“If you’re not making someone else’s life better, then you’re wasting your time. Your life will become better by making other lives better.”

Will Smith

People give their time away without thinking all the time. “Wasting time” is a pervasive part of our society today, whether it is through social media, ‘reality television,’ or any of the other myriad ways that people expend their most precious and finite resource. Wasting time doesn’t scare most people if they are honest about how they spend their time. In reality, “wasting time” is the thing that should scare us the most.  

Perhaps another way to state this is, “if you’re not making someone else’s life better, then you’re wasting your life.”

No one wants to “waste their life.” Nobody gets up in the morning and thinks, “well, here I go, let’s see how meaningless and wasteful I can be today with my one precious life.”

The reality is that we all have good days and bad days, days where we feel incredibly fulfilled and meaningful, and others where we wonder what happened. That’s going to happen.  

The secret is never to lose sight of the reason we exist, the reason God put us here on this earth. We are alive to serve others and make lives better. If you find a way to do that every day, you will never be wasting your time, you will never be wasting your life.