Time Matters

By jerry nichols

Twenty-One Mistakes I Made so You Don't Have To 

Why are so many people unhappy with their lives? Why do we let our issues control us rather than the other way around? Why does everyone make the same mistakes, yet we all think we're alone in our struggles? 

Addressing our mistakes is the first step toward improving our lives and making the most of our time. Mistakes are not the end—they're a chance to develop. By learning from the past, we can take charge of the present and alter the course of the future. Only when we make peace with our errors can we become the best, truest versions of ourselves. 

After many years working toward self-development, I've identified 21 of the most common mistakes that people make. I know these mistakes well because I made them along the way, too! In the end, overcoming these errors allowed me to spend my time on what I love—and also allowed me to develop assertiveness, mindfulness, and gratitude.  

Time Matters is a guide that will take you through these common pitfalls. With general advice sprinkled with my own experiences, you're sure to recognize yourself in many of these chapters. You'll learn to prioritize what's important to you and still maintain a healthy work-life balance. The tips in this book will make you more grounded, less anxious, and overall happier!  

In Time Matters, you'll discover: 

What I've learned in my efforts to triumph over my own mistakes 

Tips to enjoy your job and improve work relationships 

Steps to stop worrying and start living in the moment 

Why you need to listen to yourself and stop trying to please everyone 

When to stand up for yourself and others 

The trap of forgetting to relax 

Ways to take back your personal power 

How to live the best life you can by avoiding 21 common errors 

… and much more! 

Your time matters, and identifying your mistakes is the best way to spend that time wisely. This book is your chance to learn through someone else's experiences rather than going through these mistakes yourself. Some chapters will be relevant to you now and some will be later, but all of them will help you nourish your whole being as you strive to meet life's myriad challenges.  

Develop yourself, make the most of your time, open yourself up to what really matters. Scroll up and one-click Time Matters today!

• Language: English
• Publisher: jerry nichols
• Release date: Oct 11, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201898588

Book preview

Introduction

People often suffer through life with the feeling that their problems are unique to them. That they’re alone, and that no one can understand.

But is that true? Perhaps not as much as one might assume. While it’s true that a person’s exact situation and circumstances are unique, the underlying issues that plague these situations are frighteningly common. The good news is this means that a lot of what we go through in life is actually resonant with the people around us: people who can, with a little kindness and patience, readily grasp the struggles we go through.

The problem isn’t that our issues are unique to us. The problem is that we don’t always have the spare time and energy to communicate our pains in a way that can be understood by the person sitting next to us, even when we’re sharing the same language. This is why, despite sharing common strife, we often feel more lost or alone than we need to. People who’d readily understand our pains might not readily understand the words we use to describe them, or might not have words of comfort that we can readily understand in turn.

The problem is also that, regardless of the hand we’re dealt in life, we often make mistakes that help our issues dig in and gain more control over our lives. Lives that can be better spent if we shift our focus away from trying to control other people, and instead turn to the parts of ourselves that we can immediately exert personal power over. Fixing the world is a gargantuan task. Fixing the mistakes you make while living in it, while still daunting at times, is a lot more manageable.

All the above is a personal belief that’s come about over the course of the many, many mistakes I’ve made in my life, and how I’ve come to terms with them in the pursuit of overcoming my personal struggles.

It took a long time to work up the courage, but after patiently communicating my experiences to those closest to me, I realized I was onto something with this idea of improving life and making the most of our time through first addressing and learning from our mistakes. And then, of course, making peace with them.

The more I opened up, and the better I got at reaching people through my words, the more I found this to be the case.

After many years of developing my command over words, I’m inviting you to sit with me as we go over the many mistakes one can make — the mistakes I have made — and what I’ve learned in my efforts to triumph over them, whether through research or experience. The first thing I hope you notice is that mistakes aren’t the end. For those younger than me, see this as a way to laugh at an older gent, while using what he says to start making wiser decisions earlier... Decisions I wish I’d made earlier myself. Your time matters, and this book intends to help you spend it more decisively on what you love.

To do this through examining mistakes may seem paradoxical but, like all good paradoxes, the core premise will prove itself to be true as you go on.

For those in the same boat as me, the same stage of life, this book is here for you too. It’s here to help you dust yourself off and make the most of whatever time you have left. Sharing my experiences not only helped me, but also gave me new ways to bond with the people around me as we found solidarity in previously silent struggles. Although you might never know me face-to-face, I wish to try to bring the treasure of that feeling to you. Ever since overcoming my own hurdles, it’s been my passion to help people cross theirs.

As the paradox of this book resolves itself, you’ll see key themes emerge, with the core recurring theme being self-development. Assertiveness, self-reflection, gratitude, and mindfulness are all traits I had to develop in order to overcome the mistakes we’re about to cover.

When it comes to life, many of the best qualities needed to avoid key mistakes are the same needed to overcome them. So, expect me to talk about avoidance and recovery, or prevention and cure, in unison as best I can.

Other than that, I want you to treat everything I have written here as a tool. Again, while the underlying issues may be things we have in common, your unique situation is still unique, and ultimately only you can know what’s best for yourself with complete certainty. Use everything I give you when it’ll be helpful to you, and set it aside when it won’t be. Don’t copy me unthinkingly or treat me as gospel. Just allow my experiences to expand your perspective, and use that to live the best life you can.

Don’t become me, or anyone else for that matter. Use what you’re about to learn to be the strongest and most authentic version of yourself you can be.

Chapter 1: Ignoring Unhappiness at Work

Even if you don’t have a job just yet, this is still important to know. One of my longest-running mistakes was allowing myself to be miserable at work simply because that’s what I believed work was. I may not have liked it, but hey, it put food on the table, so I just rolled with it, and didn’t see much point in changing it.

Sometimes I wonder why I had this attitude. Maybe it’s because I compared it to one of those foul-tasting medicines, where you really hate it but you take it anyway because you know it’s good for you.

However, work is not a medicine, not unless you make it one. I didn’t realize it at the time, but my misery made me a pretty bad worker. This not only sapped the value out of my life, but it also sapped value out of those who had to work with me, whether they were clients or colleagues.

Why Your Happiness at Work Is Important

Stress is one of the biggest risks to your well-being when in the workplace. It’s worse than smoking, worse than eating fast food all the time. I’d rather put on an unhealthy amount of weight than be perpetually stressed, though people tell me that’d just create a vicious cycle.

I don’t know what to believe there, but what I do know is that stress wears you down. Have you ever felt your muscles ache after an intense bout of dread or anxiety? That’s the cells in your body being damaged by the feelings of stress coursing through your nervous system, keeping your muscles in a constant tense state. It can alter your breathing, hampering your ability to get enough oxygen to your brain, impacting the way you think.

Now, there are some really rubbish jobs out there, and they don’t always make it easy for us to find joy in what we do, but it’s still important that we try. Why? Because if we let ourselves get too upset at work, we take that hurtful energy home with us. Have you ever had a loved one come home from work, only for them to get set off and rail at you in seething anger over the smallest of things?

Felt pretty terrible, didn’t it?

It wasn’t your fault. It’s not what you did. When a person ignores their happiness at work, they come home so wound up by silly managers, silly colleagues, or silly customers, and then the smallest, silliest thing after that is enough to set them off. When a person is not only stressed, but also exhausted (such as from lack of sleep caused by stress), then the chances of this happening only go up.

To my shame, I’ve been not on the receiving end of this, but on the giving end, and friends and family have become collateral damage, courtesy of the self-negligence I’d practice at my job.

While I didn’t know it at the time, this caused me to take on a withdrawn attitude at work that left me feeling excluded by my coworkers: my unhappiness, and my unwillingness to deal with it or talk about it, made it difficult for others to befriend me.

It also made it harder for managers to assign me higher positions, even if my work was good. Raises and promotions became harder, because everything I did carried a subconscious air of resentment, and it’s difficult for anyone to properly reward or appreciate work made with that kind of feeling behind it.

And, even if my work was good, I was doing it too slowly. Turns out it’s hard to complete tasks quickly when you feel the full weight of your inner world crushing you all the time.

So, I was miserable, I was making my loved ones miserable, and I was making my workplace miserable, while also limiting my creativity and output. Taking my toxic environment for granted, I made myself little more than another brick in the wall.

To value your own happiness in work is to refuse being boxed in like that.

How to Be Happier From the Start

It’s easy to say we should be happier, but what does that mean? Well, I don’t think anyone ‘should’ be happy. Happiness isn’t mandatory. However, people benefit from feeling free to find moments of joy and contentment at any hour.

Now, it’s good to add value to the world, so we don’t necessarily want to slack off here: it’s hard to hold a job, feel fulfilled, or impress a