You can waste clothes.
You can waste food.
You can waste money.
But wasted time?
That’s a whole other beast.
I’m not talking about the 2 hours you want back after watching a crappy movie.
I’m talking about the time you feel you wasted watching hours of TV on end, staying in a relationship with the wrong person, working at that soul destroying job, etc.
YEARS of wasted time.
It’s one of the biggest regrets in life.
Not because we know we can’t get the time back. We know that.
But because we torture ourselves with “What could’ve been.”
What you could’ve done with that time and a result, where you would be today.
SO many ways to beat yourself up because there are SO many great scenarios to imagine and choose from.
Now what do we take from all this?
A resolve not to waste time again.
But we find we do it again inevitably.
Here’s what you have to realize.
In that moment, when you were watching those shows, spending time with that horrible person, the time you spent at that horrible job, you didn’t know what you know now.
You couldn’t have time traveled back and told yourself what you know now.
And even if you did, you would have a hard time convincing yourself because it would be foreign to you. You have the knowledge. You hear the words. You understand in your head.
But you didn’t have the experience of those years put together in your heart.
So stop beating yourself up. It’s nothing to beat yourself up over. You couldn’t have known.
And yes, people around you might have told you but again, that’s “head” knowledge, not experienced by the heart.
Second thing to realize is this.
Life is so damn fluid and more interconnected than we will ever consciously realize. Who knows what would’ve happened had we NOT wasted time watching those shows, spending time with that person, working at that crummy job.
We always picture the BEST case scenario but logically, can’t a worst case scenario argument be made as well?
Seriously.
Here you are beating yourself up over the fact that you COULD POSSIBLY be in a WAY better position now if you hadn’t wasted that time.
But then again, we have to remember that it COULD BE POSSIBLE.
It COULD ALSO BE POSSIBLE that you’ll be in a WORSE position now, EVEN IF you still hadn’t wasted that time.
Can I prove it?
No.
Can you?
No.
Can you prove you’ll be in a BETTER position now if you hadn’t wasted that time anymore than you can prove you’ll be in a WORSE position than if you did the same thing?
You can make arguments for both. It’s not an open and shut case.
Why?
We just like to ASSUME if we changed abc in the past, then xyz would happen now, but we can’t prove it. Way too many variables. Life is too fluid and interconnected that we can never predict it.
Yeah, so what if you didn’t watch that TV or spent time with that horrible person or stayed at that life sucking job and instead created your own business and made millions.
But then you were diagnosed with terminal cancer and died a slow, painful death.
With the very same stroke of imagination you paint to torture yourself with the best case scenario, you can easily make the argument to use that same stroke to paint a much worst case scenario as well.
The truth is – you’ll NEVER know where you might be now had you not “wasted your time”.
So don’t waste anymore time wondering about it.
It’s futile.
You can’t horizontally connect events and expect a certain outcome. Life is much more encompassing than that.
You want to have not “not wasted all your time”?
Here’s what you do.
You make the most of it NOW.
That’s how you do it.
You know those financial gurus who swear that credit card debt is like the devil? The ones that have a smile on their face on freeway billboards while cutting up credit cards?
Can you imagine how much regret they had?
How much time they wasted trying to keep up with everybody?
How much time they wasted staying up at night wondering how they were going to pay the bills?
How much time they spent living a lie?
Yeah, they can declare bankruptcy and forever lament their lives and drown in their sorrows over a case of beer OR they can become a voice to warn people of the dangers of debt.
That’s how they can re-write history to show that they indeed did not waste their time at all because without it, they would not have been in a position of experience to help so many others today.
Make the most of your “wasted time”.
Really maximize it.
I’m not going to tell you how because it will be different for each situation, but you will see eventually how you can do it.
And it’s when you do this that you free yourself over the regret of wasted time
Here’s the bottom line of all this:
Over time, you realize it’s not wasted time.
Just preparation time.
Kind of like cooking.
For the final product – the realization of who you ultimately have to become and what you ultimately have to do.
And I don’t there’s anybody on this earth who would call that wasted time at all.
