What if you’re a recent grad with a crummy job (or 2) crushed under a massive boulder of student loan debt.
What if you’re a single parent on the gerbil wheel of job, kids, daycare, shopping, laundry, Dr. visits, round and round.
What if every waking hour is consumed with survival concerns. Fuck the ukulele. No room for that. You gotta sleep.
How are you going to fit a self-designed project into this kind of scenario?
Do an honest time audit.
Everyone I’ve ever met, including myself, who has ever said, “I have no time,” is lying.
If you watch tv, you have time. If you play on social media, you have time. If you play video games, you have time.
But wait, you say, I need that kind of mindless downtime. I’m exhausted at the end of my survival-driven life. The only thing I’m capable of is my admittedly mind-numbing addiction to Facebook. Or Netflix. Or whatever.
Okay. But what about the one-inch dash? You know, that line on your headstone between the day you enter this life and the day you expire?
What if you get to the end of that dash and you never did anything? Or anything that really mattered, or expressed who you really were?
You have an obligation, by the sheer odds of being born, to express yourself authentically.
You have an obligation to uncover some little talent or uniqueness and express the hell out of it. You have an obligation to participate and contribute to the hive. Bring something to the table, dude. Anything. Preferably your thing.
If the only thing you do in the one-inch dash of your life is survive it, you only get one single point. It’s like the 200 points you get for just taking the SAT.
That’s not enough.
If you’re always working, look for ways of expressing yourself at work. Can you find a project there that you care about? Make it happen.
If you need your computer down-time after work, use it to research the project that if you did have the time, you would do. Dream of being a successful blogger? Read successful blogs and figure out the secrets.
Use little pieces of time you find lying around to daydream and take baby steps. Find what you can do in a half-hour and do it. Let go of one minor mindless addiction and practice your Spanish.
Listen to podcasts during meal-prep and clean-up.
Use drive time to listen to audio books.
Find some minutes every day to express yourself authentically. It’s a kick. It’s life affirming and enlivening. It will make you happy. It will make other people happy. Do it. Live your dash before it ends.
Inspiration Location 
I love this! It is my favorite of all your book blog posts thus far! I think we should start a new hashtag movement: #goya for get off your ass, haha, sort of like #yolo but being smart about it rather than foregoing common sense. #goya could be metaphorical, of course, but it’s so important to put your purpose to work, to spend that time doing something meaningful rather than spirit sucking. (And I consider reading your blogs to be meaningful, as they almost always offer me some kind of value, even if “just” in the form of laughter.) Understanding how you spend your time is as important as understanding how you spend your money. You get nowhere if you’re simply spinning your wheels like a gerbil by thumbing through status updates.
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Hashtag #goya–yes! (it might also attract fans of the artist Goya!) Thanks for your encouragement and enthusiasm. I really appreciate it!
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