JD | Never Wish For Less Time

𝙼𝚒𝚕𝚕𝚎𝚗𝚗𝚒𝚊𝚕 𝙼𝚒𝚍𝚕𝚒𝚏𝚎 | 𝙿𝚑𝚒𝚕𝚘𝚜𝚘𝚙𝚑𝚢 & 𝙷𝚘𝚗𝚎𝚢 𝙱𝚊𝚍𝚐𝚎𝚛𝚜 | 𝙼𝚘𝚖𝚎𝚗𝚝𝚘 𝙼𝚘𝚛𝚒

[JD | Never Wish For Less Time @NeverWish4Less]

Never wish for less time

We’re all guilty of prematurely wishing for the next thing in life to come or go.

When singer-songwriter John Mayer was on his Solo Tour, he said something that stuck with me:

I wait for most things to be over. I wait for this to be over to do the next thing and the next thing and the next thing…Everything you love and hate leaves at the same speed.

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I’m reminded of Ecclesiastes 3 written by King Solomon in the 10th century on the seasons of life, a text that The Byrds made popular in the song Turn! Turn! Turn!

There’s a time to weep and a time to be joyful.

There’s a time for funerals and a time of weddings.

There will be times of misery and times of euphoria.

Difficult and pleasant seasons come and go, regardless of our readiness for them.

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Mayer’s realization aligns with recent neuroscientific findings explained by Dr. Anna Lembke in her book “Dopamine Nation”:

One of the most remarkable neuroscientific findings in the past century is that the brain processes pleasure and pain in the same place…pleasure and pain work like opposite sides of a balance.”

You know as kid, when you’d try and push together the opposite sides of a magnet — they repel each other, always seeking balance — that’s your brain finding homeostasis.

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This balancing act is like the changing seasons in the natural world.

As someone who grew up in New England, the seasons have always been before me.

Just as summer turns to fall and winter gives way to new life in spring, so the cycles of life unfold themselves.

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Whether you live in an area of vivid season changes or not — we intuitively understand the cycle.
Whether that’s getting married, finding a new job, starting a business, buying a house, or moving to a new place.

Pain and pleasure, good and bad days, the things you’re dreading and the things you’re looking forward are all coming and going like the seasons.

As a comfort in times of adversity, I remember the words made famous in Edward Fitzgerald’s “Solomon’s Seal”. In it, King Solomon aims to create a sentence that will always be true — whether times are good or bad:

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This too, will pass away.
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The problem is, we’re always ‘nexting’.

‘Nexting’ is the tendency to focus on future events, at the expense of the now.

Finished school, what’s next?

Got married, what’s next?

In my late 20s, I chased contentment through house flipping. I thought that achieving my goal would bring me happiness, but 15 flips later, I was still ‘nexting.’

It left me feeling exhausted, always looking to the future instead of appreciating the present.

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Psychologist Daniel Gilbert notes that the average person spends about 12% of daily thought on what’s ahead — That’s 12 minutes of every hour of your day.

But what are the consequences of this constant ‘nexting’?

It neuters the now.

Not only does it neutralize the present moment, but it also creates an illusion that whatever is next will bring satisfaction.

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Think about it, we’re always a bit disappointed with what comes next in life — it always seems to fall short of what we expected from it.

It’s like I want to put that thing on the witness stand and interrogate it, demanding to know why it didn’t live up to my expectations.

Expectation: a strong belief that something will happen or be the case in the future.

We expected something different, but it left us looking to the next thing.

To counter the tendency to constantly wait for things to be over, Mayer implemented a new rule in his life:

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Never wish for less time
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Because waiting for things to be over is actually wishing for less time.

Instead — fully engage in your experience.

Like Jim Elliot said:

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Wherever you are, be all there! Live to the hilt every situation…
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John Mayer’s realization is not new.

It’s deeply seated in our nature, recognized by philosophers throughout history.

Life is a flickering candle, burning brightly one moment and extinguished the next, with wisps of smoke that linger in the air.

As James, a Biblical author and brother of Jesus puts it:

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What is your life?

You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes.
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Never wish for less time.

[JD | Never Wish For Less Time @NeverWish4Less]

moses was a murderer. david was an adulterer. paul was a persecutor. your past isn't disqualifying — it's qualifying.

[JD | Never Wish For Less Time @NeverWish4Less]

optionality is the religion of cowards. commit to something. fail at it. recommit.

[JD | Never Wish For Less Time @NeverWish4Less]

God didn't give you potential so you could sit on it, unused gifts are an insult to the giver.

[JD | Never Wish For Less Time @NeverWish4Less]

the most magnetic people never ask for your attention.

[JD | Never Wish For Less Time @NeverWish4Less]

@helloiamleonie continuity layer for life to keep context from deteriorating

[JD | Never Wish For Less Time @NeverWish4Less]

everyone is talking about what ai will take away, nobody is talking about what it gives: time, attention, humanity.

[JD | Never Wish For Less Time @NeverWish4Less]

ai killed the scarcity of expertise, its not hard anymore, now its free. Discernment is the scarcity now

[JD | Never Wish For Less Time @NeverWish4Less]

they medicated the kids who refused to memorize what they could look up. those kids were just running the future's operating system early.

[JD | Never Wish For Less Time @NeverWish4Less]

legacy way: can you do the work?
new way: do you know what work is worth doing?

[JD | Never Wish For Less Time @NeverWish4Less]

people are scared of ai because it's real enough to expose how much of their work was never as rare as they thought it was.

[JD | Never Wish For Less Time @NeverWish4Less]

the best scribe in 1450 still got replaced. the best switchboard operator in 1980 still got replaced. the best knowledge worker in 2026 still gets replaced if all they do is operate.

[JD | Never Wish For Less Time @NeverWish4Less]

the industrial revolution trained people to become machines, now, ai is forcing people to become human again.

[JD | Never Wish For Less Time @NeverWish4Less]

hyperfocus isn't a bug. the 4 hours you spend consumed by the one thing is worth more than someone else's 40-hour week.

[JD | Never Wish For Less Time @NeverWish4Less]

I can't believe I've thought about this quote, "the road less traveled" outside of its actual context all of my life

its more like we agonize over identical paths, then later tell ourselves the story that our choice mattered.

@DavidEpstein

[JD | Never Wish For Less Time @NeverWish4Less]

your "inability to focus" is actually an inability to focus on things that don't matter to you.

[JD | Never Wish For Less Time @NeverWish4Less]

@marclaurens That too 😂

[JD | Never Wish For Less Time @NeverWish4Less]

the adhd brain isn't broken. it was built for an era that didn't exist yet

[JD | Never Wish For Less Time @NeverWish4Less]

the real work is updating the outdated sops or creating them in the first place

[ᴅᴀɴɪᴇʟ ᴍɪᴇssʟᴇʀ 🛡️ @DanielMiessler]

Claude Code is about to release a feature called /workflows that I think will be extremely significant.

Especially for Enterprise AI.

I talked about this in 2024 in a post called Companies Are Just Graphs of Algorithms.

Basically the idea is that all work is just an algorithm, i.e., a series of steps to accomplish a goal.

Skills and Cowork have been heading in this direction already, and we've seen what that's done to company valuations in various spaces.

Well this is closer to the final form.

It's turning the regular, expected work that's done in companies into pseudo-deterministic workflows that follow defined SOPs.

The human role will be determining what problems to solve (taste, expeirence, etc), building new products from that, and then optimizing these workflows from above.

But the work itself will be these workflows executed according to SOPs.

[JD | Never Wish For Less Time @NeverWish4Less]

@DanielMiessler the real work is updating the outdated sops or creating them in the first place

[JD | Never Wish For Less Time @NeverWish4Less]

There's just certain advice i never would have listened to, because i couldn't feel the weight of time passing until it started pressing down on me.