Hello everyone, this is Helen Huang @ Organizing, based in Beijing, China. In order to better learn and practice the YiXiaoNeng Time Management System, after finished publishing 100 Chinese articles, I decided to continue writing and publishing a daily English article in another 100 days based on the "YeWuBin Time Management 100 Episodes" audio program. Today is the 169th day.
Today's topic is: The Four Reasons to Travel
Today, I'm going to talk about a new topic ---traveling.
Do you think there is a relationship between traveling and time management? I hear quite often people tell me that they have neither the time nor the money to travel. Sometimes they will say they have the time but not enough money, or they may say they have plenty of money but not enough time.
You know Michelle Obama, former first lady of the United States once said that traveling ten thousand miles is better than reading ten thousand books.
I am an experienced and passionate global traveler. I once made a plan to travel throughout Europe with my son for one month during the summer holiday. Despite the time and budgetary challenges this presented, I achieved my goal.
In the past few years, I have had to make the time to travel in order to achieve my dream. I've also had to teach others how to make the time to travel. I earned that time by working hard to increase my work efficiency and increasing my money through careful planning. You can do this too.
The first step is to want to travel. You must have the dream and then you must set the goal. A quote goes that "The world steps aside for the man who knows what he wants." You must start with the dream not on the off chance that it will come true but because it can never become real unless you dream it first. It is a necessary first step. If you spend time finding a way to achieve it, time will prove everything is possible.
I will talk about several aspects of traveling in the next few lessons. Today I want to talk about the purpose of traveling. What's reason we travel? There are four parts or four reasons in my opinion.
First, traveling should be an opportunity for you to relax. Traveling at least once a year will help you relax your body and refresh yourself for the next year. Having this refresh point will allow you to plan and execute the next year with new energy and focus.
Over the course of a year, people, like you, become exhausted working almost continuously, leaving little time to sufficiently recharge, eat, sleep and be with family.
Because of this, most people don't get even one change in the year to fully recuperate. Even during holidays and mini-vacations, most of that time is spent preparing for the festivities. Traveling can be the chance for you to relax, recharge and free yourselves.
Second, traveling is a chance to see the world differently than your used to seeing it and expand your perspective.
Why do you think it means that traveling a thousand miles is better than reading a thousand books? What do you think that means? Wow, I think it means that experiencing and observing the world first hand will help us truly expand our perspective and build an outlook that will change the way we see and act in our daily lives.
We spend most of our lives operating in the same routines each and every day. And in those routines we gather the basic necessities of life and make contact with the same people. Traveling to different lands allows us to see differences in culture and habits – habits borne out of cultural ways. The world you experience every day contrasts greatly from the world you exepriend in your travels. As one of the presidents of Harvard University said: Life is a journey, not a destination.
The third purpose of traveling is to see how other people do things differently than you do, and achieve the same or greater level of happiness you do.
You will learn many new things during your travels. You can apply the things you learn from your travels to your work and life to make things easier, different and more rewarding to you. A traveler in ancient Greece said: The world is like a book, but only through travel can we read to the end of it.
Most people live in the same city all of their lives and rarely venture beyond it. Most haven't been able to see the wonders of Beijing, such as the Forbidden Palace, the Temple of Heaven, and the Bird's Nest – three great attractions in Beijing.
Each day of life brings us love and hate in turns and often we can become affected by this cycle. We start to expect it. And it becomes a habit within us. But we aren't aware of how love and hate forms for others throughout the world. Traveling gives us the new perspective that we don't have to feel the way we do sometimes. We can feel like others do, rather than we currently feel.
The fourth reason to travel is to create motivation.
Many of us work to make money. We work smarter not harder. We try to improve. We try to be better. And the reward for all of this is to have time to relax and enjoy life. If we have a concrete goal, something to work towards, such as travel, and we apply our hard earned income, we'll work more seriously and pay attention to the details of our work. So we can accomplish that dream and it will motivate us.
Traveling is a wonderful thing for so many reasons, and in the end it will increase our efficiency and the value of our work. Isn't that a great thing?
That's all sharing today. Thank you being with me together. Have a wonderful day!
