It’s an eleven-hour flight to Japan that left San Francisco International Airport at 10:40am local time. At that moment it was 3:40am in Tokyo, which is 17 hours ahead of San Francisco. Incidentally, 17 hours ago, I was celebrating with my robotics team as the MC announced we were the winners of the tournament and now ranked in the top 150 teams globally. That level of excitement is rare to find: there are few feelings that match the feeling of winning. It means everything to win.

It tears through my head; does it haunt you too?

But 17 hours later, 300 people sleep on a plane somewhere over the Pacific Ocean. The few who are awake in front of me are watching the live-action Lilo & Stitch (which is worse than the animated one, by the way), Superman (full of low-quality CGI/CGS) with Spanish subtitles, and Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning (in which what’s-his-name “traps” an “AI”—that can access every single nuclear arsenal in the world on a predictable timeline—in an “optical USB stick”). One person in front of me has slept through eight episodes of Bob’s Burgers.

That is to say: time is not linear. Every moment means something so completely different to every person. I am on a plane, writing down the way I feel, while somewhere someone asks their crush out for the first time. Your world will change in 17 hours. In any 17 hours of human history, something has been invented. Someone important has died, or been elected, or passed a law. In three hours, your best friend may decide to move across the world or you may win the lottery—things you have no control over.

But there are ten thousand things you can do to change your world today. In the next seventeen hours, what will you do?

There aren’t many valid excuses, by the way. No money? That’s not an issue; be creative. One of the highest-grossing apocalypse films ever, 28 Days Later, was filmed with one of the lowest budgets ever. The scene where Jim walks in front of the British Parliament on a deserted street? No CGI, no government collaboration. The filming team needed the bridge to be empty for the shot, so they made it happen: they filmed the shot at five in the morning. You can just do things.

So, in the next seventeen hours: how will you change your world?