Time Is Your Friend
When it comes to accomplishing your dreams, time can be your greatest ally. But what does it actually mean for time to be your friend?
This article will discuss what it means for time to be your friend and how to avoid the costly mistake of turning time into your enemy. After this, you’ll be better equipped to achieve your goals and pursue the life you intend on living.
Contents
Time Was My Friend In Achieving My Goals
Throughout my life, I’ve achieved a few notable accomplishments thanks to my friendship with time.
Of these, being in the two percent of high school football players to earn a D1 scholarship tops the list. The major driver of my success was my friendship with time. That is, I used my time toward developing my skill and athleticism. In this way, time was my friend because I leveraged it to accomplish my goals.
Avoiding Misuse of Time
I previously shared about failing at real estate and going broke. As far as time being my friend, my misstep stemmed from being in a hurry. In essence, I made time my enemy by trying to circumvent it. Rather than slowly, methodically, and patiently working to build my portfolio – I chose to take on debt to speed this along.
What It Means For Time To Be Your Friend
Time can be your friend if you use it properly. You can use time to achieve your goals by practicing good time management and being diligent with the time that you have. If used wisely, the time you spend working on things should produce positive results.
I found that there are no real shortcuts to any place worth going. Therefore, it’s best to become friends with time and do things with discipline and intentionality. Time is your friend when you are using it in a positive way. But it certainly can become your enemy when we try to circumvent it or let it go to waste.
Life presents many situations where time is an important factor. Let’s explore some common scenarios to see how time can be used as both a friend and enemy.
Time As Your Ally in Building Wealth
When it comes to building wealth, time is your most valuable friend.
Everyone could feasibly build a significant amount of wealth if they set their minds to it. This is because an average working career spans many decades. A person with median earnings of $70,784 can amass an impressive $1.4 million by investing a modest 15% of their income each month for 28 years.
This assumes that the person starts investing around age 35, but time can be even more impactful if they start earlier. From age 25, this same person could amass an impressive $4.1 million after 37 years of steady investing.
The magic with investing happens thanks to compound interest, which allows your money to grow exponentially over time. It truly does pay to get rich slow.
Time As Your Enemy In Building Wealth
The numbers above are very real with many people achieving similar results each day. Unfortunately, not everyone will get there. Generally, people fail to build wealth because they never get started , they don’t stick things out over time, or they try to get rich too quickly.
Recent data from the census bureau shows that approximately 50% of women and 47% of men have no savings whatsoever at retirement age. This shows that people failed to make time their friend earlier in their lives. Sadly, time becomes their enemy as many of these people will have to work for a longer period of time than desired out of necessity.
By the same token, getting rich quickly sits at the top of the list of things you should never do with your money. While tempting on the surface, getting rich quickly most often leads to ruin. Just ask the people who were conned out of $3.31 billion thanks to investment fraud in 2022. Or those who lost their life savings in the vanished $8 billion at the hands of FTX founder, Sam Bankman Fried.
Time Is Your Friend In Building Your Career
If you love your job, time will be your best friend.
That’s because we spend a significant portion of our time each week at work. Estimates project that the average person will spend ⅓ of their lives at work. This equates to roughly 90,000 hours – which qualifies to me as a lot of time.
With such a large fraction of our lives spent at work, time can really become our best friend if you love what you do. By aligning our passions with our careers and proactively managing our professional growth, we can make time our friend.
Using Time To Find Fulfilling Work
We all can find work that fulfills us.
I’ve always approached my career with this belief and could never settle for a job I didn’t like. As a result, I’ve already had twelve professional jobs in the 11 years since college. While this could be considered job hopping, it has been worth it as I’ve been able to consistently move toward better fitting roles.
Time can be your friend in finding work you love if you use it toward that goal. By thinking of your career as a journey, you can make time your friend by methodically exploring new roles and industries until something sticks. You can also leverage the benefit of time by using it to retool and build new skills.
Time is Your Enemy If You Hate Your Job
In reality, most of people will end up doing work that they are either good at or most qualified for. Even with this reality, no one should ever remain stuck in a job that they despise. Once this happens, time becomes the enemy. Not only will you hate every moment spent at work, but the displeasure will seep into other facets of your life.
Millions of workers are currently enemies with time as reports show that 50% of workers feel daily stress at their jobs, 41% feel worried, 22% as sad, and another 18% angry.
Seeing this data makes me wonder why we choose to spend our most precious resource on jobs we dislike?
I’ve experienced hating jobs in the past. So take it from me when I say that life is far too short for this. A better approach would be to make time your friend by using it to find work you enjoy.
In Matters Of Love, Time Can Be Our Friend
Love is one of the greatest experiences life has to offer and something everyone deserves to experience at least once. Fortunately, time is our friend given that most of us will live long lives and have plenty of time to find that special person to fall in love with.
Even more important than simply finding love is finding the right person to love. That is, finding a person with whom you have high degrees of chemistry and compatibility with. This may be easier said than done as we are all vulnerable to leading with our emotions and falling in love with the wrong person
In dating, time can be your friend if you are willing to take it slowly as you vet potential mates. Moving at a slower pace will help ensure that you don’t miss warning signs about a love interest’s lack of long term compatibility. Taking things slow also enables you to develop a deeper connection with the one you ultimately decide to be with.
Time Is Your Enemy If You Rush Into Love
Sadly, we can often make time the enemy in the love finding process. Many of us have experienced the passion bomb romances in our pasts where we quickly become infatuated and fall for someone who may not be the right fit.
Rushing into love based solely on emotional excitement like this often often leads to disappointment and wasted time.
Granted, we are susceptible to having rose colored glasses in our courtships which cause us to overlook red flags may indicate a bad match. Then later comes a lot letdown and disappointment which could have been avoided if we had just slowed down and made time our friend from the start.
Time Is Your Friend In Managing Your Health
Consistency over time is crucial for optimal health and fitness. Small repetitive actions accumulate over time, which is why fitness professionals say that consistency is the most important component of your fitness toolkit.
With consistency, it should be fairly easy to accomplish most health related goals. We can all get there if we make great choices about 85% of the time, which leaves plenty of room to be imperfect and let loose a bit.
The great thing about fitness is that it doesn’t require a significant amount of time to achieve. I dedicate about 6.5 hours per week working on my fitness and seem to be in pretty great shape. The average person can maintain an above average level of fitness in just 30 minutes per day. Or peak levels of fitness with only 60-90 minutes of exercise per day.
Time Is Your Diet's Best Friend
In addition to exercise, a good diet is the other critical component to optimal health. There is tremendous opportunity in this area as Americans currently spend more at restaurants than they do on groceries
Understandably, most people opt for restaurant meals because they are fast, low effort, and delicious. But, cooking at home is far better for achieving both physical and financial health. Cooking at home can be done more efficiently by targeting the most simple recipes, with the fewest ingredients, and the shortest cook times.
By spending 30 minutes in the kitchen each day, you can whip up meals that are healthier and more cost effective than restaurants.
Time As Your Enemy In Health
Time is your friend when it comes to your health, but time can also be your enemy if you don’t use it toward maintaining your current health levels or if you try to rush the process.
Data shows that many overweight people gain all of their weight back after successfully shedding a significant amount of body fat. This happens because there is an inverse relationship between how quickly someone loses weight and the odds of them successfully keeping it off.
In other words, the person who loses 100 lbs in 6 months is far more likely to gain the weight back than a person who takes several years.
This is because the body works extremely hard to maintain equilibrium. Therefore, rapid drops in weight really upsets our internal systems and causes the body to work hard to restore order. In this way, time becomes the enemy because rushing it harms our long term success.
The best approach is to lose weight slowly over an extended period of time. But understandably, few people actually want to hear this.
As such, rushing against time is rarely a great path to take. Instead, doing things slowly and consistently usually always produces the best results.
Time Waits On No One
The marvelous thing about time is that it is always there for us when we need it. But curiously, time keeps marching on whether we use it or not.
Therefore, time waits on no one and we must decide if we want to make it our friend and get the most out of it. Or, we can choose to not use the time that we have or even try to rush against it. Regardless of the path that we choose, tomorrow will be here before we know. And so will next month, next year, and even the next decade.
Given that, the choice is yours.
Will time be your friend or will you allow it to slip by into tomorrow and possibly turn it into an enemy?