How to spend your time wisely
Seneca pointed out how far people will go to protect their money and property, but when it comes to their most valuable asset, time, they give it away for the flimsiest reasons.
Of all the ways we waste time, he said, the worst is through neglect. When we procrastinate. When we do nothing. When we do something other than what we should.
It’s this last part—doing something other than what we should—that Seneca said the whole of life is lost. It’s taking the job with better pay instead of the one that gives us space to learn. It’s staying in an unhealthy relationship. It’s making an elaborate Instagram story instead of logging a few miles on the treadmill. It’s checking the easy thing off our to-do list instead of struggling with the important thing for its own sake.
Maybe we do this because we’re afraid of failing or making mistakes. But if our aim is to spend our time well, then failing or making mistakes, or not having something tangible to show for our efforts, is irrelevant. Doing what we should be doing, regardless of the outcome—that’s time spent wisely.
Mistakes are Proof of Life
When Charlie White was 102 years old, writer David Von Drehle moved next door to him. The two men talked, and Drehle, inspired by the energetic centenarian, decided to write a book about Charlie’s life. Over the next few years, they would meet regularly and Charlie would share with Drehle stories from his life, including financial mistakes he’d made. Once, after the war, Charlie was asked if he’d like to invest in a ski resort in Aspen, Colorado, which was a ghost town at the time. He scoffed at the idea. This turned out to be a mistake. Another time, he sold the 60 acres of land he owned outside of Kansas City for far less than it would be worth when the land became a hotspot for multi-million dollar homes. Again, a mistake. He made another mistake when he later sold his small farm—right before the land was bought up and became some of the most desirable real estate in the country. Drehle commented to Charlie about all the fortune he had missed out on. ‘You don’t know the half of it,’ was Charlie’s cheerful response. He then recounted the time he was offered to invest in Marion Labs, a small start-up operating out of the owner’s basement. He declined, and the company went on to be worth billions. Another mistake. “Yet Charlie,” Drehle writes, “seemed to derive as much delight from recalling these blunders as he did from remembering [his] triumphs.” Not only was Charlie not bitter or resentful, he was ebullient. He understood there was virtue in making mistakes, that they weren’t disappointments. They were irrefutable proof that he was living his life to the fullest.
How To Make a Memorable Story
In Donald Miller’s beautiful memoir, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, he talks about growing up in Odessa, Texas, where the high school football team had won the state championship. Twenty years later, he was surprised that a movie would be coming out about the Odessa team. A movie about a small-town football team from twenty years ago? Miller thought there must be a story he hadn’t heard, so he went to see it on opening night. Friday Night Lights was about overcoming odds and incredible conflict. Like all good sports movies, it came down to the last play in the championship game. And Odessa…lost? Miller was confused. Hadn’t Odessa won? After some quick research, he realized they hadwon—the following year. Friday Night Lights was not a story about them winning; it was about them almost winning. But why tell a story about almost winning? An article online said it was because the year Odessa lost, they had tried harder. The story about the year they won was good, but the story about the year they lost was better because they had sacrificed more. Miller took comfort in this idea and decided it was a good guide to life. “It was necessary to win for the story to be great,” he reflected. “It wasn’t only necessary to sacrifice everything.”
Books Read This Month
-Reading The Pocket Epicurean by John Sellars made me calmer and happier. Sellars says Epicurus’s “vision of the ideal human life focused not on satisfying one’s physical appetites but rather on reaching a state free of all mental suffering.” Epicurus spent his life teaching people what happiness looks like and why we shouldn’t fear death. Seriously, read this book. (If you want a deeper dive into Epicureanism, check out The Art of Happiness.)
–Candide by Voltaire. Wow. This book is…wild. And deep. And short enough to breeze through in a few hours. Candide travels the world and eventually comes to the conclusion that happiness is found in tending to one’s own garden, and in doing one’s own work.
–On Writing and Failure by Stephen Marche has a message for aspiring writers: Writing mostly means failing. To keep showing up is the whole point.
-I really enjoyed The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny, and Murder by David Grann. The action and twists made it read like a thriller. But it also serves as a reminder that despicable things can look benevolent. And to not believe everything you hear.
–Endurance by Alfred Lansing is an EPIC, true story of survival. (I audibly gasped a few times while reading.) What I found especially striking was the men’s optimism after their ship was crushed by ice. For instance, a year into their ordeal, while stranded on a merciless, arctic island with little hope of surviving, one of the crew’s surgeons, Alexander Macklin, wrote in his journal, “A horrible existence, but yet we are pretty happy…”
-My aunt sent me Think Like a Horse by Grant Golliher, and it is one of the best books on leadership I’ve ever read. Grant writes about the lessons he’s learned from his years of training horses. Lessons on building trust, paying attention, patience, and setting boundaries. Great examples too of how he’s used these lessons to be a better parent. Be soft yet firm. Or as Theodore Roosevelt said, “Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far.”
-Minus the misogynistic essays, I found tons of great stuff in Essays and Aphorisms by Arthur Schopenhauer. He was a pessimist who said the world is a miserable place, full of suffering. But he also said that if we lived in a Utopia, if everything was perfect, people wouldn’t know what to do with themselves. Instead of hanging themselves from boredom, they would go out and kill one another, thus creating an even worse world than this one. He said this is why the current world, in all its imperfections, is better than any other. I found a similar message in Candide—that people would rather cause themselves or others harm than be bored. Blaise Pascal summarizes this idea in one of my favorite quotes: “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”
