$1,440…you want it?

What if I offered you $1440. Would you take it? You might be suspicious at first. No one hands out anything for free. You might be curious if there was a catch. You might even wonder if I was crazy when I told you that it was yours to do with as you like. Eventually, maybe with some coaxing or reassurance you’d, probably take it.  

Now what if I gave you $1440, but this time, there’s a ten dollar bill in there that is burned, covered in filth, and otherwise ruined. Would you take that? I’ve heard many different responses to this, but almost everyone reaches a similar conclusion, they’d take it, but they’d get rid of the ruined $10. No one would throw out $1430, just because of that messed up $10. Because, at the very least you still have a chunk of money. 

1440 is actually the number of minutes in our day. You get that same number every day. If you had a bad ten minutes, is it worth throwing the rest of your day away, just because of them? We all have bad moments, or minutes where we wish we were wiser, or decisions made that we regret or wish we could get back. 

What we need to remember is that the minutes that have gone by, no matter how we’ve spent them, doesn’t need to determine the rest of our day. We can remind ourselves, things won’t always be that bad or complicated or difficult. We have more minutes in our day to spend on whatever we want. 

There’s nothing more precious than spending our minutes on the things that matter rather than brooding over ones we wish we’d spent differently. So throw out that $10 and spend those minutes wisely.