To live in Atlanta (or most major cities) is to spend a considerable portion of your time in the car.  If you drive the speed limit like me you spend even more time in the car.   Thirty minutes to work daily means 260 hours per year or just shy of 11 days in your car.  Since you are not texting (in GA that would be illegal unless you speed while you text in which case that would be a double negative – positive) or doing other worthless things, here are some ideas on how to redeem that time.

Make your car a mini university. 

·         Get some books on audio and learn things.

·         Listen to the free podcasts on subjects in your field.

·         Discover your Kindle’s best kept secret.  It will read to you through earphones or out loud.  Plus there are so many free kindle books – especially classics

·         Get the Bible on audio and listen to James Earl Jones (or the other guy) read the Word of God to you.

·         Buy a cheap voice recorder and make plans and notes for yourself.

·         Look around and become aware of what is going on in your area.

·         Take different routes to work and learn your community.

Leave extra early for work and find a Starbucks close by your office to do your morning newspaper reading or answer personal email.   Its free internet and their medium coffee is only $.35 more than McDonalds.  Plus you make it to work early and don’t have to spend the first 30 minutes “warming up.”

Tell me what you do while you drive that others can benefit from

That’s what you may say to an intruder in your house at 2:00 a.m., right after you get the baseball bat or the gun out of the shoebox.  What kind of answer are you expecting?  Now ask yourself both of those questions.  What is the answer?  I ask people those questions often with predictable results.  They don’t know who or what.  Quite frankly, I had not asked myself those questions before I read the book “Eat That Frog!” by Brian Tracy.  Two blogs, two book recommendations.  It’s a streak. 

 The answers to these questions are the nuclear codes of clarity.

• Who I am determines where I fit.  Square pegs and round holes don’t work any better in 2011 than they ever have.   Figuring out who I am releases me from the prison of having to always try to be the last person I spoke to that I thought had it all put together or worse, the person that others think I should be.  May the Lord deliver us from need for the affirmation of others to feel like we make a difference.  Knowing who you are is liberating. 

• Who I am is the base metal for determining what my goals should be.  Real goals, ones that I pursue daily because they feed who I am.  Not goals that live on a list but never make it to “the list.”  The to-do list.  Imagine living a life in which you move closer to your goals every day and it happens on purpose and nothing important goes lacking.  Consider how different you would feel if you woke up knowing who you are and that your day will be filled with doing what you want.

• Finally, this is not about who you want to be – that is called a goal.   Goals are not those lists of things we keep copying to new lists but never do.  Those are called “unimportant things.”  If they were really important, we would be doing them.  Right now our goal is only to store them so that we don’t forget them.  Whatever that is worth.  Goals are the offspring of knowing what I want and what I want being fueled by who I am.

I am looking for volunteers to do this exercise and tell me how it turned out.