The other day, my youngest whose almost three, strolled up next to me as I was working and said, “Dada, look at what I made!” with a cute and excited voice. I immediately replied, “one second, I am just sending out an email (as if he knew, or cared what that was).”
No sooner did I reply, when my son started to say again, “look…look Dada…you aren’t looking”.
“One second I said, I promise” as I struggled to get this email out.
“Dada…Dada…Dada…give me your eyes,” he said as I then suddenly stopped everything and gave him my undivided attention. His face lit up with joy as he showed me what he had drawn, after which he was content and went off to play.
The irony here is that my three-year-old doesn’t know time (yet) but he actually waited one second before asking me again, and again and…well you get the idea.
- The question is: “Why did it take so long” for me to be present?
- The answer is: I got my priorities backward. I did what most people do, assume we have more time to make someone else wait or that the moment will wait for us.
The reality is that it won’t.
Time is the most precious commodity and we waste so much of it each and every day, missing out on the moments we may never get back.
Stop thinking you have all the time in the world, you don’t. You can’t recycle wasted time.
You may be surprised how much can happen in just one second, I know I was:
- A bee will flap its wings over 270 times.
- Over 2,000 pounds of edible food is thrown away in the U.S.A.
- Six babies are born every second around the world.
- 41,000+ status updates are posted to Facebook.
- Americans consume 1,500 bottles of water.
- Lightning will strike the ground 100 times.
- Bill Gates will earn $250+ every single second.
- 8,341,666,667 Hearts will beat worldwide
- 2,437,859 Emails will be sent
- Earth will travel 18.5 miles.
As many of us recently moved our clocks forward, I couldn’t help hearing the panicked cries about losing an hour of sleep, but if you really think about it, you haven’t lost anything. You still get the same 24hrs in the day or 86,400 seconds, and that’s exactly 86,400 chances to connect with those you care about personally and professionally.
For some tools to help with time freedom:
The next time your employee, spouse, partner, child, mentee, family member or friend asks you for a second of your time, think about the moment you may miss creating with that special someone by telling them to “wait a second”.
The floor is yours: You have 86,400 chances to make your time worth living. What will you do with yours?
With Leadership,
Joshua
www.JoshHMiller.com
Joshua Miller is a creative leader and impactful executive coach.
His career spans both the advertising world and the world of leadership. In advertising, he was the creative lead, responsible for the campaign strategy for Fortune 100 brands. Today, he is an innovator. He’s supporting the executive development and change management for many of the same companies.
Joshua studied at Syracuse University, NYU and Stanford. He combines that background with his deep knowledge of organizational behavior, performance and change management. He focuses on the analysis, design, development, delivery, and evaluation of scalable and global talent development solutions programs.
Joshua is a Master Certified Coach. He trained with the International Coaching Federation and CTI (The Coaches Training Institute).