Let us get one thing out of the way immediately: I am perfectly aware of the rich irony involved in telling people not to waste their time on useless things, when this very website specialises in helping people get through Mondays with a deluge of information, and start off the weekends the right way with pictures of beautiful women (who are themselves dopamine addicts).
Yet, the fact is, these things NEED to be said, as much for my sake as for yours. In reality, that most of us are letting the days of our lives run through like sand in an hourglass. We will never get that time back. And, as I get older, and more acutely aware of just how much I have failed to achieve, I have come to understand the need to transmit some of those lessons on to others, to help men understand the value of their time.
The old saying about how time is money, is an actual and literal truth. The reasoning is simple, and I explained it clearly in a previous podcast about economics. The key point to understand here is that money is a translation of one’s labour and productivity into things one can BUY AND SELL. Since your labour by definition takes up your time, money puts a numerical value on the relative worth of that time itself.
Therefore, if you are wasting time on things that have no value, you are literally wasting your life in a very measurable sense.
So, what are you going to do about it? How are you going to avoid this problem and trap? As you go through life, you will find no end of distractions, follies, and timewasters that stop you from achieving what you want, when you want to.
In my life, I have found the sources of wasted time come from two places – useless people, and useless habits. You can control your exposure to the first, and you can control your vulnerability to the second.
Here is how.
1. Do Not Be Deceived by Flatterers
Patrick Bet-David is an extremely hard-working, extremely successful entrepreneur. He is a devout Christian, a family man, and has brought tremendous value to people’s lives. And, when it comes to dealing with useless people, because he is a successful and extroverted businessman, he has plenty of experience with them that the rest of us do not.
The red flags he identifies in that video are outward displays of extreme insecurity within people. For men, these insecurities manifest as constantly deflection of blame and criticism onto other people. This amounts to a refusal to take real responsibility for anything – a profoundly Gamma trait.
As PBD notes, introducing a Gamma into your business will end up destroying it. You CANNOT put such people in charge of anything.
As all of us here know, the Socio-Sexual Hierarchy of Our Beloved and Dreaded Supreme Dark Lord (PBUH) Voxemort the Most Malevolent and Terrible, is a heuristic ranking of men that allows us to compare across social strata, functions, time, and place. It is an extremely useful analytical tool which offers predictive power as well as diagnostic ability.
Gamma traits are not always easy to see, which is why Gammas are so hard to spot and root out at times. They can seem to be very capable and skilled, at least at first, but the moment you actually put them in charge of anything important, they immediately RUIN it.
A classmate of mine mentioned this just the other day when I met him at an event. He talked about how he handed over his business to someone else during his summer internship at Big Bad Evil Global Megacorp – to a man who had been with his company for years, and whom he trusted. That man ended up very nearly destroying the entire business within the space of a few months, because he turned out to be so toxic. My classmate eventually had to pay this character a quite hefty sum (relative to the company’s revenues) to leave – which blew productive capital that could easily have been redeployed elsewhere.
How much time did that one bad decision waste? And how much value was lost in the process? Think about this, and realise that you cannot and must not put yourself in the same position, if you can avoid it.
2. Do Not Waste Your Time With Useless Things
I started listening to Bedros Keullian a while back – he is an interesting character who offers a powerful take on all things business and fitness. He has built a fitness business by taking hard decisions when he needs to – and he did it by overcoming very bad decisions he made early in life, which could have turned him into a criminal.
In that video, among other things, Bedros discusses the need to discard things that do not add value to your life. In his case, it amounted to weed, alcohol, and time-wasting activities that he did not need to do.
Do you spend your day staring vacuously at Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, or other social media? Understand that the people who created these programmes, designed them SPECIFICALLY to capture your attention and keep you hungering for the next big dopamine hit.
Or, perhaps you have an addiction to caffeine, video games, television, nicotine, marijuana, or – God help you – PR0N. These things are generally fine in moderation – except for the last one, because what goes into producing that stuff is in many cases quite literally Satanic. (That is another post for another time.) But, once you waste your time simply waiting for your next hit of the same addictive substance, you centre your life around those things, instead of around the productive and useful activities that will build you into a better and more worthy man.
You need to get away from these things and detox. You have to stop consuming that crap, and move away from it. And you MUST, without hesitation, replace them with things that add value to your life, and to the lives of those around you.
3. Develop Daily Habits of Excellence
The following video comes from our good friend, The Male Brain, and concerns the importance of cultivating daily habits of excellence that will make it easy for you to find the motivation to spend your time wisely, instead of wasting it:
A daily set of good habits is the best possible replacement for bad habits – and, while this sounds quite trivial and blindingly obvious, in fact, most people are not capable of doing it. Good habits take time and effort to cultivate. They are like financial investments – they pay off over the long term.
Bas Rutten knows about this better than most. The former UFC light heavyweight champion has a set of daily habits that keep his body strong and his mind sharp. You must do the same – as I do.
So, what about Didact’s daily habits?
Mine consist of:
- Drinking two large cups of water right after I wake up, to rehydrate and get my metabolism going;
- Stretching out my back to allow me to lift and exercise as hard as I can stand – at a pace that men HALF my age struggle to handle;
- Shaving properly using a safety razor, soap, and aftershave lotion;
- Taking a cold shower – no matter what the season is, no matter how cold it is outside;
- Drinking really good freshly brewed espresso-based coffee for the taste, and black tea for the antioxidants and hydration;
- Eating a high-fat, high-protein diet accompanied with LOTS of greens, because you are indeed what you eat – if you put trash in your body, do not be surprised if you feel and look like trash;
- Walking at least an hour every day – no matter how bad or cold or miserable the weather is, to get blood circulation going and avoiding the damage that comes from sitting too long;
- Reading the Bible every single day, praying during the day whenever I can, and just before I sleep;
These are the habits that build a mind and a body designed for WORK.
There is nothing wrong with taking some time off once in a while to change things up and try new foods, cuisines, ideas, or supplements, etc. But, these kinds of habits are the ones that build a man up. If you do not have good habits that keep you moving forward, then you need to start building them.
So what is stopping you from doing it?
4. Do Not Hesitate
Here we come back to PBD. As he explains in that video, if you want to do big things, then you need to MOVE. We all tend to fall prey to “paralysis by analysis” – and, unfortunately, the more intelligent you are, the more you tend to overthink things. It certainly affects me, all the time. I cannot even BEGIN to count the number of opportunities I lost from fear of making the wrong decision.
When you find yourself hesitating, you must fall back upon your own good judgement to understand whether to pull the trigger. This is where everything else I have written above will come in.
If you have invested your time in building up your mind, body, and especially soul, then the fruits of the Spirit will come to you – and one of those fruits is discernment. Normies might refer to that as “trusting your gut”. This gets a bad rap, far more than it should – in reality, if you are doing the right things to build yourself up, most of the time, your gut will be RIGHT.
So, go with it. If you apply the SSH and see the man across from you is probably trustworthy, and you have the discernment that comes from the wisdom that is the gift of God, then pull the trigger and take the plunge.
As I have pointed out before, the only thing you can do when you don’t know what to do, is to strike out in some direction – ANY direction – and see where it takes you. Making that decision might kill you, sure. But, the one thing that WILL kill you, in that situation, is sitting around and doing nothing.
5. Know Your Limits
None of this is a call to spend 20 hours a day grinding to build out something great, especially if you think you will be doing that for weeks on end. Most likely, if you try something like that for more than a few days, you will burn yourself out. In reality, most people only have about 4 hours or so of really deep, focused, powerful work in them for every day. The rest of their day is not going to be anywhere near as productive.
Thus, you must allocate and use those 4 hours or so of your day to achieve meaningful things.
If your day job is boring, for example, use those 4 hours to build out your side hustle. Creating a side gig isn’t actually that hard – scaling it up, though, is VERY challenging.
If your marriage sucks, then use those 4 hours to try to reconnect with your spouse and your children – doing so may require you to make some harsh and difficult decisions, and/or substantive changes to your attitude and habits. Do not hesitate to make those decisions and sacrifices – it does not matter how much money you make on this Earth, if you do not have a loving and happy family to share it with.
Work with your limits – do not seek to break them all at once. Those limits will increase over time as you test them – but this takes time and effort to do.
Conclusion
You have only this life. You will not get another one on this Earth. And your decisions in this life, will determine what happens in the next one – forever. Do not waste your time chasing after vain philosophies, shiny objects, or especially loose women. Spend your time pursuing excellence in everything you do. Seek to clean your mind, connect with God, and do good for those around you.
It does not matter how weak or powerless you believe you are. In reality, no matter your station in life, God has given you tremendous gifts, which He intends for you to USE. If you refuse to do so, and instead waste the opportunities He gives you on useless pursuits, do not then be surprised when He turns His back on you.
Therefore, look to make the best use of your time on this Earth that you can. Rest, distraction, and entertainment are no bad things – there is no evil in taking a break from time to time. But do not make pleasure-seeking your primary aim in life.
1 Comment
Excellent throughout.
The 4 hours a day of productive time is really quite jarring when you think about the ramifications. On average American corporations want you onsite 8-10 hours a day. Fully half of that time is expected to be unfocused and useless, for many 80% of it is unfocused, for some 100% of it is useless.
Why does this state of corporate imprisonment continue for so many?
People would rather be unhappy at work then miserable at home. The real challenge for a fulfilling life as a man is to make your home somewhere you want to be, not somewhere you avoid being.