START CHOOSING TIME.
I use to make fun of the sales guys who lived paycheck to paycheck and partied every weekend and never saved a dime.
This was my thought as a 22 year old with 50k in the bank and starting to look at buying my first house. A couple months later my mom got sick again and before I could realize what happened I was one of those guys.
Every weekend was filled with thousands of dollars spent and an unrelenting amount of guilt and shame.
You couldn’t pay me enough to go back to how I felt waking up Monday mornings. I feel sick just thinking about it.
It was 8 in the morning on a Wednesday, I was standing in line at 711 behind people getting their coffees before work. I was buying beer and still awake from the night before. A few hours later I remember staring at myself in the mirror. I was disgustingly skinny with a beer belly, bags under my eyes, skin was yellow, totally unemployable, and incredibly lonely.
I remember thinking what are you doing kevin? Is this really your life?
I was a college athlete. I was great in sales. I was raised the right way, yet I was not a very good person. I was unemployed, in serious debt, and had a major drinking problem.
How did I get to this point?
My mom died a couple months before, I finally got fired after countless second chances, I was using my credit cards like free money while moving from a weekend partier to an every day drinker/drug user.
It was not long after that moment that I was overdosing in the back of a taxi cab at 430 in the morning on my way back from Hollywood. I remember praying in the back of that cab for my mom and whatever God I thought was out there to save me. All I wanted was to wake up because I honestly thought I wasn’t going to.
“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people just exist”
-Oscar Wilde
As I reflect on my life on my 31st birthday, it is almost as if I went from one end of the spectrum to the polar opposite.
I went from a life that had such darkness to a life that is beyond my wildest dreams. I am someone who now sees just how precious life is and it shouldn’t be wasted.
I was the ultimate time waster but now I am DONE wasting time.
By some miracle, I have 5.5 years of sobriety. I recently walked away from a job and industry where I made nearly half a million dollars in 2 years because I didn’t believe in it anymore.
I don’t believe you should work in a job you hate just to make money and that was the only reason I was there. What kind of life is that?
We only have a limited amount of time on this planet, I don’t want to look back at a life of what ifs. A study said that 85% of the workforce is unhappy with their job. That’s ridiculous! There has to be more to life than working, watching TV, waiting for the weekend, and paying bills.
Here is a terrifying statistic. In a 65 year lifespan the average American will end up spending 9 of those years watching TV and another 4 years looking down at their phone!
The point I want to make by sharing some of my past, is for you to look at areas in your life where you are wasting time.
Life is short, way shorter than we think and we don’t have an unlimited amount of time to finish our “bucket list”.
On our deathbed are we going to wish we had more money or that we had more time? We would wish for more time! We would trade it all to have one more minute on this beautiful planet.
Fortunately, we are here now, we don’t need to be on our deathbed or to have near death experience to wake up. We can wake up right this second! And when we get to the end of our lives we can have a smile on our face because we stopped wasting time, we got everything out of life we possibly could, we have zero regrets.
If there is a passion or a dream you have and you just haven’t done it yet because the conditions aren’t perfect, stop waiting and please from the bottom of my heart go do it.
If not now, when?