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15
Apr
2011

I Don’t Have Time to Succeed

One of the more common excuses that I hear from people is that they just don’t have time to succeed. They’ve got too much going on in their lives; not only do they have to deal with family and work, traffic and shopping, there are so many other things that they like to do that there’s just no possibility of adding anything new to their schedules. Watching the latest episode of Desperate Housewives, going bowling, working on another project that seems more interesting at the moment—it all adds up.

This leads to the ever-popular refrain, “I don’t have time, Kent! I’m so busy. I mean, look at how busy I am! I just can’t squeeze one more thing into my schedule, so how could I possibly have the time to practice the things that would help me succeed and make all the money I would ever need?”

Right….

“I don’t have the time.” What does that even mean? Obviously, some people have the time and mojo to succeed, or we wouldn’t keep hearing about guys like Bill Gates and Warren Buffet and Michael Dell. Does it mean, somehow, that rich and successful people have found some secret way to add hours to their day? Maybe one of those gizmos that Hermione used in that Harry Potter movie to take three classes at once? Is there some secret Sharper Image-style catalog selling magical goodies like that, somewhere? Maybe in Diagon Alley…?

Of course not! There are 24 hour in a day, period. If there’s one thing that every person in this world has in common, one thing than none of us can get beyond or rise above, that’s it right there. You probably sleep about eight hours, so you’re awake 16 hours on an average day. So: you’ve got 16 hours of consciousness in a day, I have 16 hours of consciousness in a day. The same is true for the world’s richest people…and its poorest people, too. We all have the same number of hours in the day, universally.

So what are you are doing with that time—that gift? What are you doing with today? Because you have to get your head around this and never forget it: what you do with right now is either going to keep you broke and stuck right where you are, or it’s going to make you rich. Ultimately, it’s all up to you, and you alone. It’s your decision which possibility comes true. So make that decision consciously and honestly, with an open mind.

Realize that if you say, “Hey, I know—I’m going to go watch old Star Trek reruns and the latest episode of Pawn Stars!”, then you’ve made a conscious decision. It’s not a conscious decision to succeed, though: it’s a deliberate act of self-sabotage. You might as well be saying to yourself, “Today I’m choosing not to advance my business,” because that’s just what you’re doing. Instead, you’re going to plop yourself down on the couch and watch TV. At least admit that you’ve made that decision deliberately, okay? You’re doing it with intention…and that intention is to be lazy rather than to at least try to succeed. No one’s tying you down and forcing you to watch TV, except maybe the demon of your subconscious.

Maybe you’re refusing to look that reality in the face; but I’m telling you that until you do, until you grab your subconscious by the horns and look it straight in the eyes, you’re never going to be able to say to yourself, “What the heck am I doing here? Why am I wasting my time?” You have to realize that you are the one in charge of things here. Yes, of course you probably have obligations that take up part of your time; but still, if you’re like 99% of us, how you allocate most of your time is up to you. If you choose to be lazy for part of your day, face it and accept it. Tell yourself, “You know what? My goal is relaxation right now. I need to recharge my batteries with some mindless entertainment for a while, so I’m going to go watch TV for two hours. Then I’m going to come back to working on my business.”

The excuse “I don’t have time” is something I just don’t understand. The real truth is that you just want to do something else with your time other than work on your business. It’s easier to put it off until later, because let’s be honest here: for most of us these days, “work” is a four-letter word—not just literally, but figuratively. Many of us would rather eat bugs than work one minute more than we have to. Now, that’s understandable: time is precious. Unlike all other resources, including money, we simply can’t go out and get a little more. There’s no supply closet where there’s a little box full of time, where you can grab a spare minute or two…which makes it all the more surprising that rather than work (which eats up enough of our time) people just waste time instead, doing things that won’t earn them a cent, ever.

I’m not just talking about TV, although that’s a real part of it. It’s all those little things that add up. There’s not enough time in the day to stand around and smoke a cigarette for the first five minutes of every hour. There’s no time to daydream about how you’ll someday be rich, and there’s certainly no time to waste watching third-rate movies or reading crappy books that don’t advance your agenda. No one has any excuse to complain about how they don’t have time to succeed if they’re doing any of these things or a thousand things like them. We all have the same amount of time. What you do with it is what counts.

So all these people who claim they’re super-busy—what are they busy doing? Are they busy watching reruns, maybe, or accomplishing something of value that doesn’t have anything to do with business success? What are you busy doing? Do you even know?

If you don’t have the time to succeed, it’s obvious that you need to regain control of your time. Let me tell you a simple way to do that. Now, this isn’t a “time management” technique, though that’s what most people would call it. You can’t manage time—but you can certainly manage yourself. So start tracking your time. For two weeks, try to track every 15-minute segment of your time while you’re awake. It’s simple enough: write down what you’re doing every quarter hour. If you forget, go back and fill it in, after thinking carefully about what you really were doing. Don’t cheat.

I think you’ll be shocked at how much of your time is sucked up by things that aren’t especially productive. You might be astonished at how much time you spent surfing the Internet, or, again, watching TV (I’m coming back to TV again and again because it’s the Great American Time Waster). You might discover that even when you thought you were advancing your business, you were wasting time. Once you’ve determined which things aren’t especially fruitful, you can decide to do other things instead that advance your business: reading a marketing book, writing a sales letters, setting up a website, or even networking.

So really…you don’t have the time to succeed? Hogwash. We all have the time. What matters is how we use that time. Track your time for two weeks in 15 minute increments. Keep a notepad and a paper in your car wherever you go; keep one on your person, and every 15 minutes write down what you’re doing. Once you understand where you’re going wrong, you can put your problem-solving skills to work fixing it.

I’m as bad as anyone, folks. The reason I’m recommending that you track your time for a while is because I’ve done this myself—and the exercise helped me enormously. It was very instructive for me, because I have a bad habit of surfing the Internet. That ate up a lot of time when I should have been working on my business. When I realized that my work was starting to suffer from this habit, I began monitoring how much time I spent on the Internet doing unproductive things—and I was appalled. I was spending hours on the Internet reading garbage like entertainment and gossip columnists. I was falling into a sort of trap where I was reading news of horrible stuff happening halfway around the world, and I was tracking down multiple articles on each of these horrific events. I was blowing up my day by wasting all this time!

I could have said, “Gosh, I don’t have time to make my business better,” and kept doing what I was doing already, but that wouldn’t have gotten me to where I wanted to go. We all have time; we all have equal time. Again, it’s how you use that time that’s going to determine what kind of results you get. So I decided, “Hey, I’m going to reclaim my time!” I accomplished this by adding software to my computer system that would block my access to the Internet. It would give me 30 minutes a day of reading the news, but after that it would block it. That was a systematic solution to my “lack” of time. And so when I fell back into this bad habit of trying to surf the news, if I had already had my 30 minutes of news that day, it blocked me—and that was great! It was truly a godsend, and it let me eliminate that bad habit. Now I have more time; and because I use that time effectively in my work, I can clearly see the results of this time-tracking exercise.

You can do the same. Track your time. Figure out where it’s all going, so that you can recover it and put it to good use. If you don’t, the only person you’re hurting is yourself…and you have absolutely no excuse for not succeeding. Look, saying “I’m too busy” is, at some level, a meaningless phrase. The person who’s just staring at the wall, eating Cheetos and contemplating their navel, is too busy contemplating their navel and eating Cheetos to do anything else, right? Now, is Cheeto-eating navel contemplation a worthwhile activity? I don’t think so—because what will doing that yield you, in the long term? Philosophic Cheeto-eating skills? Maybe that will prepare you for the competitive eating circuit, but that’s about it.

So, we’re all busy. My question to you is, “What are you busy doing?”

In order to get what you want, you have to make a conscious, deliberate decision about what you’re going to be busy doing. That means that you have to decide what’s important to you. If somebody tells me they’re too busy to do whatever it takes to succeed, what they’re really saying is, “I’ve got other things to do that that are more important to me.” If that’s your position, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re doing anything that’s genuinely important in the long run; all you’re saying is that success isn’t important enough for you to put aside your other activities so that you can work at it. If you really want something bad enough, you’ll create time for it, even if the other things you like to do have to suffer. Even if you have to get up an hour earlier in the morning, you can make the time you need to be successful, if you truly want to!

So: are you ready to make money, or do you want to keep making excuses? Those two options are mutually exclusive, folks. Even if you think you’re too busy, it all comes back to the reality that you can create the necessary time if you want to. To say otherwise is one of the comfortable excuses that we all use to hold ourselves back. We can all create time for things we truly value—and actions speak louder than words, so watch people. If they’re doing the right things, and studying marketing and doing marketing, then they’re going to become successful sooner or later.

But if they’re busy burning up all their time in front of the TV set…well, no wonder they have no time. The average American spends something like 40 hours a week (40 hours a week!) just watching TV. That would be pretty horrible for your personal productivity even if you weren’t watching a lot of violence, getting programmed with negativity, and being brainwashed to consume, to spend, to keep up with the Joneses. It’s horrible.

I was walking with a multi-millionaire friend of mine once and he said to me, “You know, Kent, the number one thing that somebody can do to change their financial future is a very definite thing. Do you know what it is, Kent?” And I’m thinking to myself a variety of things, but I wanted to know his idea and said so. He said, “Here’s what it is: the number one thing that you can do to change your financial future is to get rid of your television set.”

Get rid of your television set. Right about now, some people are throwing this report on the ground and stomping on it, or deleting it from their computer—because they don’t want to face reality. That’s blasphemy to them! They’re probably snarling, “Wow, getting rid of my TV! That idea’s preposterous, Kent! How dare you! What’s wrong with you? Don’t you how important TV is to me?”

Oh really? Because it’s not. TV is not important. Imagine what you could do with an extra 40 hours a week for your business! That would be like a second job, if you got rid of your TV. And really, you don’t have to get rid of it entirely. All you need to do is say, “You know what? I’m going to watch TV for an hour, and that’s it. I’ll set up a timer next to my TV, and once this buzzer goes off, the TV goes off. I’m not going to just surf around and check out what’s on—I’m going to actually plan the shows I’m going to watch. I’ve got seven hours a week, and I’m going to plan how I want to spend those seven hours.” When you do that, you’re watching TV deliberately. But what do most people do? They turn the TV on as soon as they come home, and just plop down on the couch. They watch it the rest of the time they’re home; and by bedtime, that’s it, they’re calling it a day.

The TV is their intellectual entertainment, their babysitter, the pacifier, all rolled into one. It’s horrible, and you don’t have to let it take over your life! So if you have a few shows you like, set a timer. Be deliberate! Plan your TV watching carefully, and in so doing, you’ll find that that’s going to free up a lot of time for you. What are you going to do with all that time? You can pick up a new hobby, spend more time with a significant other, or play with your kids. You can advance your business enterprise, you could exercise more—no matter what you do, your life will get better! Your life will get better when you limit your TV watching: I guarantee that.

Do you think that in the entire 60 or 70 years that we’ve had commercial television, anyone has died seriously regretting the fact that they hadn’t watched enough TV? Of course not. When people look back on their lives as they lay dying, they regret not being with family enough, not telling people that they loved them enough, not accomplishing enough in general with their life. I doubt anyone’s going gentle into that good night whispering, “I’m going to miss Desperate Housewives.”

Believe it or not, TV is one of the easier habits to kick. And if you can excise the tumor of television from your life, or at least shrink it considerably, then you’ve probably got a lot of other unproductive things in there that you can cut, too. Do you really need to play World of Warcraft? Azeroth can probably survive without you. Is your coin collection more important than your business? Not unless your business is a coin store. Are you really doing anything on EBay other than wasting time? Highly doubtful. And you’re not likely to get anywhere reading about Paris Hilton’s latest exploits on the People.com website.

I think you get the point.

So saying “I don’t have time” isn’t a good reason for failing to succeed. If you tell me that, you’re just telling me that other things are more important to you; instead of working on your business, and climbing that ladder to success, you’d rather do something else. That’s not a real reason! We all have equal amounts of time, so what you need to do is recapture your time. Find out where it’s going, then take those activities that don’t really yield results, and jettison them! This isn’t rocket science here, although you’d think so from the reactions I get when I preach it. Just toss or severely limit the things that aren’t productive, even if it’s something you love. You have to set all that aside if you really want to build your business. Do more of the activities that are good and effective in helping you succeed. Learn to love them, so that you’ll want to do them more often. Expand them, and you will become more successful.

I think that what it all boils down to here is that rather than buckling down and doing those sometimes difficult, even unpleasant things that are necessary for success, most of us would rather do something else that sounds better, more fun. In fact, people tell me this straight out all the time. They start something, and instead of staying with it and allotting to it the time that it needs in order to succeed, they see something else they want to try. These people are flighty, which isn’t all that unusual in today’s America; we’re like a nation of ADHD kids. People are addicted to what’s new, what’s hot, and what’s next. Hey, this is a fine thing when you’re trying to sell to a particular marketplace—that’s what keeps us in beer and skittles! But as I’ve said in another article, it’s a habit that entrepreneurs must learn to eschew. Get on the other side of the cash register and stop thinking like a consumer.

Unfortunately, many opportunity seekers will join an opportunity, and then they’ll see something else they want to bounce to. Then they bounce to something else. These bouncers end up spending a fortune and never getting any traction in any of their opportunities…and many of them then blame the opportunities and their promoters for their lack of success! This is lunacy.

Avoid bouncing around, if only to avoid incurring all the start-up costs required to get into these new businesses. Focus your time, which is precious and limited. Stick with fewer opportunities, work them much harder, and don’t just get into something because it’s new. Figure it out. You’ve already made a wise decision to get into the business opportunity, so work that opportunity. Don’t waste time you could be using to succeed at that opportunity, and then complain that you just don’t have time to succeed.

That’s not the truth. That’s a comforting lie, and you can’t afford to lie to yourself.

About the Author

“Kent Sayre is a ‘top gun’ marketer and author. You can get sensational FREE business-building tips online at http://www.KentSayre.com”

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