{"id":39592,"date":"2018-01-02T04:45:42","date_gmt":"2018-01-02T10:45:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/michaelhyatt.com\/?p=39592"},"modified":"2018-01-02T04:45:42","modified_gmt":"2018-01-02T10:45:42","slug":"resolve-to-live-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fullfocus.co\/resolve-to-live-again\/","title":{"rendered":"The Secret Power of Wasting Time"},"content":{"rendered":"

Studies show that most New Year\u2019s resolutions flop a month or less after we make them. Gyms all over the country are banking on it. They have far less capacity than the year-round passes they sell to strivers who begin the year intent on changing their shape, but who give up after a few weeks of bobbling barbells and chasing treadmills.<\/p>\n

And yet, I still believe in New Year\u2019s resolutions because one of them likely saved my life.<\/p>\n

Trapped in DC<\/h3>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

This was back in 2009. I had moved to Washington, DC, seven years prior and had worked for several magazines and think tanks. I was good at what I did, but it wasn\u2019t enough.<\/p>\n

As a kid, the thing I had most wanted to be was an adult. It seemed the best way to do that was through a monomaniacal pursuit of \u201cadult\u201d things. So I fastened onto politics and policy, found something to say, and went to our nation\u2019s capital to help say these things to the folks in power.<\/p>\n

It was a bad fit, almost from the start. The weather in and around DC is awful, and the social scene is saturated with booze and regret. Ambitious people go there to make a difference. They usually end up frustrated by gridlock and shackled down by golden handcuffs. They can make a good deal of money off their knowledge and connections if they opt to stay in DC, but in the rest of the country, it\u2019s a harder sell.<\/p>\n

Over the course of seven years, I started to move home to Washington state several times. Every time, some DC outfit came calling with another job offer. Lacking a solid anchor, I\u2019d go back. This situation in life made me miserable, and I drank a punishing amount to cope.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Non-marching orders<\/h3>\n

The sticking point came was when I finally stopped blaming the place and looked squarely at myself in the mirror. The problem wasn\u2019t really DC. It was me. Even when I went home, I was miserable. In learning to succeed, I had never really figured out how to live.<\/p>\n

Pleasures that normal people enjoyed I wrote off as pointless distractions. As the year came to an end, I wondered how, or even if, one could go about fixing this. And as if in answer to prayer, a three-word resolution came to me.<\/p>\n

\u201cWaste more time.\u201d These were words I badly needed to hear and repeat. The resolution was too short to forget, too pungent to ignore, too much of a stretch to allow easy rationalizing. It was time to stop and pick the blackberries rather than type furiously on them. This resolution gave me permission to take what I would have mocked as \u201cfrivolous\u201d living seriously.<\/p>\n\t\t