Never give up on a dream just because of the time it will take to accomplish it. The time will pass anyway.

— Earl Nightingale

The above quote is a frequent sight on inspirational Twitter feeds, and it’s quite compelling. Let’s take a closer look.

“I’ll be [x age] when I’m done” is a common objection to committing to a worthy but faraway goal. Earl Nightingale points out that we’re going to arrive at that age regardless of how we spend the intervening years. We might as well achieve as much as possible.

It’s easy to overlook the role our immediate environment plays in productivity.

When it comes to working through visual or auditory distractions, I’m the absolute worst. A conversation taking place outside my office door or a TV screen in my visual field completely saps my productivity, rendering me a distracted mess. My office isn’t soundproof (whose is?), so to drown out background noise, I use a pair of earbuds along with simplynoise.com on a daily basis. When I really need to focus, I grab my laptop and abscond to an empty conference room. Some days—like today—I spend nearly the whole day there.

Jim Lovell, the commander of Apollo 13, knows something about workplace problems. When I’m confronted by a particularly onerous challenge on the job, I try to remember Lovell’s philosophy on the matter:

Be thankful for problems. If they were less difficult, someone with less ability might have your job. —Jim Lovell

He’s right, of course. If it weren’t for the vexing, taxing, seemingly intractable problems of our job, someone much less hard-working, focused, and motivated could do it. And they’d be cheaper, too.

During my recent Think Days, I hit upon an intriguing idea. In fact, I found it so compelling that I’m trying it out as a sort of governing philosophy for effective living. I know that sounds pretty heavy, but hear me out. Here’s the idea:

Whenever possible, leave things better than you found them.

This is a powerfully simple concept that we’re all familiar with. We might even put it into practice occasionally (like when we’re cleaning up our overnight campsite and we pick up a few of the previous campers’ beer cans in addition to our own). But I’m talking about using this idea to guide everything from long-term career planning to moment-to-moment conduct. I’ve been trying this out for the last week—which isn’t very long, I’ll admit—and my experience thus far has been that it makes life both more interesting and more enjoyable.

Earlier this week, inspired by Bill Gates’ legendary Think Weeks, I took two days off work in order to sit around and think. I called them “Think Days.” Clever, huh?

The goal of Think Days is to spend uninterrupted time thinking deeply about the big, important questions in our lives—the stuff we just don’t have time to ponder on an everyday basis. Before taking my own Think Days, I was concerned this lofty idea might turn out to be a waste of two vacation days, but the experience was both highly productive and relaxing. It left me with valuable insights, and I highly recommend it.