Hour of power – take one hour daily to invest into your future

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You rockThere is one single investment with the highest potential yield ever. It’s an extremely profitable investment you simply can’t miss out on. The best news in the whole story is that this investment is also reachable to you. Immediately.

Because this investment is you. You, together with your talents and potentials, should always be your number one investment priority. That’s where the potential for really big profits lies. Unless you think you’re a bad investment opportunity, which I hope is not the case.

There is no easy money, at least not legally. And there are no extremely profitable investments if you don’t put in all the hard effort and smart work – gaining control, analyzing competition, innovating, delivering surpluses of added value, being in an unfair position of high demand and low supply, and so on.

In the same way, you have to put the effort in if you want to become an extremely profitable investment.

You become a profitable investment only in one single way – you take at least one hour daily to do something for yourself, for your future. One hour, every single day. Every working day, every weekend, every super busy day, no matter what, you just have to do it.

On an average work day, after deducting worktime, sleep, commuting, eating, bathroom time etc. you are left with approximately 4 – 5 hours of free time. So there is more than enough time to take one single hour for yourself. More than enough. The only thing preventing you from it is laziness.

If you think you don’t have enough time, measure for one week how much time you spend watching TV, browsing social networks, reading news, and we can also add the time spent on different apps on your mobile phone, out for coffees and meetings.

In an average person’s life, that sums up to 30+ hours per week being wasted. You can very simply make a little bit of room to invest in yourself with a few time management tricks. If nothing else, you can listen to audio books when you commute.

Hour of power

Why would you do it?

There is always a way, if there’s a will. If you want to really commit to the daily hour of power, you must have a strong why. But that’s a really simple one.

I think you don’t want to have a shitty job, crappy relationships, a bank account in red, poor health, crappy fitness, and so on. I assume you don’t want your potentials to be wasted and your life thrown away. Then you need to grow.

Not only does everything get harder with years if you don’t invest in yourself, you’re going to die someday. It’s not as far away as it may seem. That should be big enough motivation by itself.

You only have one life and if you want to live a good life, you have to invest in yourself. There is no other way, at least not one that would work in the long-term. On top of that, it feels good.

It feels good to see your potentials realized. It feels good to have a healthy and fit body full of energy. It feels good to have a sharp mind that can solve many intellectual challenges.

It feels good to have many competences you can offer on the market, and a full bank account. It feels good to be happy in life, being able to manage negative emotions and destructive thoughts and to have deep fulfilling relationships.

One of the best feelings in the world is being a resourceful person of value. You feel good in your own skin, people love to spend time with you, you have no problem finding the dream partner, you have many job opportunities, you name it.

But you can only become a resourceful person of value if you regularly invest in yourself. Don’t be lazy, don’t be scared, believe in yourself and just do it. If none of these reasons are strong enough for you, find one for yourself that will be. I can find thousands of them.

You want to leave a legacy behind. You want to be a good role-model to your kids. You want to test your limits. You want to live a diverse life experience. You want to feed your curiosity. You want to become the best at something.

You want to prove your parents wrong. You want to contribute to the world. You want to have enough money to travel the world. You want to free yourself from your negative past.

There are hundreds of different reasons why you should invest in yourself. Find one so strong that nothing will come between you and your daily hour of power.

You can only become a resourceful person of value if you regularly invest in yourself.

Nothing will come between me and my hour of power attitude

You eat every day for your energy levels to stay high. You sleep daily to recharge your batteries. You go to the toilet (hopefully) every day so your body doesn’t drown in its own dirt. These are all physical needs you have to satisfy or you won’t survive. Your hour of power should become one of these needs.

You should feel like you’re going to die if you don’t invest one hour per day into yourself; or at least you should feel as uncomfortable as when you don’t go to the toilet for a long time because you’re constipated. The closer you are to the end of the day, the sicker you should feel if you haven’t invested in yourself yet.

You have to wire it into your brain, feel it in your bones and beat it in your heart. When it comes to investing in yourself, you need a no-matter-what attitude. You have to make sure that nothing comes between you and investing in your future.

Here are a few additional ideas of how you can achieve that:

  • Timebox an hour of power into your calendar
  • Make it a part of your morning kick-off routine or evening shut-down routine
  • Use the D.E.A.R. concept – one hour before you go to sleep? Drop Everything And Read.
  • Stay flexible about where and how you do it, life is somehow unpredictable

There are so many things you can do

There are so many different ways you can invest into yourself. Basically they break down to four levels – taking care of your body (physician dimension), mind (mental dimension), heart (emotional dimension) and soul (spiritual dimension). People also often call these things sharpening the saw.

  • Body: Exercise, lift weights, stretch, do yoga or tai chi, get a massage etc.
  • Mind: Read, take an online course, play chess, write, learn a new skill, do brain games, meditate, learn to breathe properly, etc.
  • Heart: Write a self-reflective journal, examine your past, have a deep talk, volunteer
  • Soul: Pray, learn to forgive, be grateful, write down your life mission, forgive somebody

You can use 60 minutes to do one thing or you can divide it into 2 or 3 blocks. One day, you may read for 60 minutes, another day may be perfect for 20 minutes of reading, 20 minutes of exercise and 20 minutes of meditation. You can do all three at once or with breaks. It doesn’t matter, stay flexible, just make sure you do it.

The only important thing is that you aren’t doing 100 different things. You want to be making 10 steps in one direction, not 1 step in 10 different directions.

Consistently repeating the same thing leads to accumulation. It leads to the success spiral – you get better and better at something, you see the results, you become more self-confident and thus you want to invest even more. So search for a few things that fit you best as ways to invest into yourself in a certain period of your life, and then stick to them.

Invest in yourself

Your investment in yourself will start to accumulate

The basic principles of life are pretty simple. One of them is this: it’s hard to start with something, but with time things get easier and after a while, results start to accumulate.

The first few hours are the hardest, but then in a few weeks you start seeing the first results and after a few months, real accumulation begins. Just make sure you don’t overestimate what you can achieve in a few weeks and underestimate what you can achieve in a few years.

Do pushups every day and in few months, you’ll be able to do more pushups than 90 % of people. Learn to code every day (or a new language) for an hour and you’ll gain a new competence in a year or so. Read every day and in a few years, you’ll see a vast improvement in your knowledge. Run every day and soon you will be able to run a marathon.

By far the best advantage you can have in life is to develop the ability to consistently practice one thing every day. Consistency and repetition are the key. You need a focused attention span for one single hour, not more. Most people are too lazy to do that and the average person has an attention span of 8 seconds.

So if you’re wondering what will take you far above the average, now you have the answer – consistently invest into yourself. Everyone knows the benefits, but most people just aren’t hungry enough. Don’t be one of them. Don’t become a zombie.

The main idea of the daily hour of power is to help you keep consistency and repetition.

Eight hours for survival, four hours for success

If you’re really committed to extracting the highest possible yields from yourself, in other words if you want to be massively successful, there is a way to take everything even a step further. Don’t invest one hour per day into yourself, invest more. As much as possible.

Many successful people follow the “eight hours for survival, four hours for success rule”. They work for 8 – 9 hours at their job or in their business to earn enough money, but then they invest almost all of their free time into their future.

They exercise for an hour, read for an hour and then they plan, brainstorm ideas or do other things that will lead to a brighter future and will make them even more successful. Eight hour for survival, four hours for success. I suggest you start with one hour and then you can scale up from there.

Homework

Enough theory, it’s time to put things to practice. Drop everything and immediately take one hour completely for yourself with the goal of investing into your brighter future. It’s definitely something you will never regret.

About the author

Consulting and management coaching

Blaž Kos has managed venture capital investments over the past 12 years and participated in the development of the start-up ecosystem in the region. Today, he advises companies on growth strategies, process optimization, the introduction of lean agile methods and the digitalization of business. In addition to the Slovenian blog, he also writes an English blog, which was selected among the 50 best bloggers in the world in the category of personal and business growth.
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