Twenty-four. Tick. Tick. Not enough time—never enough for us. And yet, how do we explain why it is enough for prolific writers and seminal ? How enough time for Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart to write 625 compositions. Let me add that Mozart died a month before turning 36—he lived fewer hours than I hope any of us will, yet is among the most prolific of composers. How?

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart didn’t watch Teletubbies or play World of Warcraft. At age three, he followed his sister Nannerl to the harpsichord bench, where his father Leopold ensured he practiced hours per day. At age five, he began composing, and by age ten, had published his first sonatas and symphonies.

Why didn’t we all publish music before we hit puberty? We had the time. We have 24 hours each day, the same as Mozart. The same as Archimedes. The same as Gandhi. And the same as Benjamin Franklin, who—amid printing newspapers, studying electricity, and leading the American Revolution—had the time to record how he did those things.

Here is a quote from Franklin’s autobiography, just after he had begun working and eating at a printing press in London.

“I drank only water; the other workmen, near fifty in number, were great guzzlers of beer…. My companion at the press drank every day a pint before breakfast, a pint at breakfast with his bread and cheese, a pint between breakfast and dinner, a pint at dinner, a pint in the afternoon about six o’clock, and another when he had done his day’s work. I thought it a detestable custom; but it was necessary, he suppos’d, to drink strong beer, that he might be strong to labour. I endeavoured to convince him that the bodily strength afforded by beer could only be in proportion to the grain or flour of the barley dissolved in the water of which it was made; that there was more flour in a pennyworth of bread; and therefore, if he would eat that with a pint of water, it would give him more strength than a quart of beer. He drank on, however, and had four or five shillings to pay out of his wages every Saturday night for that muddling liquor; an expense I was free from. And thus these poor devils keep themselves always under.”

End quote. I am then not the first to believe that the simple substitutions we make determine how successful we are. Simply choosing water rather than beer determined how successful Franklin was. Simply relieving himself of the need for beer’s taste and strength relieved Franklin of paying for it. It relieved him of cloudy intoxication, such that Franklin could efficiently use his 24 hours. Simply saying, “I don’t need this comfort, or this luxury, or this idle time; there is something better I can do,” I believe we can all make simple substitutions. I believe we can all replace our spades with climbing picks. That we can stop digging holes, one scoop per day, and start ascending the mountains where we really want to be.