In Brief: Essential Insights for Post-Military Transition
23 Oct 2023 · 5 min
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In this solo episode of the In Brief podcast, host Jordana Megonigal, CEO of the Recon Network, reflects on how people habitually wish time away and end up wasting it. She opens by describing the common tendency to look forward to future events or to rush through difficult periods, which leads to a feeling that life passes by unnoticed. Jordana cites the Roman philosopher Seneca, who argued that life is not short but is squandered through careless use of time, emphasizing that a generous amount of time is available if it is well‑invested. She underscores that time is the only truly finite resource—every person receives exactly 1,440 minutes each day. Jordana challenges listeners to view even mundane activities such as sleeping, working, and eating not as wasted moments but as purposeful tools that can enhance the value of other minutes. She uses concrete examples (e.g., choosing nutritious food to fuel the body) to illustrate how daily choices can support a more meaningful use of time. The episode concludes with a call to action: assess how you spend your minutes, recognize any wasted time, and intentionally invest each minute in activities that matter, thereby turning the perception of a short life into a longer, more purposeful one.
Chapters
This is In Brief. Let's get to it. Hey there, and welcome back to the In Brief podcast. This is Jordana. I'm CEO of the Recon Network and host of this podcast, where each week we take just a few minutes to talk about a topic that hopefully changes your life in some small way. And if you're going through the transition process, maybe even helps you a little bit through that. This week we're talking about the waste of time. How often do you find yourself wishing your time away? I mean, we all do it. We've got something big we're looking forward to coming up and we wish it would get here sooner, or we're going through something hard and we wish it would just hurry up and be over with. We're always looking ahead wishing that the minutes in between would just Disappear so that we could live up the great times and forget about the bad ones. The problem is, when we do that, we spend a life of willing our time away, and then we sit back and scratch our heads wondering where all our time went. How did this year fly by so quickly? How are we already this old? How did we even get here? It feels like sometimes life is so short. Like we look up and all these things have happened to us without us even being aware. But life isn't like that, no matter how much it feels that way. You don't just go from 15 years old to 40 years old, or however old you are. There were millions of minutes in between that happened, things that changed you for worse or for better, things that affected you and the people around you. There were incredibly happy moments and likely some horrifically hard ones. And yet, when we look back, it feels like time just dropped us where we are without warning. It just feels like life is so short, doesn't it? The Roman philosopher Seneca diagnosed this situation better than maybe anyone before or after him. He said, It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well well invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death's final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing. So it is. We are not given a short life, but we make it short, and we are not ill-equipped but wasteful of it. Life is long if you know how to use it. Basically, Seneca said, this life offers us plenty of time. We just don't realize until it's too late that we've already wasted most of it. As we've discussed on this podcast before, the thing about time is that it's the one resource that is actually finite. You can't buy it or barter for more, and all the money in the world and all the good works you do won't get you any more of it. And it's quite possibly the most equal opportunity equivalent we'll ever see, because every single one of us has 1,440 minutes every day to do something with. So our job, our mission, is to ensure that every one of those minutes matter in some way. And I hear you, you skeptic out there saying, well, we all have to sleep, and we all have to work, and we all have to eat. Yes, you do. And you may be trying to make the argument that those things don't matter or that they don't make life better, but I would argue that they absolutely could. When you do those things, are you running through the motions, or are you consciously using them as tools to make your other minutes matter more? For example, are you grabbing fast food for convenience for lunch, or are you fueling your body with the things it needs to have the energy that it needs? To make your non-eating minutes more functional. The thing is, everything we do, no matter how mundane, can have a larger purpose behind it if we want it to. So if you're like me and you feel that sometimes life is far too short, take a look at what you're doing daily that might make it feel like that. And if you think that I'm saying that eating salads and grilled chicken constantly will make life feel longer, yes, I am. It will make it feel eternal. You will feel like life will. Never end. But in all seriousness, realizing that you have 1,440 minutes tomorrow, what will you do with them that counts? What will you do with them that matters? And if you feel like you've already wasted too much time, use this opportunity to find the urgency to truly live with a good investment and not just pass the time.
