Last week I told my wife I was jealous of her.

She’d just gotten back from a hangout with her girlfriends and she was in tears as she recounted something funny that had happened that evening.

“I gotta tell you, I’m jealous of what you guys have.” I said.

See, my wife has an incredible group of girlfriends. Honestly, it’s the kind of friend group that seems like it only exists on TV. These women have supported each other through pregnancies, miscarriages, and double-digit numbers of births. They know each other’s hopes, fears, and garage codes. They plan elaborate get-togethers and get matching tattoos, and their group text requires its own data center to keep running.

I told my wife that I’m so glad she has a group of friends like that, but I admitted that I’m also a little jealous.

See, my friends are incredible too. But due to the nature of my work, they’re spread out all over the country. Where my wife and her friends see each other nearly every day, I’m lucky to see some of my friends once a year.

My wife said “You should plan a trip to go see your friends.”

I shook my head. “I’m too busy. It’ll have to wait until things slow down.”
She said “Things never slow down, Kyle. You just have to make time for this stuff. It’s important.”

I thought about what she said as I boarded a plane to Nashville for an event the next day, and I started texting my friends who lived there.

“Hey, last minute, but I’m coming to town for a few days. Want to grab lunch?”

I did the same thing when I left Nashville and flew to South Dakota. I even extended my trip so I could swing by my friend Seb’s house in LA and visit a few other friends in the area.

By the end of the week, I’d gotten quality one-on-one time with more than a dozen of my friends (I forgot to take pictures with a few of them, so you’ll have to take my word for it). For comparison, that's probably more spontaneous get-togethers than I've had in the last twelve months.

See, in the past I’ve let these opportunities slip by because I was too busy or too tired or too overwhelmed, telling myself "I'll catch them the next time I'm in town."

But this week I realized that there will never be the perfect time to meet up with your friends.
There will always be something more urgent, more logical, more convenient.

But if you want to cultivate the kind of deep friendships my wife and her friends have, you have to do the inconvenient thing.

The same is true of anything you want in life. If you want to have something (an experience, a skill, or a relationship) you have to make time for it. Those things will never be the logical choice.

There will never be a perfect time to build deep relationships or learn new skills or bet the farm on a crazy idea.
It's never the right time to build a birdhouse treehouse or invite your friends to dig a giant rock out of the ground.
But those are the things that make life more fun.

Those are the things we'll look back on and remember most fondly. But if we want to be able to look back on those memories later, we have to actually take the time to make them now.

Two questions for you this week:

1. When you look back at the end of your life, what are the things that you’ll wish you’d made more time for?
2. Why aren’t you making time for those things today?

Happy Friday, friends. Make it a good one.

-Kyle

P.S. If one of the things you want to make time for is creativity, my new book, How Ideas Work, will not only show you how to have more incredible ideas, it’ll give you a step-by-step framework for bringing those ideas to life.
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It would mean the world if you’d preorder a copy today.​
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