Why Regretting Wasted Time is Wasted Time
Written by Alex
Hey Tribe,
Welcome back!
If you’ve read a bunch of our mails, and follow the great lads in here on Twitter, you most likely have changed your mind about yourself, society, life, and the mind itself.
But inevitably, there will be regrets popping up.
Especially if you went after it. Started something, got shit done, got your life together. At some point, you’ll be thinking
“If only I started earlier.”
Well, stop that. It only makes it worse.
Learn from my experience
See, I had to turn 30 damn years old before I even realized what’s going on in this world. I realized, I am a mortal being. This life is finite, and I am not using it as well as I should.
I’m sure you have arrived at the same conclusion.
And now I am getting shit done, every day. It feels great.
But what about the first 30 years?
Or lets say 12 years, if I started true life at 18. What about those 12 years where I did nothing but watch porn, play video games, get shitfaced drunk each weekend, working at a shit job?
“Imagine what I could have achieved in 12 years?”
Those are your thoughts, right?
Maybe you’re 24. Congratulations, you noticed it earlier than me. Maybe you’re 50. Doesn’t fucking matter.
The only important metric is, that you woke up! And now you’re going after it.
You lost 12 years? So what? Make the next 6 years count twice. Boom. Solved.
But every single minute that you’re thinking about the thoughts you wasted, are more wasted minutes. Think about it.
Instead of sitting there, mourning the past, you could be building, creating, fixing your life. Whatever.
Thinking about wasted time in the past is wasting time now. And at some point in the future, you’ll be sitting there thinking about the time you wasted right now.
It’s a vicious cycle.
Break it!
Nothing is ever wasted until you flag it like that
I, personally have a saying, that I tell myself every day.
“If you win, you win.
If you lose, you learn.”
This way you never truly lose. Those 12 years of wasted time? They weren’t wasted. They were the precursor to you waking up to reality. If you didn’t fuck up life so badly back then, you wouldn’t realize it right now.
Now you can use it to push yourself. “I’ll never be like that, ever again.” That keeps you moving. 12 years of not moving wasn’t wasted, it is a teacher. The image of your personal hell. Now you have both images. Your goals, which are the images of your heaven. And your “wasted” past, which is your image of hell.
Keep moving, so you don’t fall back into hell. Don’t mourn the past. Live in the present.
This email shall be the last time you thought badly about your past. And it shall be one of the last times, you thought at all about your past.
And even better, teach other people what you did. Tell them what you achieved. Tell them how it’s done. Tell them, what life is truly about. That and your personal image of hell might be the only useful times to think about your past.
USE the past as a tool.
Don’t live in it.
Cheers,