March 2019 – Grandpa Bob Encouraging Leadership

I heard the term, Time Billionaire, a few weeks ago on the Tim Ferris Podcast (which I highly recommend, by the way).

There are 31,500,000 seconds in a year.

If you live to the end of your 90^th year, you will have lived 2,838,240,000 seconds.

Each of us is a time billionaire. We have billions of seconds at our disposal.

To date, I’ve used about 1.67 billion of my seconds. If I’ve slept for a third of my life (wouldn’t 8 hours per night be nice?), I’ve been awake and actively (?) living for 1.1 billion seconds. I have roughly 770 million more active seconds remaining (if I live to be 90).

How many billions of seconds have you used? How many do you have left?

It’s easy to answer the first question, impossible to answer the second one.

One thing is certain. If you’re reading this post, you’ve already used billions of your seconds, and you probably have millions more.

The most important question is: What do you want to do with your remaining seconds?

Love. Work. Play. Explore. Rest. Watch. Avoid. Climb. Run. Accumulate. Distract. Hate. Support. Waste. Invest. Achieve. Overcome. Reach. Reduce. Enhance. Ignore. Engage. Imagine. Share. Write. Read. Produce. Consume. Hide. Encourage. Recover. Experiment. Challenge. Destroy. Create. Build. Live!

We decide how we use our seconds (even when we choose not to decide, or let someone else decide for us).

None of us gets a second helping of seconds. It’s worth investing some valuable seconds to consider what to do with the rest of our seconds before they’re gone.

Photo by Aron Visuals on Unsplash

Surely, reading a book on pushups is the best way to learn how to do them.

The proper techniques. The most effective forms.

When should you do your pushups? How often each week?

While doing your pushups, what should your mind be doing?

What’s the proper number of pushups per set? How many sets should you do?

What are all the available variations of pushups?

Why should you do pushups in the first place?

Are there any risks associated with doing pushups? What about the rewards?

What if the author also provides weekly blog posts and podcasts about pushups…or YouTube videos of people doing pushups?

All of this is helpful. None will match what you learn by doing your first pushup.

That first one will be awkward. It’ll shock your system. It’ll be much harder than you imagined after seeing all those happy people doing them on YouTube.

Your technique will be terrible. Your body will scream in protest. Your wrists will ache, your shoulders will burn, you’ll probably feel muscles in your lower back you haven’t felt in a while.

Now that you’ve done that first one, what about the next ten? The next hundred? Will you make this a habit? Will you do pushups every day, every-other-day?

Maybe you’ll decide they’re too hard and just skip them altogether…

It’s the same with most things in life. Reading about it, talking about it, or watching it provide only one dimension of understanding.

Doing is an entirely different thing.

Doing brings the risk of failure, the risk of embarrassment.

Doing requires discipline and endurance for the journey you’ve chosen.

Doing requires personal drive and motivation to push through the awkward (and sometimes painful) beginning.

It’s easy to sit on the sidelines of life, casually watching and listening to what everyone else is doing. But, the most important choice each of us can make is the choice to step into the game.

Step in and do the thing you’ve been watching.

It’s the only way to truly learn.

Photo by Lopez Robin on Unsplash