By: D. A. Slinkard
Recently, I had the opportunity to speak to Girl Scout Troop #1922 pertaining to a positive mental mindset. I am going to ask you the very questions I asked them, and by a show of hands, please tell me who would be excited if you woke up tomorrow morning with $86,400 deposited into your bank account? Go ahead, raise your hand, and keep it up high. We can all agree that we would love to have $86,400 deposited into our very own bank account. Now, let’s expand on that premise in that every day you get $86,400 deposited into your bank account; HOWEVER, you cannot keep the money from one day to the next.
You’re reading that correctly, in that tomorrow you get $86,400, but what money you do not spend, you cannot carry over to the next day. If you don’t use it, you lose it. Who, reading this article, would make sure they would spend the entire $86,400 tomorrow knowing they could not keep one penny from the amount? I am guessing that the readers of Athens Now are in much the same mindset as the Girl Scout troop because there was a clear consensus that everyone would spend their money.
We need to put this into perspective in that every one of us on this earth has 24 hours in a day. There are 60 minutes per hour and 60 seconds per minute. If we do the math correctly, we find that 24 x 60 x 60 equates to 86,400 seconds. Every one of us has the same amount of time deposited into our daily lives; but what are we doing with the deposit? Just like the money example from above, we cannot take time from today and add it to tomorrow. It does not matter how much money you have, there is no one who can buy more time. How many of us are wasting our days away all because we choose not to spend our time wisely?
A few articles back, I mentioned how we should look at shorter time frames when it comes to our goals. The shorter time frame to accomplish the goal means we have to be more aggressive in our actions. The majority of people fail not because their goals are too big; most people fail because they do not take the right amount of actions to achieve their goals. We all want to dream big, but we fail to realize the proper amount of action we must take to be successful. When you are thinking about your goals, I highly suggest you look at your goals in three separate categories. These categories are: 0-3 months, 4-6 months, 7-12 months.
Typically your goal for 7-12 months will be a culmination of steps you need to take in months 0-6 to find success. If your goal is to write a book within 12 months, this could seem very daunting and potentially impossible to achieve. However, with the proper goal-setting, an individual could break down the tasks over the three categories, and what seemed impossible now has come to fruition. We cannot eat the elephant whole, but we can do it one bite at a time, and doing so will help us reach our full potential.
With the thought process of spending every 86,400 seconds and utilizing the three categories of goal processing, what are you going to do differently to change your life? We cannot get last week back; we cannot get today back; all we can do is make the most of our present time and our future. We have the ability to control our future, but we must first learn to control our actions. Life is all about the decisions we make on a daily basis and our lives, whether good or bad, are the direct result of the choices we make.
The majority of people walk around with the feelings of remorse and regret for what they have not done with their life. Why? Why are we hanging on to what we have not done when we should be thinking about everything we could be doing? If this is you, why are you partaking in this trap? What we need to realize is that our daily deposit starts over each and every day, and the question becomes what are we going to do about it? It is time for you to think about the life you want to live, what steps you must take, and then go do it.
By: D. A. Slinkard
D.A. Slinkard is the manager of the Athens Staples store
