The average daily commute to work and back home is one hour. That means on average you are spending 5 hours on the road a week. Or roughly 20 hours on the road a month. Or 240 hours on the road a year! What do a lot of us do while we are on the road? Most of us listen to music. Some start talking away on their cell-phones. Others feel the need to yell at every inept driver on the road. When you take into account that most university students spend roughly 250 hours a year in the classroom earning a degree, you can understand the true importance of those accumulated road hours. Commuting hours should never be wasted, but rather converted into value-producing time for personal and/or professional development.

Over the years, I have accumulated quite a collection of audiobooks and courses. I make sure that whenever I get into my vehicle for a drive that will last over 20 minutes, that I have an audiobook CD ready to play. Just think about it. In one daily commute, you can have the equivalent education of a university lecture right there in your car, without doing anything extra.

People are often surprised that I can speak in both Portuguese and Spanish and they ask me where I learned how to speak those languages. I tell them,