You have 18 awake hours in your day. During this time, every person in this world lives a double life. We go to work and plug away because without our jobs, we wouldn’t survive. We need our work because it sustains us. It turns our gears and provides us with safety, security, and Fruity Pebbles.

Aside from our regular work, we also have within ourselves something that makes us tick, another “job” that that beckons us with intense zeal and gusto. This is called our passion, and when we take it on with full force, we feel a satisfaction that our regular work simply cannot give us.

For some, this means training every day to complete a 5k. For another, it means waking up every morning to write 1,000 words in their novel. Still others stay up into the wee hours of the night putting the final touches on a website they created just for the fun of it.

We all have that something that drives us, something beyond our work, beyond our own families, but why?

We do these things because we desire to see a change. Our minds recognize a lack of beauty, order, or truth in the world, and we look within our souls to discover that we have the means change it, to bring about the beauty, order, and truth that we seek.

So we put cliché bumper stickers on our laptops that read “Be the change you want to see in the world” and “Carpe diem” because we know that deep within us, we’re meant to do something with our lives, something beyond our 9-5 work…

Something huge.

The problem is, many of us use our jobs and our families as excuses as to why we cannot pursue our passions. We immediately dismiss and sacrifice our passions because we either feel too exhausted after finishing our 9-5 work, or we feel selfish for taking time away from our family.

Now, these excuses are sometimes valid and should be honored as a reason to put off your passion.

But for 99.99% of the population, both excuses are a cop out. Let me tell you why:

If you work, there are several hours a day in which you are able to dedicate to your passion, but it takes a ton of motivation to notice them. I call these moments “The Peripheries of life.”

For example, your lunch break might last anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour. Those are precious minutes that you could have been researching your next project idea or sketching out the rough draft of your next obra maestra painting.

Moments like these happen every day. You have to notice them if you truly desire to live your passion.

The key factor that holds your work-life balance in tact is time.

The time you give to the things you do is the identifier of how much you love those things.

If you are working more than your regular 40 hours a week instead of spending that time with your family, you love work more than your family.

If you stay up late watching a movie with your wife instead of reading the latest New York Times best-seller, you love your wife more than reading (good for you!).

If you come home from work and scroll through your Facebook app for hours instead of killing it in the weight room, you love your phone more than your own body.

You have to dedicate your time to the things that matter most and for all other ventures, including your passions, you gotta create your own free time.

So, how do you do it? You need to create time. 

Every morning, I’m up at 5:30AM so I can dedicate two solid hours to completing the tasks that my passions dictate. When coupled with the flitting 20 minute moments throughout the day and my lunch break, I can pull off anywhere from 3-5 hours of extra work per day (if my son takes a good nap, which he is actually doing as I write this!).

I work on my passions while my family is asleep or totally occupied because I refuse to let my passion overtake my time with them. If your work-life balance is off, there’s a good chance that you have put too many stones on one side of the scale. My advice is to reevaluate your priorities and measure the amount of time you dedicate to each important thing in your life. Pay specific attention to the amount of time you dedicate to your passion because if you aren’t doing anything with that priority, you’re missing out on what it means to be truly satisfied.

Deep within you, there is a muse pressing your emotional buttons, telling you that you need to make a change in the world. The world, however, will constantly distract you from completing it because the world doesn’t want to change The world likes everything just the way it is. It’ll tell you that you’re scared. It will make you think that you don’t have the time, the talent, or the endurance to see it through to completion.

You do.

You have 18 hours of awake time. What are you doing with them?

I’d love to hear what your passion is as well as the things that distract you from them. Let me know in the comments below!