It’s the amateurs who are “busy” all the time.
“Time management is a skill that must be learned & practiced.
When you say yes to something, you’re saying NO to everything else that could be taking place during that time.
The goal is to say no to average (piss poor) uses of time so you can say yes to better opportunities.”
-Ray Zingler on X
When I was younger and starting out in business, I said YES to everything.
It was because I was working to get my business off in the ground and I saw every opportunity as a great opportunity.
“Will you take on this client? Yes.
Will you come to my house and train me? Sure.
Can we do some conditioning at the high school? I’ll be there at 3.”
Yes. Yes. YES.
In a year’s time I went from, “Am I actually going to be able to make career out of this?” to “blending up chicken, rice, and water into ‘chicken shakes’ because I didn’t have time to chew in between clients.”
And while I don’t totally regret the 100-hour weeks of endless work with small doses of “trying to human” sprinkled in there, I learned a lot.
I learned that if I keep saying yes to everything, I am going to eventually run out of time. Hell, I was already trending that way.
And I also noticed that not all of these things I was saying yes to carried the same value.
“I can make $15/hr doing it like this, or I can make $100/hr doing it like that.”
And, again, if I have a finite number of hours, I need to make each hour as profitable as I possibly can.
And wait, what if I found a way to make $500/hour?
Then I could work less hours and still make real money.
While this story sounds silly and like common sense (it is) I wish I could tell you I figured this out over night, but obviously that’s not the case.
This took years and I am still working on it today.
Admittedly, you must earn the ability to say no to average opportunities, but once you do, you can start playing the game.
And that game is learning to use your hours as judiciously as you possibly can.
How people sit on their ass for hours and watch tv literally boggles my brain.
Time is more valuable than money and people waste it? I’ll never be able to understand it.
Learn the skill of time management.
Continuously refine it.
COMPETE to make every hour as valuable as possible.
It’s what winners do.
