Make Time Your Friend
Time management from the angle of mental growth: accept reality, persist, act now, and befriend time with your mind.
I’d heard of this book for ages but never thought to read it. I’ve been using WeChat Reading a lot lately, it got recommended to me again, so I just started reading.
1. Overview
This book approaches time management from the angle of mental growth, arguing that time management is the key to success.
Drawing on cases from his own career, the author shows us how to open up our minds, how to use our minds to befriend time, how to understand what time management really means, make breakthroughs in it, and then use our minds to start our own journey to success in life.
2. Main Content
2.1 Befriending time
- This book argues that only after opening up your mind and improving your ability to think can you do the right things in the right way. Only then is time your friend; otherwise, it is your enemy.
- In fact, for young people, growth matters more than success. Growth is something everyone can achieve and something everyone should pursue. And there is really only one road to growth: accumulation.
- Human rationality is built on accepting reality. If you can’t accept reality, all growth is an illusion. Only those who persist can accept reality, and only by accepting reality can you start using your mind to make rational decisions, and then possibly befriend time.
- Time is the friend of realistic people and the enemy of unrealistic ones.
2.2 Persistence
- Nothing can be done well all at once. If you don’t do this and don’t do that, in the end it’s no longer “not doing some things” but “doing nothing at all,” and you end up achieving nothing.
- Not studying because you can’t get high marks, not doing something because you can’t do it perfectly: these are losers’ excuses. We must learn to accept our own imperfection and the world’s imperfection; only by accepting them can we move step by step toward better.
- It’s not that you do well because you’re interested; you become interested because you do well.
- All success in learning depends on just two things, persistence and learning methods, and persistence is itself the most important learning method.
- The most fundamental reason for achieving nothing is giving up.
- What is perseverance again? Strategy plus repetition.
2.3 Act now
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Never again ask “when is the best time to start,” because there is only one answer: now!
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It’s never too late to start; what matters is that you must start now.
The best time to plant a tree was ten years ago; the second best time is now.
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After accepting a task, when should you start? The sooner the better? That’s not enough: start now!
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Rather than wasting time looking for a learning method that suits you, start acting right away and study diligently, so you don’t waste even more time.
2.4 Other
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Success has never been something everyone can achieve; not in the past, not now, and not in the future.
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No matter how fun useless things are, you shouldn’t do them, or at least do fewer of them. Useful things, however dull, should be done, and you should find ways to make them fun.
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Life is of course not smooth sailing, and effort doesn’t necessarily get you to your final goal. But if you don’t make the effort, aren’t your chances even smaller? Besides, even if you don’t get what you want, what you accumulate along the way is “wealth” no one can steal. However long the road, there will always be a result that satisfies you to some degree.
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Opportunities always exist; you must believe this without a doubt!
Because I believe, I see.
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Find a way to have fun in any situation; complaining only wastes more energy and time.
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Reading widely greatly improves a person’s ability to take in new things.
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Breaking tasks down is a very important step: the finer you break them down, the more feasible they become and the easier they are to finish.
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How to judge whether a goal is realistic is simple: first, someone has already done it; second, I’m not too far behind that person.
3. Summary
After reading this book, I remembered only one sentence: keep doing the right things.
We live in a rapidly changing era, and lifelong learning is the most important thing. AI is surely the dividend of our era. Keep learning and using AI, and let AI create productivity and wealth. That’s the thing most worth doing!