In 2007 I discovered audiobooks and began listening to a lot of business and self-improvement books. One of the first that I discovered and listened to with great interest was a book titled The 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss. For one thing, the book was well written and the narrator was great. I enjoyed the book and felt I learned a great deal.

Over the years, I have listened to the book several more times. On one occasion in October of 2014, I was driving to a customer’s site for a meeting and listened to it on the way. At the time I was in a job that was not going well. I liked the job itself because I was getting to focus on a topic I liked, but there were a lot of negatives about the job. The two men I was reporting to were terrible bosses. One was a bully who constantly called me up (I worked in a remote office) and threatened my job and the other was his spineless passive-aggressive sidekick who would constantly be paranoid about whether or not I was going to do something to make him look bad in the eyes of the first and get his job threatened. As I drove down the road listening to The 4-Hour Workweek, I became convinced I needed to find something I could do on my own that would someday provide enough income that I would never have to stay in such a work situation again.

It was a Friday, and after the meeting, I decided to take advantage of the fact that I was near one of Florida’s nicer beach areas to stay at my own expense for the weekend and have a short weekend vacation. After I arrived at the hotel and checked in, I grabbed some dinner at the resort restaurant and went up to my room to relax. As I watched TV in my hotel room at the resort I had checked into, I began to think about what kind of project I would enjoy doing in my free time. I thought about how I had always thought I would have enjoyed teaching. It was then that I came up with the idea to start working on a project in the form of a website related to online tutoring. I got excited about the idea. I bought a domain to use and made notes about the project on the small pad the hotel had provided on the nightstand. The next day I relaxed on the beach and thought more about my idea. On the ride home at the end of the weekend, I finished listening to The 4-Hour Workweek, and the more I listened, the more convinced I became that it was time to start something.

In the months that followed I continued to work on the project. I had a nice logo made. I hired a developer to develop the first version of the website, and when that didn’t work out I taught myself how to build websites and Android apps and built a second version myself. I also started a blog as part of the project and wrote the first few blog posts myself on different educational topics. In the years that have followed, I have devoted most of my free time to this project and have enjoyed doing so.

In a few months, I will have been working on the project for five years, and I am planning on continuing. It is still a work in progress and is not making any money yet, but I can honestly say it’s not about the money anymore. It has become something that is important to me to finish and see become successful. I hope at some point it will turn into a source of income, maybe later on in my golden years I can do a little work to manage and maintain it while it rewards me for my years of hard work. But more than that, I feel it could help a lot of young people be successful in school and continue on to college and have great careers and lives, and for that reason, I carry on using my free time to work on it.

So, I share all of this to share a very important insight I have learned from the combined experience of listening to Tim Ferriss’ book The 4-Hour Workweek and then devoting the past five years to work on the project that was born from my having done so. And that insight is that most things in life worth doing take time to complete. If you think about it, most of the things we accomplish in life that add value to our lives take time. It took me five years to finish my BS college degree and another two and a half to finish my MS degree. I started taking guitar lessons in 2009, and it was not until 2013 that I felt confident enough to take part in a guitar recital where I played in front of other people. Things worth doing take time.

This realization helped me let go of a lot of things that I really wasn’t willing to devote that much time to in order to be successful. What things in your life are important enough to you to devote another four years to in order to succeed? Of the people in your life, which of them would you still want to be in your life four years from now? Do you love your current job or career enough that you would still want to be in that job or career four years from now? These are the questions I asked myself, and it helped me refocus my time and energy on the select few that I said yes to. I hope you ask yourself the same questions because I know the effect on your life if you follow through on the answers will be nothing but positive in the long run.