People often tell me that they feel frustrated because they don’t have the time to explore their interests or build new skills. I understand where they’re coming from. I have many interests. I like digging into new topics and new skills, feeling the concepts start to click together. There are many, many more things I want to learn than I have the time to do in one lifetime. There’s everyday life to deal with, too.

One of the most useful things I’ve learned is how to not be discouraged by the limitations of time. We set ourselves these deadlines (“I want to be a millionaire by thirty!”) and we get frustrated because we aren’t getting there fast enough because of all the things in the way. An oft-repeated piece of advice is that your goals should be SMART: specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-bound. While time-bound goals are useful in many situations, they’re not the best fit for everything. It’s easy to be overwhelmed by all the possibilities and frustrated by the fact that you can be in only one place at one time, paying attention to one thing and forgetting others. If you have too many goals, you don’t have any.

It’s good to know when to let that go. It’s good to give yourself permission to explore in a general direction but not necessarily force yourself to arrive at your destination by a specific time or date. Then any obstacles in your path just mean that you’ll take the scenic route, and sometimes you might discover interesting side-paths along the way.

I know that I may not get to do everything, but I can do the things that matter the most, and I can slowly explore other interests in the time and space that I have. It’s like the way that I think about savings. I may not be able to buy everything I want, but I can save up for the things that matter. If something is more expensive than others, that simply means that it will take me a little longer to save up for it. Likewise, I may be curious about what it’s like to have certain kinds of skills or experiences, but I can probably get there even if I go slowly.

It’s a different kind of ambition, perhaps. For many people, ambition is about getting somewhere. My goal is to have a good journey along the way, and to share that with others.

Letting go of deadlines makes it easier for me to scale back some things in order to make space for other interests. I keep a list of things that I say “no” to in order to make space for this I want to say “yes” to. My mother observed that I haven’t been writing about sewing lately. It’s on my “no” list, just as playing the piano is. Both are good hobbies and many people enjoy them, but I’ve moved the time and focus to other things at the moment, and that’s okay. Right now, I’m focusing on writing, drawing, and learning how to develop mobile applications.

Frugality helps a lot, too. If I don’t spend so much, then I don’t need to earn so much, and I can work less and use the extra time to experiment. The other approach is to earn more so that I can free up more time in the future, but that can be dangerous. Work can be addictive, and postponing exploration means missing out on some things that are better when they mature over time. A hybrid approach that’s working out well: work less and earn more, then use the extra time to learn how to make things even better…

There’s time enough for the things that matter, and a little more for exploring.