Using data from the United States Department of Labor, this video provides a powerful visual representation of the notion that life is short.
Your life span can be represented literally and figuratively by 28,835 jellybeans – a single bean for each day. When you examine how you spend most of your time, you realize that your jellybeans disappear rather quickly. After subtracting the time you spend sleeping, working, eating, commuting, caretaking, and doing household chores, you are left with slightly fewer than 3,000 discretionary jellybeans (or 8 years worth). As each day passes and jellybean after jellybean is required for routine tasks, how will you choose to spend your remaining handful of beans?
To extract as much as possible from your jellybeans, we invite you to make deliberate choices as to how you spend and use your time. In the context of standardized test preparation, we would encourage you to limit the amount of time you spend engaged in mundane activities, such as sitting in a traditional “bootcamp” class for more than 25 hours a week when you could achieve greater score improvements in far less time. This will provide you with more options for the future and significantly more discretionary time to pursue activities you are truly passionate about.
Your time is precious. Spend it wisely.