Don’t Waste Your Life Being Ordinary

1. The price of mediocrity

Start with a simple calculation.

Suppose you work from the age of 25 to 60: roughly 35 years. After sleep, meals, commuting, and necessary household tasks, you might have around 3,000 waking hours a year that you can freely allocate to doing something. This is an illustrative figure; everyone’s circumstances differ, but it gives us an order of magnitude. Over 35 years, that comes to a little over 100,000 hours. This is the total capital a person has to allocate across a working life.

In economics, opportunity cost means that choosing A requires giving up the best available alternative, B. Most people think of it in terms of money: money spent on a house cannot also be invested in stocks. But money can be earned again. Lose it, and you can save more; if you cannot borrow it today, you may find a way tomorrow. Time is different. There is no lending market for time, and no buyback provision. Once you spend three hours this evening, they are gone. No financial instrument can buy them back.

So the question is not simply, “What did I do with those three hours?” It is, “What do I have now that I did not have before?”

I have seen this many times in investing: an asset is always in motion, always making news, always looking busy, yet a decade later its net value has barely changed. Plenty of activity; little accumulation. Many lives follow the same pattern. Work fills the day, the calendar is packed, and energy is spent constantly. But compare yourself today with yourself three years ago: what you can do, what your work commands in the market, and what you can judge are almost unchanged. The time has been spent, yet the balance sheet has gained no new asset.

That is what I mean by the price of mediocrity. It is not a loss you can trace to one event on one day. There is no particular moment when you feel you have lost money. It is the cost of remaining on a low-return path: a little less accumulated each year, until a decade opens a considerable gap between that path and another.

The gap is hard to see as it develops, for a simple reason: it appears as income never earned, rather than money paid out. No bill arrives. At some point, you simply discover that you have fewer options than you expected.

For years, I have followed a habit when looking at someone’s career. Before asking how much they earn, I ask how much of their income comes from selling this year’s time, and how much comes from what they accumulated in previous years. The former is wages; the latter is a return on assets. If the sources of someone’s income are almost identical after ten years, there is a good chance those years were consumed rather than invested.

I am not saying this to provoke anxiety. I want to put the accounts on the table: your time is finite principal, and each year some of it is allocated somewhere. The question is whether you chose that allocation, or merely drifted into it.

2. Being ordinary and staying ordinary by default

Before going further, I need to draw a distinction. Without it, this essay is easy to read as something I do not intend.

“Don’t waste your life being ordinary” can sound contemptuous of ordinary people. If that is how you hear it, I understand. Statements like this often carry an air of superiority, as though the world contains two kinds of people: those entitled to climb, and those who deserve to be left behind.

That is not what I am criticizing.

At a particular stage, someone may have an ordinary income, an ordinary job, and an ordinary pace of life. That is a description of their circumstances. It can describe a recent graduate, someone changing careers, or someone caring for family with little energy left for anything else. There is nothing wrong with any of these situations. Often they result from a rational choice. Someone who gives much of their time to children or parents receives a return that does not appear on a balance sheet, and need not be measured there.

My criticism is directed elsewhere: at remaining ordinary for a lifetime, passively, without ever having chosen it.

Three questions make the distinction clear.

First: did you choose this path, or drift into it? Choosing means comparing alternatives, understanding the costs, and then deciding how to allocate your time. Drifting means that nobody asked you, you never asked yourself, and things simply happened.

Second: is this a stage, or your destination? Many people say, “For now, I’ll carry on like this. I’ll think about it later.” If “later” has no timetable and no preparatory action, it is not a plan. It is postponement.

Third: are you accumulating anything? Even with an ordinary income today, a path can slope upward if each year adds something in a chosen direction: a skill, a body of work, a group of people who trust you. The starting point is simply low. Conversely, however high the starting point, a flat slope means standing still.

So when I speak of wasting time, I mean an unexamined default: a life carried forward by inertia. If someone consciously chooses a quiet life, knows what they want, and accepts its costs, I have no objection. I may even envy them a little.

With that distinction in place, we can move on.

3. A linear life and a compounding life

Income can broadly be divided into two kinds.

One is linear: work an hour, receive an hour’s pay. Stop working, and the income stops. Most wages, hourly services, and piecework fall into this category. They offer stability and predictability, but their ceiling is set by your time. A day has only 24 hours, and perhaps ten or so can be sold. Linear income therefore has a natural upper limit.

The other compounds: what you do today produces value today and continues to produce value afterward. A good essay is still being read a year later. A tested method of judgment can be used ten or a hundred times without being reinvented. A client who trusts you may introduce you to someone else while you are doing nothing at all. These have something in common: their value does not vanish with the time you spent. They remain as assets that can keep working.

The crucial step in compounding is not rapid growth. It is creating something that remains. Many people work hard all their lives, but the product of their effort is used up immediately. Once the task is finished, nothing is left. The next year begins from scratch. That effort has value; it simply does not accumulate.

In my experience, assets that can accumulate fall into roughly five categories.

Skills and judgment. Skill is knowing how to do something; judgment is knowing what to do and what to leave alone. The former can be trained. The latter develops through experience and reflection. Of the two, judgment has greater potential to compound because a change in tools does not automatically make it obsolete. Over my years in investing, many specific techniques I learned early on have become outdated. But my sense of which risks deserve to be taken, and which stories deserve skepticism, remains useful. Each year it is corrected and strengthened.

Work and content. A piece of work is time made durable. An essay, a model, a method, or a product can exist independently of you once it has been created. People who produce content understand this especially well. Spend a week making something that people can read and cite repeatedly, and the return may far exceed that of a week spent in ten meetings. The condition, of course, is that the work is actually useful. Otherwise, you are simply producing waste.

Reputation and relationships. These are easily underestimated because they are difficult to quantify. Yet whether people believe what you say, or respond when you ask for help, depends on credit accumulated by keeping promises over time. This asset builds slowly, can be destroyed quickly, and cannot be rushed. Those qualities are precisely what make it difficult to replicate.

Capital. This needs little explanation: capital producing more capital is compounding in its simplest form. But for most people, the most important capital early in life is not financial. It is the first three categories. Financial capital is often their result, rather than their starting point. Many people reverse the order, waiting to save enough money before beginning. Their savings grow slowly, while the other assets fail to grow at all.

Health and energy. I put these last because they matter so much that we often take them for granted. Think of them as the operating capacity of every other asset. Without enough energy, accumulation slows. If your health breaks down, even the value you have already built can become difficult to realize. I have seen people push themselves relentlessly before 40, then spend much of their energy afterward repairing the damage. In effect, they cash out part of their future compounding early, at a steep discount.

You need not become exceptional in all five categories, or work on them all at once. But ask yourself: has any one of them genuinely grown over the past year? If the answer is no across the board, it is time to examine where the time went.

4. The risk of taking no risks

Many people understand risk this way: if you do nothing, you cannot lose.

In investing, the flaw is easy to see. Put all your money somewhere that produces no growth, and you may suffer no nominal loss. Yet inflation and opportunity cost steadily erode what you hold. Its purchasing power declines while forgone returns accumulate. This is a slow, almost invisible loss, rather than an absence of risk.

The same reasoning applies to human capital.

Anyone familiar with asset allocation knows that risk and return are priced together. To seek a return above the average, you must accept some uncertainty. You cannot simply demand both certainty and high returns. Choosing certainty generally means accepting an average return, or less; seeking more means accepting fluctuations. That is the underlying logic of pricing.

Apply it to your career and the allocation of your life.

You put all your time into a stable job. Its income path is predictable, and the risk seems low. But you are also concentrating your human capital in an asset with a fixed pattern of returns. If those returns remain below what you could reasonably achieve elsewhere, each year carries an invisible cost.

Alternatively, you devote part of your time to something uncertain: writing, a small project, a demanding skill, or an attempt to change direction. The immediate return may be zero, or even negative. Its advantage is the possibility of a nonlinear payoff. Even if it fails, you acquire experience and judgment, and those do not disappear with the project.

I am not encouraging impulsiveness. Sound risk management means understanding how much you can afford to lose, then making room for experimentation within that limit.

A more considered allocation looks like this.

Keep the core secure. Maintain an income that covers basic needs and an adequate cash buffer. This safety margin allows you to tolerate mistakes. Taking risks without it is gambling, rather than investing.

Above that secure core, reserve some time and energy for an exploratory allocation. It need not be large. Even a few fixed hours each week can work, provided the commitment is sustained, the direction is clear, and results can be assessed.

You must also define an affordable loss. Losing income from a side project may be manageable. Committing all your savings and giving up every source of income for an uncertain outcome usually is not. The first is a measured exposure to risk; the second concentrates your whole portfolio in one position.

I have seen two kinds of people whose choices I find unfortunate. Some never try anything because they are waiting for the conditions to be right. Ten years pass, and the conditions never arrive. Others go all in immediately, without any buffer, and one failure forces them out. Both are failures of risk management: excessive caution in one case, excessive aggression in the other.

When I say the greatest risk is taking no risks, I mean the first case. No single decision ever feels like a mistake, because no decision has been made. Meanwhile, time keeps passing, and the window for compounding keeps narrowing.

5. The two sides of AI

Any discussion of personal resource allocation today must address AI. I want to be specific, rather than repeat slogans about replacement or enormous opportunity.

My view is that AI is doing two things that pull in opposite directions.

First, it is eroding the value of a category of competence: intermediate skills that can be clearly described and repeatedly reproduced.

What does “clearly described” mean? It means you could write instructions that another person could follow to produce broadly similar results. Organizing information, drafting standard documents, preparing formulaic analysis, writing conventional marketing copy, or turning one report format into another all share this feature: the rules connecting the input to the output can be articulated. Once those rules can be articulated, machines can learn them, quickly and at low cost.

Such abilities once supported many livelihoods. They commanded a price because, for a time, only trained people could perform the work. That barrier is becoming thinner. I do not want to predict an exact timetable, or announce which professions will disappear; such predictions are often unreliable. But the direction seems clear: value supported mainly by being slightly more proficient than someone else will face continuing pressure.

One point deserves emphasis: this pressure reaches beyond low-end work. The middle can be especially vulnerable. Low-end work already commands a low price; the middle relies on a premium for proficiency and experience, and proficiency is precisely what can be copied most readily.

Second, AI is amplifying another kind of ability: judgment, taste, and leverage.

Judgment, as discussed earlier, means knowing what to do, what to avoid, and when an answer feels wrong. AI may offer ten proposals, but deciding which is worth pursuing and which contains a trap still requires human judgment. The stronger the tool, the more valuable that selection becomes. Generating options grows cheap and abundant; choosing well remains scarce.

What is taste? I understand it as the ability to distinguish the better result among many acceptable ones, and explain why it is better. It is a set of standards developed through extensive reading, practice, and comparison. AI can generate a great deal, but who decides whether the result is good enough? That standard still draws on what a person has accumulated.

Leverage means that someone who uses tools well can produce several times as much in the same hour as they once could. That gap will widen. People who combine tool use with judgment will pull further ahead of those who merely operate the tools, or refuse to use them.

This leads to a practical implication for allocating time: avoid concentrating it in work whose value AI is likely to flatten.

How can you assess that? I ask three questions. Could the method be written down as clear instructions? Would there be a substantial difference between the finished work of someone with five years’ experience and someone with six months’? If a sufficiently good tool were available, would I still want to spend the same amount of time doing it?

If your answers lean toward “the method can be written down,” “the difference is small,” and “I would not,” be alert: you may be investing part of your time in an asset approaching depreciation.

Instead, shift some of that time toward other directions:

• Do more work that requires judgment, rather than execution alone.
• Accumulate things others cannot readily copy: your experience, your perspective, and the trust you build with particular people.
• Learn to turn tools into your leverage, rather than becoming the work they replace.

Let me be clear: I do not think AI makes life harder for everyone. For someone willing to develop judgment, it can be a powerful amplifier. The greatest pressure falls on those who stake their entire value on proficiency and never move beyond it. That is why remaining ordinary by default can become more costly in this period.

6. The discipline of investing in yourself

Now we need to move from ideas to things we can do. I dislike slogans, so I will offer a few restrained practices whose results can be checked.

First, conduct a balance-sheet review once a year.

Choose the end of the year, your birthday, or another convenient date. What matters is making it regular. Ask one central question: did this year’s time become assets that can grow in value?

Work through the five categories:

• Skills and judgment: what can I do now that I could not do a year ago? Did I make a judgment that my previous self could not have made?
• Work and content: what did I create that can continue to be used?
• Reputation and relationships: has my conduct this year made anyone more willing to trust or recommend me?
• Capital: did my savings and investments grow independently of the wages I earned this year?
• Health and energy: am I in better or worse shape than last year?

You do not need scores or a long report. Write two or three factual sentences for each category: what you did, and what resulted. The category you cannot write about marks a gap in your year.

Second, protect a fixed time for your exploratory allocation.

Set aside a few hours each week for work with little immediate return but the possibility of long-term compounding. Consistency matters more than volume. Spare time rarely appears on its own, because urgent tasks always take priority.

Third, define when to stop and when to continue.

Exploration does not mean unlimited commitment. Before beginning, write down how long you will try, how much time you will invest, what results would justify continuing, and what would justify stopping. Otherwise, you risk either abandoning everything after a brief burst of enthusiasm or sinking ever deeper into sunk costs.

Fourth, make work that leaves something behind your default.

When choosing a task, ask one more question: what will remain when it is finished? Reusable material, a result you can show, a collaboration someone will remember, or nothing at all? This does not mean every activity must leave an asset. Rest, companionship, and enjoyment are necessary. But distinguish consciously between consuming time and investing it, and make their balance a choice rather than an accident.

Fifth, be skeptical of busyness.

Being busy does not guarantee useful output. At the end of each week, I look back at the three activities that took the most time and ask what each produced. If the most time-consuming work leaves the least behind, it may need to be reduced, delegated, or dropped.

Sixth, compare yourself with last year’s self, rather than with other people.

That may sound like a motivational cliché, but I mean it. Other people begin with different resources and live at different stages. Those comparisons tell you little. The useful comparison runs through time: after another year, has your own balance sheet grown?

None of these practices requires you to resign immediately, reinvent your career overnight, or transform your life at once. They ask only that you treat time as capital that needs managing, review the accounts regularly, and acknowledge that every hour spent is irretrievable.

Time cannot be bought back. A year gone is a year gone; nobody can return it. What you can do is look honestly at the ledger at the end of each year and ask: what did this year’s time become?

If it added something, however modest, next year begins from a better position. If it added nothing, find out why and allocate differently next year.

That is all.