You Haven’t Wasted Your Life. Here’s Why.

It’s a common element I see in a lot of motivational videos. They’ll start with the secret to growth (or whatever they think that is), and then they’ll go into personal accounts: Stories of people who discovered this new, magical approach later in life. I hear it a lot, and it makes me wince every time. People will say, “I can’t believe I wasted so much of my life doing x when I could have been doing y.” And then there will be a call to action: Don’t waste any more of your life. Don’t spend your time (or money) on things that don’t work. A reasonable conclusion, right? Kind of. My problem with this style of thinking is its emphasis on not letting your life ‘go to waste’. And while the idea of enacting change into your lifestyle can be motivating, that motivation can be short lived, and very quickly replaced with guilt. Why? Let’s have a look. <ol> <li>If you’re only going off of motivation, you’re setting yourself up for failure. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing (contrary to popular belief, some things are worth failing at), but it is something that’s important to acknowledge when you set out to do the things that are important to you.</li> <li>In this day and age, it is very rare for anyone to be satisfied with where they are. There will always be things we ‘could have’ done better. Maybe you could have dedicated more time to mastering the violin when you were eight. Maybe you should have learned four languages before the age of ten. Maybe you feel like you wasted your athletic potential by focusing too hard on books or video games. Whatever the case, no one starts out perfect, and very few people feel that they’ve done enough.</li> </ol> <a href="https://medium.com/@RaineInTheDesert/you-havent-wasted-your-life-here-s-why-3a1a2a488cbe">Read More</a>