Use Your Time Wisely: Advice I Should Have Followed

Time is a very precious thing. It’s funny because it doesn’t actually exist, it’s something that humans concocted for measurement. Over generations it’s taken so much meaning to all of us. One of the biggest life lessons I’ve been told over and over and still never really followed deals with how I use my time. I’m sure everyone has been told that time is precious and we should be spending our time wisely. This is a valuable lesson that I think 95% of us will ignore despite knowing that it’s true. Why don’t we follow this advice and what does spending your time wisely truly mean?

My dad is one of the biggest preachers of the advice. He’s told me this year after year. He’s now approaching 90 years old. I’ve heard him nag about this constantly since I was a teenager but I never listened. What does he know? He’s an old man that never became rich or wildly successful at anything. My dad had me when he was much older so a lot of his advice fell on deaf ear. Now that I’m older I’m starting to understand what he’s been nagging me about and he was right.

One of the many things that he nagged to me about was to go to school. He didn’t care whether I got a job afterwards, all he knew was that it was good for me. So I did it and it was fun. I took courses that were interesting to me but I didn’t want to follow any of the career paths that the curriculum directed me towards. He was proud of me nevertheless. He wanted me to continue to go to school. “The more you learn the better” was what he’d always say to me. I didn’t get it. I couldn’t afford to continue to pay for university and I found it overall exhausting and a waste of time. Once I finished my bachelor’s degree I was done with school.

I eventually got a job. It wasn’t in the field that I studied but my bachelor’s degree helped because it was a requirement for the job. I started to feel comfortable because I was making good money and living without worry. Still my dad continued to badger me about going back to school. He would say to me, “you have this extra time on your hands why don’t you make yourself better?” I didn’t. Could you blame me? I’m a young guy in my 20’s making cash that I’ve never seen before, taking trips and having fun.

Fun was the keyword I guess. It’s because I was having so much fun I would quickly forget his advice and I fell into this weird coma of inactivity. I was enjoying myself with trips and purchases of fun things like cars and video games. Years flew by and it all started to feel the same. I started to slow down and that gave me time to reflect on my life. What have I been doing? I don’t regret any of those fun years I had but if I worked harder like my dad told me to what would my life be like today?

I’m not sure when it happened but I started to realize that buying a giant TV does have immediate satisfaction but in the long term you’re only going to want something even better. That becomes a vicious cycle. That trip I took to China was fun at the time but I didn’t quite appreciate it as much as I would if I had learned the language and the culture.

So it’s later in my life and now my perception of the world has changed. My outlook is different but not that different. I sort of see life like a role playing video game. You have to grind away to level up. That time spent watching TV or exploring memes could instead be spent on learning languages, maintaining personal relationships and learning new things around the world. I’m starting to see what my dad was seeing. Education isn’t supposed to be a means to a career or a job. It’s a means to fulfill your interests and your interest should stay insatiable. It’s probably why he’s lived such a long life, his curiosity of the world never waned therefore his mind continues to be active.

I’m learning more about what it means to be healthy in body/mind/soul. We have so many distractions in the world especially today. Those distractions can be turned into our own weapons if we learn about them but they will be our own demise if we let those distractions take over us.