Here are some of my observations about time.
It it not linear.
It is our most valuable asset.
Paul Graham said in his essay How to Lose Time and Money, the most efficient way to lose a lot of money is by bad investments.
Excessive spending would trigger our alarms immediately. For most people, it’s hard to spend tens of thousands of dollars buying stuff in a couple of month without thinking “man I am losing a lot of money”.
On the other hand, if you start trading derivatives, you can lose a million dollars in the blink of an eye.
And we often mistake liabilities for assets. The financial system wraps a lot of liabilities (such as mortgages) and try to trick us into buying them as “an investment”, and without proper training, it can be hard to differentiate a liability from a true asset.
Dido with time. The most efficient way to lose time is to invest it on the wrong things, to fake work, to pretend we are doing the right thing, but deep down we know it does nothing to develop our mental or physical strength/ assets.
The hardest part is making the decision (on what to spend time on).
The hardest part about going to the gym is deciding you are going to go.
Finish what you started
Like coding, close your bracket before opening a new one.
Focus on one pair of brackets at a time.
P.s
On “observation”:
Paul Graham has another essay How to Do Great Work, where he said:
Some of the very best work will seem like it took comparatively little effort, because it was in a sense already there. It didn’t have to be built, just seen. It’s a very good sign when it’s hard to say whether you’re creating something or discovering it.
When you’re doing work that could be seen as either creation or discovery, err on the side of discovery. Try thinking of yourself as a mere conduit through which the ideas take their natural shape.
Being an observer is incredibly fun 😀