How valuable is your time?

We all know that time is valuable and the older we get, the more quickly it passes. Even so, it's still easy to take our days for granted. Here's how one speaker used an analogy and then specific examples to give a new and memorable twist to this subject.

First he asked his audience to imagine there was a bank that credited their accounts each morning with $86,400. It carried over no balance from day to day, allowed no one to keep a cash balance, and every evening canceled whatever was unused during the day. "What would you do?" he asked his audience, "Draw out every cent, of course!"

He then told them they did indeed have such a bank; its name was Time. Every morning it credited them with 86,400 seconds and every night it wrote off what they didn't use. Even though it opened a new account for them each day, if they failed to use the day's deposit, they would lose it.

To make the value of time even more specific, he used a few examples. "Imagine," he said, "what the value of one year is to a student who has failed a grade, or what the value of one month is to a mother of a premature baby. Even one minute becomes valuable to a person who has missed a plane, and one second becomes precious to the person who has avoided an accident."

In closing, he urged his audience to invest each day's time deposit so they would get the most from it in health, happiness and success.