In 2011, after three years being in the United States, I developed enough English to understand people when they spoke to me. And I was doing a package delivery job.
The work was five and six hours of driving every day. After expenses it paid about twenty-eight thousand dollars a year.
Delivering was not a thing people wanted to talk about. Pizza, packages, groceries, rides. Nobody wants to share that experience. It was life. There was nothing to feel bad about.
For the first few weeks I listened to music.
Then, after like two or three weeks of delivering packages, I thought about it. If I'm going to drive six hours a day, eight hours a day, and I'm listening to music, it gains me nothing. I gain nothing.
So I did some research and found a service where the first book was free. I don't speak English. I don't know who's who. I scrolled a list of names that meant nothing to me and took the one that cost nothing. It was a book about deal making by a man I highly doubt wrote it.
The book was not good. That was not the problem.
The problem was that I'd never listened to a book before. It was a skill that I needed to develop, and I forced myself to listen to it. I finished it. Then I got a second book. Then another book, and then another book.
Then I was hooked.
Over time I finished maybe around three hundred books. Business, psychology, communication, entrepreneurship.
Then I got a job later on at a company an hour's drive away. I didn't mind, because they paid me ninety-three thousand dollars a year. Every day going to work I would listen to a book. Every day coming home I would listen to a book.
I own maybe twenty or thirty of the same shirt in different colors. Every few weeks they pile up and I steam them, and sometimes it takes me one hour. My wife says let me do it. I say no, I want to do it myself. Do you know why? I'm creating opportunity in that one hour.
It doesn't change you overnight. But after one or two years you're just a different person. I turned my delivery van into a college.
How many hours next week will you spend driving, waiting for a bus, taking a train, or doing something routine with your hands?
Whatever number you produced, you didn't count the journey home, the queue, the washing up, or the twenty minutes looking for parking. Those hours are already paid for. Right now they are going nowhere.