Invest Your Time In Things That Matter
What I have learned most this year is how to invest my time wisely. This can be applicable to anything in life. Your time at work, time with friends or family, time off traveling, etc. To make a long story short as I will write a blog about it sometime soon, I invested about 10 months of work into new products that ended up being manufactured completely wrong. This resulted in me losing not only my 10 months of hard work, but a lot of money. To put it in perspective, I describe it as spending a year at college working on your final thesis paper or project, only to have it fail due to circumstances that were completely out of your control.
Now before you start feeling bad for me, don't, because that's not the point of this post. To repeat myself, I plan on going into what happened earlier this year in another post in the hopes that someone can relate to it and possible learn from what I went through. But, back to the point of me writing this.
As I started to get over what happened, the main thing I kept reflecting on was the way I managed my time. How I should have invested more time into looking into other manufactures, rather than just a few. How I should have gotten more opinions. How I should have been more cautious with the investment and so on. Now, even though what happened was completely out of my control, at first I was really disappointed in myself for the amount of time that I had, in a sense, wasted on this. But, my opinion changed recently on a recent trip I had out to L.A. I was there for a few different meetings regarding different aspects of Soul Honey. In one of the meetings someone said something that I really resonated with. He said something along the lines to this, "Invest the time into finding the right people to work with. Once you do that you won't have to waste your time micromanaging them, as you can rest assured you hired the best. Thus, giving you more time to use and invest in on different aspects of the company." Now he was telling me this relating to a certain aspect of Soul Honey, but it got me thinking....
After a few weeks of thinking about what that meant, to essentially invest my time wisely, I realized we should do this with everything in life. From the work we do, to the people we spend time with and so on. We should use every day to the fullest. Now, that was a completely round about way to get to the real reason I sat down to write this post.
My family and I have a good friend who was a successful baseball player for the Angels. Every time I saw him for the better part of last year he told me about this podcast called, "How I Built This." He would encourage me to listen to it and every time I saw him a few weeks later he would ask if I had done so. The answer was the same every time, that I would get around to it sometime soon.
Now flash forward to this year. I got back form those meetings in L.A inspired and energized. I had been really down on all this time I had lost and was motivated to not let that happen again. Whether it was a week day or the weekend, I was going to carpe diem, gosh dang it!
So, the day came that I decided to turn off my music and turn on the "How I Built This" podcast. Because if I had a 30 minute drive to the print house, as much as I love singing Taylor Swift at the top of my lungs, I could use that 30 minutes learning from other entrepreneurs. It was one of the best decisions I have made recently. I find myself wanting to drive the long route home just so I can listen to the podcast longer. I have learned so much in these past few weeks, I am kicking myself I didn't do it sooner!
So, all that to say, use your time wisely. Listen to and learn from the right people. Don't wait the better part of a year to take someones advice, try it out immediately.
If you are business minded or simply just like learning from interesting and inspiring people, I can't recommend these podcasts enough. I am leaving a link below, as well as some of my favorite companies I listened to. But if anything, I hope this post motivates you to not waste your time. To use it, but use it wisely. A simple change, like listening to a podcast, can inspire and motivate you. I encourage you to give it a try.
And don't worry, you will still catch me on the freeway jamming out in my car, but most likely it will be jamming out to some amazing entrepreneur I am listing to.
Thanks for reading!
xx,
Abby
Founder and CEO of Soul Honey
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How I Built This - With Guy Raz (https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510313/how-i-built-this)
-Wholefoods
-Warby Parker
-Bumble
-Honest Tea
-Southwest Airlines
-LaraBar
-Patagonia
-Ben and Jerry's
Just to name a few!