“more time”
cannot be granted
to someone who does not use it
in the first place.
“i wish i had more time”
Tag: personal-growth
Perspective Matters
“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”
-Marcel Proust (July 10, 1871 – November 18, 1922)
Everything is Nothing. And Nothing is Everything.
A Personal Meditation on the Overlooked
“It is not enough to be busy. So are the ants. The question is: what are we busy about?”
— Henry David Thoreau, WaldenI’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, how we’re always doing something. Scrolling, replying, running errands, checking notifications, planning the next step in our lives. There are no breaks in the modern way of life. Sometimes even when we try to slow down, our minds are still running at the same speed.
The weird part? Most of the time, I don’t even know what I’m chasing. This feeling is probably universal, right? (unless you’re totally unhinged, in which case… congrats?) Like you’re ticking off boxes, but you’re not sure where that list came from in the first place?
The other night I sat on my porch just for a few minutes with no phone, no agenda. Just sitting. I noticed the wind in the trees, a neighbor’s dog barking, the way the air felt a little cooler than usual. It wasn’t dramatic. No thunderbolt revelations. But I felt present in a such a way that it was almost a miracle.
Moments like those have made me realize that we were never built to be machines.
Yes, working hard has it’s place. But not all the time.
And definitely not at the cost of being alive to your own life.
I’ve made an effort to treat slower days and slower moments as the essential times they are. The little things, those things that give life its flavor (like smiling at someone in the morning, or the way your tea smells, or the color of the sky) are just as much a part of life as the big things we constantly chase.
The slow moments are where you digest the rest of your life.
So next time you’re wondering what to do, consider:
There’s nothing harmful in slowing down.
The answer isn’t always to do more.
Maybe it’s ok to pause.
To breathe.
To do “nothing.”
Because maybe that’s where everything is.
Procrastination for Dummies, by a Dummy
Do you find yourself unable to focus on things that matter?
Tasks that you know, without a doubt, will benefit your life. Things you’ve promised yourself you’d do, goals that could reshape your future… Yet, somehow, you don’t do them.
I do.
And I’ve tried to understand why.
I’ve dipped into the science of focus, from the neurological mechanisms that help us stay on task to the conditions needed for deep, uninterrupted work. But the deeper I dig, the more confused I become. The research contains contradictions, and what the media says about focus rarely aligns with what actual cognitive scientists are discovering.
And with the rise of self-improvement culture, a mythology has formed around the idea of discipline. We’re told that successful people are just more focused, more motivated, more driven. And if we’re not like them, the implication is that we’re simply not trying hard enough.
But that’s as far from the truth as you can get.
I’m not an expert (though I’d like to become one), but here’s the clearest conclusion I’ve come to:
The problem isn’t a lack of effort. It’s a lack of systems.
It’s not that you’re unwilling to do the work that needs to be done. It’s just that your environment, your habits, and the mental scaffolding you’ve built around your day-to-day life aren’t optimized to support focus.
Everything in nature requires activation energy (hi, chemistry class)—a certain threshold that must be met before a reaction can occur. The same applies to our behavior. Starting something hard, like studying, exercising, or writing, takes far more energy than continuing once you’ve begun. That beginning stage is the hardest part. And modern life is constantly raising the cost of starting.
Unfortunately, every time we reach for our phones, scroll social media, or binge a few episodes of something “harmless,” we’re not just wasting time, we’re retraining our brains (and I, more than anyone, wish this wasn’t true). We’re conditioning it to seek high-reward, low-effort stimulation. And the more we feed it, the more it resists anything else.
And that’s what’s scary. We think that these things are just distractions, but those early hits of false stimuli are actually inoculations that blunt our ability to focus later. They raise our brain’s threshold for engagement. So when we finally try to sit down and do the important stuff (stuff that takes time, patience, and effort) our mind rejects it. Not because we’re lazy, not because we’re unmotivated, but because we’ve already taught our brain what to crave.
Small actions have big outcomes. That innocent scroll in the morning may seem like nothing, but it creates ripples throughout your entire day. By the afternoon, your ability to focus has been quietly, but significantly, eroded. And no amount of “trying harder” can change that, because by then, the system is already working against you.
It’s that simple.
I can start with the biggest lie I’ve ever been told.
“It’s not that simple.”
I believed it. Whenever I told my peers I wanted to start something new – do better in class, start writing poetry, pick up boxing, start learning guitar – the one phrase that always cut through was:
“It’s not that simple.”
But today, I want to tell you something different.
The best piece of advice I have ever received is this:
It’s always that simple.
I love to overcomplicate things. I bet you do, too. We create mental barriers as excuses to validate our inability to accomplish our goals. We tell ourselves that it’s complicated, our timing’s off, or we’re not ready. But in reality, they’re excuses disguised as logic. Sometimes, we even adapt to our inability to adapt, and in doing so, we stay stuck in places we don’t want to be.
But being stuck is not a failure. It’s a starting point. And you can choose where you want to go from there.
Because it really is that simple.
Yes, doing things you’re not used to is scary. Heck, it scares me, and it probably scares everyone.
The consistent discipline it takes to accomplish your greatest desires, to ascend, to have the authority to dream big – that’s difficult. But when it comes down to knowing what needs to be done, your brain will always know.
The first step, the next step, the final step – it’s all one, and it’s always within you.
You don’t need a hundred tutorials. You don’t need motivational videos on loop. You don’t need anyone to give you permission.
Everything you need is already there.
Yes, it’s going to be hard, and you’ll have to give more than you’ve ever given before.
But just remember:
It’s still that simple.
And that’s what makes it possible.
Mason Lai 