Waiting. It’s a fact of life. You’ll wait in line, you’ll wait to get somewhere, you’ll wait for a package in the mail. Waiting eventually brings on frustration, and that brings on complaining. Well complaining can be fun and I like to indulge a little myself sometimes, but…

Wouldn’t it be better to turn this time into something that will radically change your life for the better?

A little dramatic? Perhaps, but not far off the mark. I did this just yesterday on a flight and it came as easily as staring into space, shifting uncomfortably in my seat, or overpaying for a hamburger.

I accomplished it by picking up a book. Profound? Hardly. There is a little more than that to it, but not much. Specifically I made a conscious decision to learn something new in the 8 hours of my life that I would be devoting getting from point A to point B. Having made this simple and easy decision I packed accordingly, stuffing into my luggage Josh Gordon’s Selling 2.0 and The Wine Brats’ Guide to Living with Wine for a lighter read.

I arrived at my destination with 5 new ideas to immediately implement into my business sales process, along with information on how to build a wine cellar cheap.

The lesson here is that while you can’t always (or even often) choose your environment, you sure as heck can drastically alter the results you receive from your situation. The best part is that the line between complacent inaction and amazing achievement is very thin. You stand on it everytime you choose between staring at the neck of the passenger in front of you, watching the in-flight movie, getting work done, or picking up a book. All it takes to end up on the great side is shifting your balance a little towards it.

I highly recommend choosing educational reading above all else. The absolute best part of putting wasted time like this to good use is that you haven’t committed to getting the other mundane but somehow important stuff done during it, such as answering e-mails, washing dishes, or writing a report. The time has already been written-off as wasted, it’s sitting there in the discarded inventory bin, and now you have the opportunity to seize it to get all that reading done that you’ve been putting off. A famous quote by an author whose name escapes me states “The people who complain the most about not having enough time are those who waste the most of it”. This is your chance to eliminate that “I don’t have the time” excuse and learn new concepts and ideas that can literally reinvent your future.

Another great task to do when in a waiting situation is the infamous goal planning. Putting pen to paper and setting or revising goals for your business and your life is in my opinion one of the very few things that you could do which will have an even more lasting and beneficial impact on your life as education.

Stop dreading the Wait and make it the most productive and insightful time you have!

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This entry was posted on Saturday, April 22nd, 2006 at 5:03 pm and is filed under Productivity, Books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.