Rule 28: Stop Wasting Your Life

[May 10, 2025]  Orient your life in every possible way to increase your chances that what you want will occur. Wasting time is doing anything that does not contribute to your personal goals.  Know your goals and where you’re going.  And if you are willing to make the right sacrifices to get there, you will always be successful.

“Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be.  Be one.” – Marcus Aurelius

Psychologists tell us that people typically operate at about half their total capacity.  Their studies indicate that most folks waste about four to six hours daily.  That’s one hell of a lot of time being thrown away, which we could have put to better use.

We can all agree that using our lives for more productive activities is a step toward a more fulfilling life. We waste our time watching television, playing video games, drinking and drugging ourselves into a stupor, and we know what wasted time is about.  We know we’re doing it.  We’re fully conscious of it.  And, the younger you are, the more negative impact wasted time has on you throughout your life because your youth is the exact time for you to invest in your future.

One meaningful way to stop wasting your life is to learn to write.  There is no difference between writing and thinking.  Those who can write will succeed in life at several magnitudes greater than everyone else.

Start writing, even if it is imperfect, even if it is terrible writing with lousy grammar and bad sentence structure.  You need to learn to write because writing forces you to think, which makes you act correctly and successfully.  If you practice writing now, in five years, you will be so far ahead of your peers that they will never catch up.

Also, make a schedule and stick to it.  Schedules are used to plan the day, not as a straightjacket to tie you down.  Most of us don’t like following a schedule because we make it too restrictive.  That is wrong.  A schedule is not a list of responsibilities; it is a manageable layout of those things you want to do that day.

Set up your day as if it were the best possible day you could realistically create.  The rule is that you should be better off by the end of that day than you were at the beginning.  Ultimately, your schedule is a negotiation with yourself to trade work today for a payoff tomorrow.

Reject making things consciously worse for yourself and others.  We all do this, and we do it because there are times we are spiteful, resentful, arrogant, or deceitful.  Get your act together.  It isn’t only your life; it’s the fate of everyone you’ve networked with.  The things you do or don’t do are far more critical than you think.  The alternative is a meaningless life with no responsibility.

You can whine about your suffering and disastrous life; maybe the only thing you gain from it is that people will feel sorry for you.  Taking this pathway as a martyr and rejecting responsibility (with its associated difficulties) is the wrong path.  To live a harmful life, you harm your family, and if enough people do that, then it’s hell on earth.

Bear your burden of life properly, live with your head up, and be confident in yourself and others. Furthermore, no one can live well without a routine.

I recommend you get a routine because you cannot be mentally healthy without it.  You need to pick a time to get up (preferably early in the morning), go to bed, and stick to it. Otherwise, you will screw up your circadian rhythms that regulate your mood.  Any mood other than being positive works against you.

Plan the life you would like to have and do that by having a conversation with yourself.  Present to yourself the idea that you want a good life (not an easy task).  Doing so may sound irresponsible, but some people don’t like themselves very much.  Consequently, they beat themselves up for not fulfilling their daily needs and then doing nothing about it.  This is such a pathetic way to spend your day.

One of the main reasons people don’t get what they want is that they don’t figure out what they want.  The probability of getting what you want when you don’t specify your goals is precisely zero.  You will fail.

Figure out what you want and aim at it (RULE 4:  Aim high, find your mission in life). Take the time to reorient your life in every possible way to increase your chance that what you want will occur.  If you are willing to live in the world properly, not waste your time, and know your goal and aim at it, you will be more than you can be.

Stop wasting your life.

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Please read my books:

1. “55 Rules for a Good Life,” on Amazon (link here).
2. “Our Longest Year in Iraq,” on Amazon (link here).