Time is an abstract construct. It’s one of those things that we take for granted, and can quickly become mindblown trying to understand and describe. Time is the attribute, more than any other, that makes our growth and evolution oriented cosmos what it is. All we really amount to are collections of conscious, self-aware particles constantly, beautifully, deliciously reorganizing ourselves and our surroundings and becoming more and more.

Time is literally the measurement of the unfolding of reality. It’s our ability to see, experience, and remember where we have come from in relative terms. Like gravity, black holes, mass, and other things of a similar nature, it’s something that we can refer to and try to describe, but know of only as a theory or a principle. Time is something that I’ll spend very little time describing, and much more time and energy on exercising the mastery of it.

To spend too much time on explaining and theorizing what it is, is quite frankly a very mentally-exhausting task. The majority of what you read here is a pragmatic and useful repetition of the following concept: all success comes from balance, progression, and order, and the management of time through the conscious awareness of what we’re doing, what we’re receving, and how we’re feeling is the basis of forward motion. 

When it comes down to it, success is a state that comes as a result of the actions we take, and to be in a state of success is all about a matter of balance. Balance is essential because we are inherently imperfect in our consumption and production of energy, and we must always be working to reaquaint ourselves with activities and thoughts and ideas and points of focus that help us to reconnect and restore ourselves. 

The Alchemy of Success, involving Time

Alchemy – I love that word. Alchemy is the medieval forerunner of chemistry, based on the supposed transformation of matter. It was concerned particularly with attempts to convert base metals into gold or to find a universal elixir. I think that’s what we see success as today – the be all / end all that produces and provides anything we could ever want. Using it in the discussion of success, a state of being that is equally if not more alluring than gold itself is particularly fitting, I think.

The study and mastery of success revolves around the management of time, namely, in seizing our opportunity to make decisions that propel us toward success, and maintaining our energy and wellbeing through balance in our activities.

Living in a time-based existence, one where life unfolds in a linear fashion, we are journey and progress-focused. It’s one of the rarely-contemplated attributes of our existence, and this awareness as it pertains to success and happiness is of paramount importance. Every successful person is someone who has mastered time, which is to say they have understood all of what their responsibilities are, and have addressed and tackled all their tasks in a manner that promotes the smooth unfolding of success. Everything is sequential, and if one has ten steps but does them out of order, some before others and some of the first last, they will forever find themselves in a quandry wondering why time continues to pass but they seem unable to ever accomplish anything. 

—-I think it’s important to remain cognizant of the unfolding of time and of balancing our activities so that we don’t get too caught up in one thing or another and the momentum that ensues from our focus on a subject and lose sight of our ever shifting desire to experience all things, not just one or two things, to remain in a constant state of growth. You see, the problem is that when we don’t manage our time well, we actually get into a state of regression.

Time is really the basis of all success. It’s the drawing board for success, if you will – the palette on which we paint our lives – and it’s the choices and actions and activities that we make and engage in within each day that are the catalysts to definite shifts and changes in our state of existence.

We’re all equally and evenly favored when it comes to opportunity…

In describing success, I use time as the foundation, an important element, really, the basis of success to illustrate to people that we are all equally-equipped and endowed with equal opportunity to succeed. Every one of us has the same amount of time a day – 86,400 seconds. Your opportunity to succeed is in the wise and efficient use of time. Did you know that the average person makes over 35,000 decisions a day? One doesn’t have to be brilliant, well-educated, or have tons of resources to start walking down the path toward a state of success, all they need is a subtle awareness of the principles, a vision of where they want to go, and the determination and faith in the process, and to follow it. I feel that my study of success and what I share here is easy to trust, because it is logical and makes sense, and does not rely on abstractions too greatly.

Achieving a state of success is about using time well and making the right decisions, feeding our minds, and constantly refining the beliefs and perspectives and awareness we have that influence those decisions. Opportunity is not where you are right this red hot moment, nor does it have anything to do with what you have, it’s the ability to make decisions; one decision after another, each one leading in the right direction, each one a better decision than the one before it. That’s something we all have. When Jeff Bezos started Amazon back in ____, there were millions of people in a better place of “opportunity” than him to become a multi-billionaire. He started selling used books out of his garage. In several years, he had already far eclipsed them. Where he was had nothing to do with his success; his decisions did. The quality of your perspective, your focus, your decisions, and your ability to reflect and adapt is at the heart of your potential to succeed and to do so rather quickly.

We may not all be starting at the same place. We may be in different situations, and at different places in our lives. But, we all have the same number of hours in the day, and we all have the opportunity to make choices and changes. Our opportunity to spend time is our opportunity to produce change and progress, and those who are ten years behind but are focused and disciplined and know all of this can easily outpace people ten years ahead of them who don’t know any of this in a year or less. People are quick to think that success is made up of some fortune only bestowed to some, better situations with more advantages. No. Success is built from focus, action, and reflection, and the speed of success and the exponential nature of success that builds and compounds massively in a very short amount of time is something that is anyone’s to seize.

We’re human beings, not machines…

The degree to which a person is successful and to which their success grows is rooted not just in their quality and appropriateness of their actions and choices and activities, but primarily in the balance of their time as it pertains to what they do with their time. The reason that some people are more successful with their time than others has a lot to do with how they spend it. Sure, it comes down to the individual choices that they make, the things they do, etc, but their ability to make those choices and do all of those things depends ultimately upon their mental, physical, and emotional energy, stamina, or endurance.

Unlike computers, we’re not plugged into the wall, an endless supply of energy. We fatigue over time, and we need variety. While the choices we make, the beliefs we have, the perspectives we carry and view our world with have a lot to do with our energy and how we react to life from moment to moment, and some people have greater endurance than others, we all need balance when it comes to our time to restore our energy. 

Choices make us successful in the short and long term, but it is balance that enables us to continue to make choices and reflect on our successes and opportunities again day after day, and to do so in a state of clarity, insight, and peace.

Create / Play / Rest

I first came upon the idea of this division in 2019, about a year after I’d taken a job with a 50-hour-per-week schedule. In the midst of trying to manage the job, a side hustle, time to commute, eat, take care of myself, have some social life, and get plenty of rest, I realized that I’d gotten myself into a situation where compromise was inevitable. I wanted to do all of these things, fulfill my duties at work, enjoy life, and still get plenty of rest, but I quickly realized that something would have to give. Reluctant to let this become the new norm, I set about to think this out on paper.

I made a quick inventory of all the things I did / wanted to do in a day, and divided them up into categories to try to plot out my time and see where I might be wasting time on one thing that could be better allocated to another thing. In the process of doing this, I realized just what a challenge it was to fit all of these things in, and went over a comparison chart of my previous 40-hour-work-week lifestyle, and how I spent my time then, when, admittedly, life was more enjoyable. At that same time, I became very interested in studies on the effects of standard work weeks, four-day-work-weeks, working from home, jobs where you can take naps, jobs without hourly requirements, and how they affected employees, as well as things like how much sleep we actually need per night to function. Over the next few months, unable to experiment with many variables surrounding my job, I began to experiment with changing the amount of sleep I got, modifying how long, how often, and when I worked on my side hustle, and how much time I spent in the evenings and on the weekend engaged in pursuits of pleasure. I also kept a grip on my emotional response to all of this, what made me feel accomplished, at peace, anxious, and every other feeling out there. 

What I came to realize is that productivity, laziness, desire, accomplishment, progress, stagnancy, success, fulfillment, they all work hand in hand with one another. Certain tasks and activities require a certain type of energy that other activities tend to restore, and vice versa. I could spend several hours doing something that on paper was very productive and end up feeling just totally and completely exhausted, mentally and emotionally, and then put it down for the night and spend an hour doing something else and feel totally revived. Here we have yet another really trite and obvious point I’ve just made, but it’s one that people miss the forest for the tree all day every day with.

The point is that for people who want to accomplish a lot with their time, your need for balance between work, play, and rest is of utmost importance. When I made that inventory of activities earlier, I scanned over it and I thought “what are the categories I could lump this all into”? My thought was “if I’m here working this much each day in this block, and I need this big of a block of sleep, how much time do I have to, oh, say just sit back and enjoy life a little? Work was an obvious one, as was play, and when rest came along, it just sealed the deal. Over time, and my own reflection on the subject of work, play, rest, I came to revise things slightly, realizing that “work” had a lot of negative connotations to it for me. In reviewing all of the things I did – both my day job, as well as my side hustle(s) (which actually fell under “work” in my categorization of everything) – I came to realize that “create” is a better term for “work”, because all work, all jobs, they come from a desire to create something of value for others.

Since this realization of the three areas of my life, I have come to become very interested in the subjects of efficiency, effectiveness, preventing mental burnout and emotional fatgieu, managing productivity, tracking progress, creating plans to promote peace of mind and a sense of control andmastery over our destinies, and a number of other related topics around the idea of making the most of our time.

You cannot run on an empty tank. You can try to schedule time for each of these things, but I find that the best thing is to remain open and free with your allocation of time, and simply remain mondful of the need for a healthy split, what that split typically looks like, and to remain self-aware in the moments of your day about how you feel, and when it might be a good time to shift. People who do pomodoros, and other time and task-management techniques realize the importance of this, and the cognitive and processing limits of the brain. People who are aware of mental fatigue and the effects of it are also tuned into the importance of all of this. 

• A state of success is the byproduct of time well spent making smart decisions, reflection, and adaptation.
• In order for success to be sustainable, it requires immense mental, physical, and emotional energy, and so the time you spend creating, playing, and resting must be in balance