Imagine picking up a lottery ticket that had been left on the ground. You check the date and realize it’s still a good ticket. Not thinking much about it, you stuff it in it pocket and continue on with your day.
Later that night, the winning numbers flash on the television screen, and you remember the ticket you’d found. After hitting the pause on the remote, you go get the ticket, the whole time thinking there’s no way this could amount to much. Stuff like winning the lottery on a ticket you didn’t buy never happens to people like you!
But then, as your eyes dart from the ticket to the frozen image on the screen, your face gets flushed. First one number, then two. You scan faster, but also more carefully, until you realize that you hold a winning ticket! You check again, and then again, before firing up your mental calculator for some quick math.
After taxes, you realize that you’ll be holding a check for $692,040.
That’s a lot of Benjamins, my friend.
A jackpot of that amount is life-changing, but only if it’s used wisely, and, as evidenced by the tragic number of numerous lottery winners turned bankruptcy filers, most don’t.
Most squander the jackpot.
A jackpot that all of us won on the day we were born. As it turns out, that’s the exact number of hours that all of us have over an average life expectancy of 79 years. Ok, it’s actually 78.79, but I rounded up because it made the math easier, and it felt optimistic.
But the point here is that we all won the lottery. All of us have the same amount of “time dollars” in the bank (give or take some Gs one way or the other), but not all of us use them the same way.
My encouragement to all of us? Evaluate how you’re stewarding the jackpot. Are you spending the time or investing it? All of us can find time that we’ve squandered, but how can we learn from that and take steps toward better uses of our time going forward?
We actually have all the time we need to do all the things we need to do. Share on XIn fact, if you’ll invest a little time now to ponder those questions, you may find a surprising truth: we actually have all the time we need to do all the things we need to do.
We just have to stop squandering it on the things that we really didn’t need to do first.
