Effectively Wasting Time on Trivial Pursuits

Old Orange TelevisionIt seems to me that so many of the current lifestyle choices that many people choose to make are spent on wasting time. When we think about how much time is spent, wasted on pursuits such as Facebook, television and all of the other things that are just purely entertainment, we realize that if we spent this time on something more productive, it would lead not only a better life, but a better existence in general.

 

Let’s talk for a second about television. According to Nielsen.com, 2 1/2 hours every day are spent staring at a glowing box. What could you do with 2 1/2 hours per day?

 

I know that I’ve used the learning guitar reference before, but in this instance, it is extremely relevant. When I was in high school, I knew a few guys that would never come out and party. All I knew about them was that they would go home after school and not come out as everyone else and have a good time. As it turns out, they were going home to practice guitar. I knew this because the only thing that they would talk about during school hours would be the guitar or music in general.

 

And as a proper online creep, I looked them up recently, only to find out that they are in popular bands surrounded by gorgeous women, based only on the talent that playing guitar has got them.

 

So, that being said let me also tell you about a fellow named Malcolm Gladwell. This fellow is a best-selling author and has discovered that the key to being great at anything is spending at least 10,000 hours doing this. If you are spending the average amount of time watching television, then in approximately 10 years you will be an expert in watching television. If however, you can translate that into a bankable skill then you are going to be well off, and probably set for life. If you do not translate your 10,000 hours of television watching into a bankable skill,then you will have wasted nearly 10 years of your free time watching television.

 

Television is extremely enjoyable. I can admit that I watch it on a daily basis. The only difference is that I keep the television in the corner of my eye while doing something else. This means that I do not devote my full attention to this waste of time. If like me, you can multitask, then keeping television as a second thought to the projects that you were working on, is going to reward you with not only successful projects, but also the feeling that you have not wasted your existence watching content that has only been created to fill the time between commercials.

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