The Last Word

By Matthew Bolter | Posted: Monday February 13, 2023

"No one told you when to run, you've missed the starting gun."

Those were the words I heard from David Gilmour in Pink Floyd's Time as I sat in my room not really doing anything for another afternoon. It was a point where I realised I was truly in control of my future through how I used my time, and if I didn't make sure to focus on my goals then I could find myself missing the starting gun.

See, as we get older we gain more and more control over what we can do with our lives. As young children, decision making around how we spent our time was largely made by our parents, but now in our later teen years we hold more and more of that responsibility. This is both a blessing and a curse.

We have more freedom, ability to follow our passions and interests and spend our time how we want. But we are also more prone to falling into bad habits, laziness and loss of focus on our goals with teachers and parents checking in less and less to make sure we are achieving and completing tasks and goals. No one is telling us when to run and if we don't start to drill in good habits and plan out our goals then we may find life moves forward, leaving us behind.

This situation is happening for us right now.

For Year 12's this is an incredibly important academic year. Your results from this year are looked at for determining university scholarships and sets you up for Year 13, where for us the challenge is getting university entrance. We are all at a stage in our lives where we are making the decisions and putting in the work, or not, that will shape how the rest of our life looks. It's daunting, and that's because we have to make significant choices about how we use our time.

Time is often seen as something infinite and never ending but for all of us as individuals it is a limited resource. We need to look at where we waste it and what we do well. Swapping out 30 minutes of scrolling through social media each day for 30 minutes of study could be a difference in time spent that could be worth tens of thousands of dollars in future. The same goes for making time for sports and other interests. The little steps taken today can have a drastic impact on your future self. A fundamental flaw of being human is that we struggle to look at how our current actions will affect us in the future.

So, think about what you have worked for and achieved in your life so far.

In 1, 5, 10, 20 years we want to reflect and feel that for this year and years to come, we spent our time in both ways and that we enjoyed and achieved our goals. So we need to have a hard think about what our goals are, long and short term, how we should spend our time to achieve them and what uses of time are holding us back. Now verging on adulthood this is a responsibility we all have for ourselves. We have to make the steps ourselves. No one is telling us when to run.

I challenge each of you to think about what would feature in your autobiography and what wouldn't. Would you detail hours a week of social media being your highlight of Otago Boys'. Or would it be countless sports practices or study sessions that set you up to achieve your own personal excellence. If you spend large chunks of time on activities that bring you no real meaning now or in future, think about how you can cut out these roadblocks to your achievement.

We were all born with roughly the same tools, what sets people apart is how they use their time. To quote John F Kennedy "We must use time as a tool, not a couch."