The way we spend our time can be divided into three “bottles”. They are the necessary tasks bottle, the voluntary tasks bottle and the happiness bottle.

Every day, we spend time filling the necessary tasks bottle with useful things, like making money, doing housework, buying food and paying bills. We then fill another bottle with voluntary tasks. These are the things we do for others, but we may not enjoy them. This bottle gets filled with tasks like taking children to activities, cooking family meals, and doing laundry. Those bottles are very important. If we don’t fill them each day, our family won’t run properly.

However, we often forget to fill the third bottle—the happiness bottle that we fill with activities that make us happy. Is your happiness bottle sometimes empty at the end of the day? Between doing all the necessary and voluntary tasks, time flies by, and before we know it, it is time for bed. We all have days like that.

That is why each day we have to make an effort to fill our happiness bottle. I fill mine by going to the dance class. And I always leave class more happily than when I enter. This week, I had the pleasure of taking part in a guitar practice in neighborhood. We show our musical talent and practice music for charity. It was a time of fun, friendship, and music-making. At the end of the evening, my happiness bottle was filled to top.

▲ Will your activities bring joy to your life? Or are the other two tasks eating up all your time? Try to find ways to achieve a balance between how you fill your three bottles. At the end of the day, hopefully, we’ve done all we can do to make sure that our happiness bottle is filled.

If you have a magic bank account ( 银行账户), it has 86,400 yuan in it each morning. But if you don’t spend this money during the day, it will go back to zero at the end of the day. What would you do? Spend as much as you can each day, of course.

In fact, we all have a magic bank account like this. It is the time we have each day. Each day is 86, 400 seconds long, but every second passes. Every second can’t get back again.

Of course, you can never borrow time. You can’t borrow time from your future or take a “time loan(贷款)” from someone else. The time you have is just the time you have and that is that. You need to manage your time yourself. You can decide how to spend your time, just as you can decide how to spend your money.

Many of us don’t use time the same way as we use money because we feel our time never runs out. If you spend money, you can’t get it back the way that a new day brings us more time. But in fact, there is no way to get more time in life. So we should use our time wisely (明智地).

When I was a kid in Minnesota, watermelon was expensive. One of my father’s friends, Bernie, was a rich businessman, who owned a large store in St. Paul.

Every summer, when the first watermelons arrived, Bernie would call us. Dad and I would go to Bernie’s place. We’d sit on the edge of the dock(码头), swung our legs and got ready for a big meal.

Bernie would take his knife, cut our first watermelon, hand us both a big piece and sit down next to us. Then we’d hide our faces in watermelon, eating only the heart—the reddest, juiciest, firmest, sweetest, most seed-free part—and throw away the rest. Bernie just smiled and looked at it patiently with satisfaction.

Bernie was my father’s idea of a rich man. I always thought it was because he was such a successful businessman. Years later, I realized that it was not Bernie’s wealth itself but his way of dealing with it that my father liked. Bernie knew how to stop working, get together with friends and eat only the heart of the watermelon.

What I learned from Bernie is that being rich is a state of mind. Some of us, no matter how much money we have, will never be free enough to eat only the heart of the watermelon. If you don’t take the time to dangle your feet over the dock and enjoy life’s small pleasure, your work is probably hurting your life.

For many years, I forgot that lesson I’d learned as a kid on the loading dock. I was too busy making all the money I could.

Well, I’ve relearned it. I hope I have time left to enjoy the success of others and to take pleasure in the day. That’s the heart of the watermelon. I have learned again to throw the rest away.