Did you know that human rights activist Malcolm X used be a prison inmate? Arrested for armed robbery and sentenced to a decade in jail, X turned his life around by doing one simple thing. Reading books.

As he put it,

‘I knew right there in prison that reading had changed forever the course of my life. As I see it today, the ability to read awoke inside me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive.’

We can all learn a great deal from his actions. Of course, we might not be serving a sentence in prison, but we all have spare time. How we choose to spend that time might just be the thing that’s preventing us from succeeding.

Malcolm didn’t waste his jail time sitting around doing nothing. He made the most of that time by reading and learning everything he could get his hands on. He chose alive time over dead time.

See, every single day we have spare time. It might only be thirty minutes or it might be several hours. It doesn’t matter how much time we have - what matters is how we spend it.  

I guess the big secret to success we’re all looking for is something that we already know: to succeed, we have to work. There are no shortcuts, just free time and two ways to use it.

What matters is whether or not we’re prepared to prove that we’re serious about getting what we want — and if we’re not serious, we’ll never get it. To prove it, we have to make every second count, even if it’s only a few moments each day.

Photo by Aron Visuals on Unsplash