Don’t forget about Time Management

I just recorded the 4th episode of It’s All Mahalo with my girlfriend, Camille. It’ll be published around Friday. If you want to listen to the first 3 episodes, you can find it wherever you get your podcasts: Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, iHeartRadio.

This week, Camille and I had a conversation about our passions, our futures, and being okay with giving up some control. We culminated the discussion by talking about how we can implement these concepts practically into our daily lives. The answer, as Camille pointed out, has to be Time Management.

The biggest takeaway from this conversation as to focus on timely habits rather than achieving goals within a timeframe. An example: if you want to start reading before bed, make it a priority to read for 20 minutes before bed as opposed to reading 40 pages before bed. This allows you to have some freedom within your schedule and focusses on the process of reading rather than the end goal of completing a book. With emphasis on the habit of reading, we become free to read rather than bound to our commitment of reading a certain amount.

This method can be extrapolated to many things aside from reading. The next time I want to implement something into my daily life, I’m going to focus on the habit over achievement, on the process instead of the goal. After all, life is the process of living, not the goal of having lived.

Gratitude Over Regret

Camille and I have been trying our hand at Flip Life, that is, going to yard sales, buying someone’s junk for cheap, and selling it on eBay for profit. We’ve made a good chunk of change so far—plenty to pay for our textbooks, a few meals out, some tanks of gas, and our podcast startup costs (more on that soon). We’re still sitting on a good bit we’ve yet to list.

Today we were out flipping, looking through old kitchen appliances. Then a car pulled right in front of the driveway rather abruptly. A gentleman hurried out of the car and grabbed two long boards for sale. They were nice but large and used, so we didn’t think much of them at first glance. After scooping those, the man continued to rush around the sale, almost bumping into me at one point. We left soon after. We don’t have much tolerance for people like this.

While walking to the car, Camille mentioned how we should’ve picked up the long boards when we saw them. She was right. Though difficult to ship, each board was worth around 50-60 dollars. We would’ve made a killing. We were bummed—at this point we’d been to 5 yard sales and had struck out all 5 times. That could’ve made it all better.

But maybe that man bought the boards for his son who’s been wanting one, or maybe he flips junk for a living and hasn’t had a Saturday off in a decade. We made peace with it and started driving to our last sale of the morning.

My Maps app had two ways of getting there: a straight shot or back roads. Camille get’s motion sickness, so I chose the straight shot. While approaching a red light, Camille yells, “Garage Sale!” We can’t park so I let her out while I go to find parking. Long story short, this woman was selling some of her son’s PC gaming tech. There was also a box of almost new Pokemon cards. All in all, we could get anywhere from $250-500 for everything we picked up at this stop.

We could’ve regretted not picking up the long boards. We could’ve called it there, too defeated after 5 strike outs to try one more time. Instead, we chose to be grateful for the opportunity to go out flipping together. We chose gratitude over regret, and it lead to a jackpot. It almost always leads to some kind of jackpot.