The Difference Every Day Makes

One day doesn’t seem like very much time and if we get a lot of good stuff done or we do nothing but watch TV all day it may not seem to make much difference in our world let alone the rest of the world.  Hey, it’s only one day. No big deal. I’ve got lots and lots of days ahead of me—like maybe 50 or 100 thousand more of those days before being blasted off this planet. But those single goof-off days can add up quickly and none of us have near as many days as we might figure to accomplish what we want, especially if we set our eyes and minds on big and lofty goals.

Yesterday as I was driving home from a great doubles tennis match I did some quick figuring in my head and was somewhat shocked at the number of days I had left in my life or I should I say the lack of number of days. Even if I made it to age 100 my remaining number of days, with me being almost 71, was only a little over 10,000, and that was IF I make it to age 100!

Even if you are only a mere 25 years of age, that still only gives you just over 27,000 days to age 100.  Now to some people that might seem like a lot of days but to me it’s a pretty small number, therefore I am inclined to think that to waste even one day is a very serious matter, unless of course you don’t have any big and lofty plans and goals.

The good news however, is that I am totally convinced from my experience in life that if you are keenly aware of your hours and days as you experience those days of your life then you will be much more likely to not only set good, worthwhile and important goals but you will be many times more likely to reach those goals.  And because we all have a limited number of days–whether it’s 10, 20 or 27,000–we need to put strict time deadlines on those goals, because if we do that then we are much less likely to waste those precious days and more likely to reach your goals.

Recently I came across an article about me that appeared on the front page of the Sunday Register Star of Rockford, Illinois and I was quite stunned at some of the things they quoted me as saying way back on November 1^st of 1981.

I was only 37 back when the paper ran the story entitled “He Quit Bragging after his First Million”.  As I re-read the story that they wrote about me, I must admit that I was a bit surprised that in talking about my beginnings as a construction worker 16 years earlier, there in Rockford, making only $4.50 an hour, that I had already set my sights on becoming a millionaire.  Plus, even at the young age of 21, I was acutely aware of this thing called “time”.

I had figured that even working as hard as I was, making just $4.50 an hour would only bring me a mere $9360 in a year and even after 50 years, I would only have made $468,000. Of course, when I considered that I would have to spend money to live, I quickly figured out that there had to be some formula or secret to becoming a millionaire because just working an hourly job wasn’t going to do it. I was to find out later, using each precious day to look for the answer, that there was, in fact, a formula to making millions and one that doesn’t require a person to invent Facebook or Amazon or some hi-tech computer program.

If I hadn’t realized how critically important each and every day was and how few days are in a person’s life, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have spent my days searching for the “financial formula”.  So please never forget the great and precious value of a single day in your life and use it accordingly.

Next week I want to share more of the newspaper article and more specifics of the “financial formula”.

 

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