Productivity

A teacher walks to the front of his class one day and sets a large bucket and a box of rocks on the table. 

The teacher silently transfers the rocks from the box to the bucket while his curious students look on. When the bucket is filled to the brim with rocks, he asks the class, “Is the bucket full?”

They respond with a collective “Yes.”

The teacher then reaches under his desk and pulls out a bowl of marbles and proceeds to pour the marbles into the bucket until they reach the top.

The teacher asks again, “Is the bucket full?”

The students are a little more apprehensive this time and hesitate to answer. A few brave souls speak up and say, “No.”

“Good,” the teacher says. He reaches under his desk yet again and pulls out a bag of sand and fills the bucket, followed by a pitcher of water which he dumps over the sand, marbles, and rocks.

The teacher then motions to the bucket and addresses the class once again: “What’s the point of all this?”

The Lesson:

The “rocks” are metaphors for the most important things in your life: family, health, faith, love, education, life goals, etc.

If you don’t put the rocks in your bucket first, you won’t fit them all in. In other words, if you focus too much on the little things (the marbles, sand, and water), you’ll lose sight of what matters most in your life.

We waste so much time on things that don’t matter.

The average American will spend 137,904 hours  of their life watching television.

That’s 5,746 days.

15 years.

If you’d rather spend your time doing something that offers a return—whether financial or emotional—on your investment, make sure you focus on taking care of the big rocks in your life first.

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Barry Dillah

The joy-per-dollar efficiency.

Money is permanent. You have it until you trade it for something, and then that trade is permanent — you are thereafter permanently without that money. It’s gone and belongs to someone else now. Therefore it’s important to consider the permanence of whatever benefit you traded it for.

Think about it: when you die, you will have earned and spent a specific, finite number of dollars. For you the number might be 2,193,003, or maybe it’s 8,806,550, or even 217,101,992. Whatever it is, at the moment you die, it is a real and actual number. Even if you never wrote any of your purchases down, there’s an actual list of things these dollars were traded for, and each of these trades contributed to (or maybe detracted from) the overall amount of pleasure and fulfillment you experienced in your life.

There’s an enormous range of possible things to trade these finite dollars for, but ultimately there’s only one thing you’re trying to get for your money, which is quality of life. Universally, we want the feelings in our lives to be good, and there’s really nothing else we value. If you could see your “final balance sheet” and look back on how things went, you’d intuitively know which of those transactions contributed significantly to your overall happiness and which did not.

This trading can be done extremely well or extremely badly. The joy-per-dollar efficiency between different trades can vary by factors of thousands or millions. So, what are you trading your money for? Do you invest in people or things? Do you invest in yourself? What makes you happy?

Remember, it's not how much you earn that is important. The important thing is paying attention to how much is needed so that you can trade it to have the quality of life that is important to you. 

A $4 cup of coffee could buy you 15 mins of happiness. $1 could also buy you a game online that could give you countless hours of fun and happiness. Do you trade for short term happiness or long term happiness? Remember to trade wisely.

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Barry Dillah

Before it's too late...

Here are ten things you need to know, before it’s too late:

1. This moment is your life. – Your life is not between the moments of your birth and death.  Your life is between now and your next breath.  The present – the here and now – is all the life you ever get.  So live each moment in full, in kindness and peace, without fear and regret.  And do the best you can with what you have in this moment; because that is all you can ever expect of anyone, including yourself.  Read The Power of Now.
2. A lifetime is not very long. – This is your life, and you have to fight for it.  Fight for what’s right.  Fight for what you believe in.  Fight for what’s important to you. Fight for the people you love, and never forget to tell them how much they mean to you.  Realize that right now you’re lucky because you still have a chance.  So stop for a moment and think. Whatever you still need to do, start doing it today. There are only so many tomorrows.
3. The sacrifices you make today will pay dividends in the future. – When it comes to working hard to achieve a dream – earning a degree, building a business, or any other personal achievement that takes time and commitment – one thing you have to ask yourself is:  “Am I willing to live a few years of my life like many people won’t, so I can spend the rest of my life like many people can’t?”
4. When you procrastinate, you become a slave to yesterday. – But when you are proactive, it’s as if yesterday is a kind friend that helps take a load off your back. So do something right now that your future self will thank you for.  Trust me, tomorrow you’ll be happy you started today. Read The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.
5. Failures are only lessons. – Good things come to those who still hope even though they have been disappointed, to those who still believe even though they have tasted failure, to those who still love even though they have been hurt. So never regret anything that has happened in your life; it cannot be changed, undone. Take it all as lessons learned and move on with grace.
6. You are your most important relationship. – Happiness is when you feel good about yourself without feeling the need for anyone else’s approval.  You must first have a healthy relationship with yourself before you can have a healthy relationship with others. You have to feel worthwhile and acceptable in your own eyes, so that you’ll be able to look confidently into the eyes of the people around you and connect with them.
7. A person’s actions speak the truth. – You’re going to come across people in your life who will say all the right words at all the right times; but in the end, it’s always their actions you should judge them by.  So pay attention to what people do. Their actions will tell you everything you need to know.
8. Small acts of kindness can make the world a better place. – Smile at people who look like they are having a rough day.  Be kind to them.  Kindness is the only investment that never fails. Wherever there is a human being, there’s an opportunity for kindness.  Learn to give, even if it’s just a smile, not because you have too much, but because you understand there are so many others who feel like they have nothing at all.  Read Way of the Peaceful Warrior.
9. Behind every beautiful life, there has been some kind of pain. – You trip and you fall, you make mistakes and you fail, but you stand strong through it all – you live and you learn. You have been wounded, not defeated.  Think of what a priceless gift it is to grow through these experiences – to breathe, to think, to struggle, and to overcome challenges in the pursuit of the things you love. Yes, sometimes you will encounter heartache along the way, but that’s a small price to pay for immeasurable moments of love and joy. Which is why you must keep stepping forward even when it hurts, because you know the inner strength that has carried you this far can carry you the rest of the way.
10. Time and experience heals pain. –  Look at the circles below. The black circles represent our relative life experiences.  Mine is larger because I am older and have experienced more in my lifetime.  The smaller red circles represent a negative event in our lives. Assume we both experienced the same exact event, whatever the nature. Notice that the negative event circles are the same size for each of us; but also notice what percentage of the area they occupy in each of the black circles. Your negative event seems much larger to you because it is a greater percentage of your total life experiences.  I am not diminishing the importance of these events; I simply have a different perspective on it.  What you need to understand is that an overwhelmingly painful event in your life right now will one day be part of your much larger past and not nearly as significant as it seems right now.

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Barry Dillah