You were born for a greater purpose than merely waiting for a monthly salary paycheck.
You were born to touch the world in your own special way – to leave a mark as unique as your fingerprint upon the surface of the world.
Though we may sleep on the same bed, we can never dream the same dreams.
Though we can walk side by side and talk soul to soul, we can never think the same thoughts.
That your fingerprint, tongue print, footprint and any other print you make can only be made by you… should be a continuous reminder that this world will never find you by looking anywhere else.
Yet how you wish you were another other than yourself!
Your real mistake was to think you could be your better self by becoming somebody else!
We don’t have another you anywhere else.
That means in life some dreams will forever remain undreamt till you dream them.
Some ideas will never be found unless you, and only you, give yourself time to think them.
Yes, many will think similar to you, but none will think identical to you.
Unless you stretch your hand and touch the world in your own special way, then there are prints and marks that will be forever missing on this woven cloth called life.
Sometimes life will make you feel like a sorry Cinderella dancing in the arms of a smiling prince.
Not even once did it cross Cinderella’s mind that in her absence, the party wouldn’t have brought the prince so much pleasure.
If Cinderella had stayed at home, the party would have gone on and another princess would have been chosen.
Chosen, not for the sake of love but for the sake of the agenda. Chosen, because the real princess had stayed home.
That precisely is the tragedy your absence can cause in this world. Without you, of course, the world will move on, yet it is only out of agenda rather than out of option.
I have been to conferences where the main speaker fails to show up right at the last minute. Yes, the convention moves on, but it feels different.
Somebody takes his place – but nobody takes his gift. You can feel that the conference could have gone much better if the real speaker was present.
This shows that the relief-speakers were merely placeholders; their mission was not to make an impact but to help make the agenda go on.
Know this. There is a place in this world that somebody is using – not because they were born for it – but because they were waiting for you.
Without you at your place, of course, the world keeps moving on, yet it is only out of agenda rather than out of option.
In the races of life, many are given gold medals not because they are the fastest, but because the fastest stayed at home.
The fastest man at the Olympics is not necessarily the fastest person on earth; he is only the fastest person among those who showed up for the race.
Not all at the top deserve it; some are there simply because YOU stayed home.
Arise and march in the direction of your dreams and you will find that “the world makes way for the one who knows where he/she is going.”
The placeholders will step aside, some of them heaving a sigh of relief, because nothing would have been more straining than to have lived keeping your place at the expense of their own. In my book Life Capsules for Success, I write…
“Life is like a restaurant, you can have anything you want as long as you are willing to pay the price.”
– MOFFAT MACHINGURA | Life Capsules for Success
Cinderella became a Queen because she showed up. She took her place at the Ballroom Party – she knew her place was right there in the Prince’s arms – she took it without waiting to be given.
Everyone wanted to be in that place; and many times in the past, she had let her sisters take her place.
They had taken her room and left her to sleep on the kitchen cinders.
They had taken her beautiful dress and left her in tattered rags; and they had taken her father’s affection leaving her lonely and isolated from the first and only man she had ever loved.
Yes, they had taken all she had, but not anymore…
There are moments in your life when you must decide it doesn’t matter what everyone wants or thinks.
There is a time in your life when you must stop being a giver and become a receiver.
You can’t be a good giver if you are a bad receiver, that’s because you can never give what you have never received.
Those who give and never receive will not be around to keep giving for long, no matter how generous they may consider themselves to be.
Cinderella looked at the Prince and fell in love again, she looked at the palace and saw her new home.
Even though she was wearing rags it didn’t stop her from believing in royal robes.
She showed up at the party, fell into the Prince’s arms and said to herself, “This is my place and this time I won’t let anybody take it away from me!” Are you taking your place?
Taking your place in this world is going to happen but definitely not in a day. There is no such thing as overnight success. Overnight success comes from many sleepless nights of hard work.
I should add that success is born not only from hard work but also from successive failures.
Follow your dreams because that is the only journey in this life that is worth it.
There is no problem with a dream that takes forty years to be completed; the problem is when a dream takes forty years to begin.
Postponing the journey of your dreams because accomplishing it might take you long is NOT going to make the journey any shorter.
It only makes the journey impossible. You lose the time and the life you were given to fulfil it.
In that palace party, Cinderella knew all her splendid linen dress and shining glass slippers would turn to rags and dust precisely upon the clock striking midnight twelve.
Cinderella was a dancer running out of time.
But Cinderella had a choice though. She could protest, “This is not fair! How come only I have got to have a curfew! Why can’t I be here till sunrise like everyone else?”
But Cinderella didn’t waste her precious lifetime complaining about why the bad that happens to her wasn’t happening to everyone else.
Perhaps she knew that life does not need to be fair. She knew life only needs to be just.
Everyone reaps what they sow, though none can decide the amount of seed to start off with.
In that way, life is fair by being unfair to everybody.
Perhaps it was that truth that made her say, “Unlike everyone else, I don’t have much time, I only have enough to give life my best shot!”
If you were Cinderella, knowing you only had half a night to be a princess would you have found time for a warm-up?
Yet many people waste each day laying off their dreams on “Someday I Will” island because they think they are here for long.
The Biblical texts tell of a rich tycoon (and disciple of Jesus Christ) named Joseph of Arimathea. Joseph had dug a grave for himself when he was still alive.
Unlike many then and today, Joseph knew there was no need to deny the unavoidable. Death is inevitable, the best you can do is prepare for it.
Gosh! No wonder Joseph became such a great man; he faced every day knowing he was running out of time.
Just like Cinderella at the party, Joseph always knew that life has a curfew. Every moment Joseph told himself, “I don’t have much time, I only have enough to give life my best shot!”
If you knew you had only nine months left on this earth, how differently would you start to live?
I am sure in those nine months you would make a more tremendous difference than your whole lifetime ever made.
If you are still single, I am sure you would stop being shy and make your first try. Not even for love, but because you don’t want to be among those who died before they tried.
As for all the people you love, if left with just nine months you will, this time, love them much better.
You will remember those that loved you and you were too busy to love them back and tell yourself “…if I find you in my arms again, this time I’ll hold you forever…”
That is the miracle of living life with a deadline – you stop saving your energy for only the day you flee from your fears, and start using your energy for every day that you are following your faith.
The days in your life are like the money in your purse – you are as rich as how much remained in your purse not as how much went out of it.
Similarly, life is NOT how many days you have lived, life is how many days you are left with.
You can never know how much time you have left, but you can very well know each day that passes by leaves you with one day less.
Every day a day drops out of the purse of your life.
Yesterday your days of life were few…today they are fewer. Like Cinderella, you and I are dancers running out of time!
From the first day that you came into the world, there was already a set day when you should leave this world.
You already had a finish line the day you touched the starting line. Every day is a step towards that finish line.
That means we don’t live one day at a time, we die one day at a time. Death is not an event; death is a process that happens to us one day per day.
Of course, drugs, accidents and Sexually Transmitted Diseases will increase that rate to losing one month of your lifetime per day, losing the whole lifetime in a day, or losing the whole year per day.
But the truth is, every day you are cutting off a slice of your time from the pie circle called your lifetime.
Now get this…
You can’t change the fact that you are dying every day, but you can decide what you are dying for every day.
At the end of each day, you should ask yourself, “Is what I did the whole of today worth exchanging a day for? Are the people I spent the day with worth losing a day for?”
Whether it’s your girlfriend or boyfriend, a friend, or workmate… Whoever you spend your time with must be as important to you as time itself.
One day on my way to train people on Time Management, I misplaced my best watch. I was losing time looking for a clock. I left it.
The only thing it was going to tell me after I had found it was how much time I lost looking for it.
It’s better to lose the clock than to lose time. It’s not your clock that is ticking away; it’s your life.
One of my most in-demand business seminars is on Productivity and Creativity.
In the Productivity session, I say something about time that is so true that it always shocks people who hear it for the first time. I say that,
“We don’t have time, time has us.
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We can’t stop time from passing by; we can only decide what to do with it while it passes.
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Either we use it or we lose it.
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Don’t think failing to use time will stop you from losing it.
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We are all losing time, but it’s only the few wise among us who have chosen to lose it usefully.”
– MOFFAT MACHINGURA
You start to be wise when you know you have little. Always live knowing you have little time left.
For a fact: If you don’t budget your money you will spend it on food. Especially pizza and fizzy drinks, chocolate cake and candy.
Without a budget, your eyes are deceived into seeing plenty when you have little.
What you perceive as plenty you will use pleasurably, but what you perceive as little you will use purposefully.
Seeing the days of your life as plenty will make you live merely for your pleasures. But seeing the days of your life as few will make you live for purpose.
Live like Cinderella at the party. She stepped to the beat knowing that she was running out of time. It was the sense of having “little time left” that made her make her every step her best step.
Dominate Your Day
How the World’s Greatest Achievers & Richest People Manage Their Time
You cannot afford to waste time because time is the stuff life is made of.
Life will never be given to you as a full seventy-year lifetime, it is given one day at a time and how you take care of each day is how you are taking care of your life.
If you have attended my life makeover seminars and conferences you will find that I go on further to really show you how you can make each day a tool that changes a part of your life.
If you keep achieving much in a day, one day you will look back through the years and find you achieved much with your life.
To have a remarkable life; create remarkable days.
Your days are a tool. Use them.
It’s not time that changes your life, it’s what you do with it.
Every day you must accomplish something that translates a part of your dreams into a part of your reality.
Waking up into a new day is like climbing onto a horse. Time is a horse. It’s a stubborn horse that you can’t stop, but can only pull the reins and direct it where you want it to take you.
Here are eight tips on how a hundred millionaires and more than twenty billionaires have been known to manage their time.
i. They Write Tomorrow’s To-Do List… Today.
One of the reasons we can’t wake up early is we don’t know what to wake up for.
Decide today what will make tomorrow worth having.
Every night before you go to bed, list three core things or Core Tasks that you want to accomplish by the end of the next day.
Core Tasks are those special kinds of activities that will change your career, your business, or your life in a big way.
Every day you must have at least one life-changing or business-changing action – every day take such an action.
I choose to have three because the faster you move towards your dreams the faster your rate of achieving them.
Don’t waste your energy on Other Tasks before you do your Core Tasks.
Many people mistake Core Tasks for Other Tasks. Core Tasks are those tasks that make life happen, Other Tasks are those that maintain what happened.
Let me give you examples…
Core Tasks include important tasks such as
- Studying
- Brainstorming on a better product
- Writing a marketing strategy
- Solving an important problem
- Meditation
- Creating the Product
After Core Tasks add four more Other Tasks. These are tasks that are urgent but not important. The main examples are…
- All meetings
- Answering phone calls
- Checking Emails and Mobile Messages
- Writing and Reading Work Reports
Other Tasks are tasks that won’t change your life in any way, but they must be done because they maintain the change that your Core Tasks are already making.
Without clearly outlined daily Core Tasks your life will be filled with activity without productivity. A great Life Coach and productivity development trainer, Tonderai Mandaza, would say, “there is a difference between being a busy person and being a business person.”
I add that busy people are those who focus on doing a lot of things yet business people are those who focus on making a profit from what they do.
Core Tasks are those that directly help you fulfill your goals for a prosperous and profitable life.
A vision is a goal for a lifetime. Project Deadlines are goals for a certain period of time. Then a To-Do List shows you your goal for the day. You need daily goals to achieve your lifetime goals.
Always start your day with a goal because what you will achieve at the end of your life is determined by what you are willing to achieve every day of your life.
Do you know why most people never set goals? It’s because they don’t want something that shows them they failed.
They rather just fail and never know! That’s because to fail and never know, makes you think you have never failed.
Unfortunately, you can’t learn from a failure you refuse to recognize.
Set a goal for every day that heaven gives to you, and refuse to let the sun set without that goal being fulfilled. G
od gives us a day every day to show us how precious we mean to him, what we do with each of those days shows him how precious he means to us.
Write your To-Do List… tonight.
ii) Decide Today What to Wear the Next Day
Have you ever noticed there are days you turn and turn in bed till ten o’clock in the morning – and if your friend calls to ask why you are still in bed you shamefully close your face with your hand and say, “You know what – I can’t figure out what to wear!”
The worst thing about getting dressed is you can’t go anywhere before you do it.
No wonder Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple – the first United States Company to be worth more than one trillion dollars (Forbes, August 2018) – always wore the same color of jeans, sneakers, and polo neck every day. The time you spend deciding what to wear can cost you millions.
Have you ever heard of something called the Decision Threshold? There is a limit to the number of quality decisions that a human mind can make in a day.
The limit is not exactly defined, but studies show that the more decisions you make during the day the more you lose the mental energy to make good ones during the same day.
The Decision Threshold is mainly evident in Stock Market Trading and Forex Trading. It doesn’t matter how well you are doing on that day, limit the number of trading decisions you make and leave the rest for the next day.
That’s because the more good decisions you make during the day, the more you lose mental energy to keep making more good decisions during the same day.
No wonder Mark Zuckerberg the billionaire founder of Facebook wears the same colors and jeans every day just like Steve Jobs.
No wonder Richard Branson – the billionaire founder of Virgin Airways; Virgin Active; Virgin telecommunications and hundreds of many other virgins you may think of (as long they are not women) – is always dressed in a white shirt and white trousers.
These are people who have discovered life is too precious to spend it thinking about clothes. Find one thing that amazingly fits you, stick to it every day, and go out to change the world!!!
Even highly achieving women choose one hairstyle that fits them perfectly and stick with it for years.
This principle is as old as time itself – you can hear its echoes from as far as two thousand years ago (30 AD) when Jesus sits upon a rock and teaches multitudes saying, “Is not life more than food and the body more than clothes?” (Matthew 6:25)
Even John the Baptist who came before Jesus always wore the same kind of clothes. And so did Elijah who always had the same coat.
These people were highly effective in their time because they found something to live for that was greater than what they had to eat or wear.
Don’t get me wrong, just like you I like to look good too. I will say more on that after the following side note.
SIDE NOTE: This side note is to someone who is wondering where the next meal could be coming from.
Maybe you are a Cinderella boy or girl feeling like you can’t enter the palaces of life simply because you don’t have something good enough to wear.
Actually, maybe you are reading this, and you are so poor that even poor people call you poor…
Let me tell you…
Don’t focus on the torn dress, focus on the palace.
Focusing on the torn dress only shows you what to cry for, but focusing on the palace shows you what to live for, what to be strong for and what to fight for.
Your purpose is more important than your situation.
I know how it feels to live without. I know how it feels to walk to school without shoes or in bathroom slippers – because once upon a time I was where you are.
I still remember those days, and I still force back my tears when I remember them.
It was in those worst days of my life that I found the best lessons.
I learned that you have to see beyond bad days in order to go through them.
I learned that what you hate will continue to occupy your life till you learn to focus on what you love.
I learned that bad times mean nothing to a person who has found a reason to live.
I learned that purpose is the prosperity of the soul, and that it’s only a life that is lived for a purpose that will find true success.
Don’t let the urgency of your circumstances distract you from the importance of your purpose.
BACK TO OUR TOPIC: Anyway let’s get back to time management. I shared that side note because without it – you wouldn’t have found the power to protect your Decision Threshold…
Don’t get me wrong…
It’s good to look good.
I’m not saying be a nerd…
People are different. Some people make fashion, some follow fashion, and some have no idea what this thing called fashion is (you can even see it from the way they dress).
If you love to look good, here is a big millionaire tip – decide tonight what you will wear tomorrow. If you can, even decide it for the whole week in advance.
Here is an easier option: simply search and download an application for your computer or phone and let it decide what you can wear every day.
Remember you can’t increase the number of hours that you have each day, but the less time you have to spend on doing trivial things the more time you will have to do the necessary.
Let’s go to tip number three…
