffected dignity, with human sympathy, with dispassionate justice — and to vacating your mind from all its other thoughts. And you will achieve this vacation if you perform each action as if it were the last of your life ”
(The Meditations, Marcus Aurelius, the link goes to Wikipedia.)
Therefore one should always strive to expand upon each moment by adding vigorous attention and clear aim, leaving no task to an idle mind. Making each moment more. While doing so also choose how to spend each moment and perform each action. Defining who she is.
In our modern world
One could easily evaluate the life of bench-watching Netflix series and other distractions and perceive it as a life without proper attention, time spent without time in mind. In such a case I would argue for one to spend even time on idle tasks with full attention. Making even the idlest task somewhat purposeful by the value of conscious attention itself.
My lesson to you if any would be one of making time yours by giving it the respect of your attention. And when one finds themselves again in the pursuit of time and success, one now finds themselves in the pursuit of awareness towards the present moment, not toward one fleeing future. Making each moment more valuable and life more precious. And in this way making time yours.
