Seek yourself, not distraction. What you need is not more ways to waste your own time, but more ways to win, to stack the odds in your favor, and to make sense of your own life.

Everyone needs space in which to think clearly, effectively, and pragmatically — not to mention boldly — and so you need to cultivate these three types of space in your life too.

Space is non-negotiable for happy, successful, peaceful winners.

All the great thinkers, everyone worthy of that distinction, have helped themselves to heavy doses of these three resources — time, money, and mental clarity — and I’m going to show you how to get them all.

It’s also not as complicated as people would have you believe. These kinds of space and freedom are readily available, and here’s the first thing you need to understand:

It’s a noisy world out there, and most people are simply afraid of silence. I don’t normally like to say, “most people,” but in this case, I may be right.

People everywhere are always in flight from themselves, escaping off into noise and distraction instead of coming home to themselves and seeking silence within.

Silence is the first step.

Silence — stepping back from the chaos of your life — is the first step to taking control of it and shaping it to your will. Silence will help you to see how to get these other types of space that I’m talking about here: time, money, focus.

No one is just going to give you this space. You have to take it.

You have to demand that Life give you the space to think, and most of my success can be attributed to rigorously cultivating this space for myself.

Long stretches of reading and thinking helped me to create the kind of life that I look forward to living, but even that’s not the whole answer.

I mean, even if you have all the time in the world, but you spend it captured and tortured by thoughts of unpaid bills, you can’t think.

If all your bills are paid, but you’re rushing around like Marie Antoinette with her head cut off, with no time to check your direction and tune in to what you find most meaningful, then you’re going to fail in the end.

If you have good mental health, and time to enjoy it, but no money to put your grand plans into action, then your life will always be less than it could be.

These three resources need to appear together, and they need to talk to each other. You need all three, and if you don’t have them right now, your top priority is getting them.

Here’s how.

Creating Mind-Space

The 3 types of space you need are non-negotiables. It’s unreasonable to expect that you’ll be able to be successful at anything without a heaping helping of all three, and perhaps the most important one is your mind, because that’s where your entire reality resides.

Everything you will ever experience takes place in your own mind, regardless of whether you’re seeing or thinking. Your mind mediates your entire conscious experience, and so you have to start there.

Nothing is good or bad, but thinking makes it so, says Shakespeare, and so the next step after cultivating silence is carving out mind-space. This means taking care of your mental health and prioritizing sanity and calm.

You’re going to see, as you keep reading, how these three different types of space influence and strengthen each other, but right now, what’s important to understand is that your mind is the starting point of every conscious experience you’ll ever have.

“Clean the mirror,” “wipe the windshield,” and learn to enjoy living inside your own head. The good news is that, to a large degree, you are responsible and in control of what goes on in your own mind.

At least, you have a lot of say as to what goes on in there, as long as you do a few simple (but not easy) things:

You must declare martial law on your mind.

You almost literally create your own reality with your thoughts (and I know what you’re thinking, but I actually f***ing hated The Secret), and you control the majority of the “inputs.”

You control what you put inside your own mind, and there’s a saying that I’ve damn near tattooed on my brain: “garbage in, garbage out.”

It means that what you put into your head is exactly what you get out.

What’s on your news feed is what’s feeding your mind, and so if you feed it a steady diet of fear, anxiety, and negativity, that’s exactly what your mind is going to produce.

So, curate your own reality, and audit ruthlessly what you allow to penetrate the only citadel you’ll ever control: your mind.

What you read, who you talk to, what you listen to, what you choose to ignore — you need to start getting really serious about consciously deciding what you allow to penetrate your citadel’s defenses.

Creating Money-Space

Money is a huge, loaded topic, and as much as I love talking about it and helping people master it, there’s a lot to cover.

A few paragraphs here in this article are not going to solve your money problems if you have them. Your financial education should be ongoing, and I can wholeheartedly recommend the following books:

The Education of Millionaires, by Michael Ellsberg

Die With Zero, by Bill Perkins

The Great Rat Race Escape, by MJ DeMarco

(None of those are affiliate links, by the way — they will take you to free and complete, detailed breakdowns of each book mentioned here)

But, for the purposes of our present discussion, I would say that debt is the most dangerous killer you have to face. At least, if you want to clear your mind, gain perspective, and start moving your life forward.

Money is…life. It creates possibility and abundance, and you’re not above going out and making some of it.

Real commerce is about making other people’s lives better — being of service to others— and if you can remove the sources of people’s pain, at a price they can afford, and in a way that’s ethical and as effortless for them as possible, then you’re going to start raking in a lot more cash.

But right now, if your debts are keeping you up at night, paying them down is your highest priority.

You need space, and right now, it’s being taken up by credit card payments, due dates, and bill collectors. Nobody can think straight with that nonsense hounding them, so to gain money-space, you need to pay off your debt.

You may have heard of the “debt snowball” method, which is just where you pay off the lowest balances first, giving yourself a small “win” and a psychological boost that lets you then tackle the next biggest debt you have. You could do that.

Or, alternatively, you could start with the highest-interest debt, which, mathematically, is the most efficient way of paying down your debt. Technically, you’ll pay it off earlier, but it will take longer to see the progress since you’ll still have all those smaller balances kicking around.

Either strategy works. You just have to, you know, do it.

Debt is the dream killer. It has absolutely zero place in your life, and if you want space to think, debt has to go. Take every available dollar you have, for as long as you need to, and put it towards your mental and financial freedom.

It’s one of the best things you’ll ever do for yourself. Seriously.

I could go on and on, but another huge part of freeing up money-space is reducing your expenses, at least for a little while.

Are you strong enough to go without your 17 monthly subscriptions to services you’re barely using, in order to secure your freedom for the rest of your life?

Are you secure enough in who you are to drive something less than you can afford, so you can finally get on top of your spending and take your life back?

Especially if you own a business and you’re trying to grow it. Man! By having no liabilities, you can outspend EVERYBODY on ads and business development, making your position virtually impregnable.

In business, if you’re competing against someone who “needs” all these little comforts and big vanity expenses, you can keep punching them in the head (in a business sense lol) and they can’t touch you.

If you don’t need anything, you win. And you also win your mental freedom. Small price to pay!

Anyway, I love talking about money, but I need to move on to another critical resource you NEED to have if you want to make your thinking as sharp as Floyd Mayweather’s jab.

(I couldn’t think of any better similes that haven’t already been done to death, so I just went with Mayweather. Alright, let’s move on, shall we?)

Creating Time-Space

Man, I’m passionate about this one too. Time is what your life is made of — if you waste your time, what you’re really doing is wasting your life. Are you okay with that? With wasting the priceless gift of life itself?

I’m not okay with that, and so I refuse to waste time.

Pointless conversations and meaningless activities — gone. The long way? I’ll take the shortcut, thank you very much, if it’s going to get me where I need to go, ethically and effectively.

You NEED time to think, to plan, to enjoy life. To set your direction, to make progress on your huge, audacious dreams. To live!

Money is life. Time is life. Your MIND is life. Again, it all comes back to inputs. Audit where you’re spending your time now and refuse to indulge in any and every activity that’s not taking you closer to where you want to go.

Money can also be used to buy back your time. I do this every day, and it literally adds dozens of hours of productive time to my schedule every month.

There is a WHO for every HOW, by which I mean for anything you need to get done — schedule flights, pick up dry cleaning, pick up your groceries, schedule calls and appointments, buy gifts for people — there is someone else out there who can do it faster and more effectively than you can; someone you can pay to do it for you, leaving more and more time to focus on the things that actually matter.

You don’t have to be rich to buy back your time. You don’t have to be a “CEO” or whatever people are putting in their Instagram bios these days to make themselves feel important. Buying back your time is affordable, and it’s ALWAYS a great deal.

I’m not going to go too deep into this — just Google “virtual assistants” or go to Upwork or something and you’ll find plenty of capable, professional people willing and able to help out with the things you don’t have to do yourself but that need to get done by someone.

That someone doesn’t always have to be you. All it takes is a little creativity.

Even just thinking ahead a little bit will save you a ton of time.

Group all your errands together, so you’re not traveling from one end of the city to the other and back again when instead, you could have planned your route better and done everything in batches.

Say no to more things. Favors especially. Be willing to help people, sure. I love helping people. But just realize that, when people are asking for “just a few minutes of your time,” what they’re really asking for is a piece of your life. Is it worth it?

Further Reading

You just spent a not-insignificant portion of your life with me (NO part of your life is insignificant), and I’m incredibly, just stupidly grateful for that.

My goal is to help you, because by helping you, I make the world better, which makes my own life better.

Just like these three types of space are interconnected, so are we all, and so my hope is that your life gets significantly (or even just a LITTLE bit) better after spending just a few minutes here with me talking about this stuff.

As well, you can find my full Reading List at this link right here. 1,100+ books about self-improvement, business, philosophy, goals, happiness, and more. And I’ve also got detailed notes on each book if you want those.

Anyway, yea…please let me know what else you’d like my help with!

I’m always happy to do whatever I can, but I can tell you right now that there are two things that have helped me the most in my own life: books, and mentors.

I wish you happiness, peace, and space.

All the best,

Matt Karamazov