Consider this a writing to my older self, I hope she gets to read this. Why? Wait around, and you will find out.
When I was a child, I love reading a lot of books, so that meant, I knew a lot of things too big for my age. And there was this older fellow who kept saying he wished he knew, what he did at that age, at a young age.
I did not completely understand what he meant until now. Looking back, I have come to understand that life had given him lots of experiences, and he wished he was still very young to implement them.
But the reality is that he has gotten too old to establish most of those things, and he may literally die of regrets.
It is therefore paradoxically to say that “it is a pity that youth must be wasted on the young”
That because as young people, we tend to think we have so much time on our hands, so we are found wasting it. No matter how many times, the older generation tries to tell us, otherwise, we throw off their advice down the drain.
If the older folks could trade their age with ours, I am 100% sure, they will use all of their experiences to make marks in history.
I guess, maybe this is why, today, if you are reading the book “the greatest salesman”; you will find in the pages of that book, that you should not wait around for experiences, instead you should learn from masters that have come before you.
In this way, your labor will be cut short, and you will be furthering your goals on the hard work of your predecessors.
However, if you are looking for something to counter the mentioned book above, go for the book titled “Mastery” by Robert Greene, and you will surely find out that shortcuts never lead to mastery.
You need to undergo the vigorous pieces of training of life, and find your voice, as well your inclination, then soar with it.
You see life is a two-faced coin, you will always have the head and the tail, and you cannot have both at the same time. So if one is looking for short cut his best option is learning from previous experiences.
And if they are looking for mastery, competence, and efficiency, they should look for option B.
At some point, when I think about this, I wonder if what I need to do is to teach my children from a tender age how to be experienced. Then, I will hold myself back because I would not want to seem like a parent who is deciding the path of destiny for her children.
Even at that, I still feel, it gets better with each generation, if I found out early on, why youth is such an important phase of life, then the next generation from my lineage will naturally tap into it, this time even earlier than I did.
This way, the process continues to more generations ahead of me. Each generation will come with an advanced understanding of how valuable time is.
No one ever believes we need the prime of our lives to be who we want to be. We usually thought it was the period with no real obligations, and so we have to swing it the way we like.
The people who don’t get this luxury are those who had to face various disasters such as losing a parent, or both parents, having to take care of themselves, and properly their siblings.
The ugly truth here is that they take life at face value with no time for fun, or distractions, jokingly, they are the ones who never have regrets at the end of their lives.
And that is because by then, they must have fulfilled all righteousness, by taking responsibility for every damn action, and working to correct any that turned out to be a mistake.
The next people who seem to be in this category are those whose parents already had an empire built for them to run. At a tender age, they realize they have to live up to the expectation of their parents; or suffer in their eyes.
Even though they may think they have been cheated out of their youths, and childhood; by the time they are able to break away from the sting of their parents, they will realize that the pieces of training they received were necessary for the road ahead.
And they remain grateful
And finally, those who had both parents alive and did not have to live up to any expectation get to have the most regrets if no one shows them how important youth is.
For anyone out there who is still in the prime of age, I will say you should not waste yours; for the scripture has stated clearly of a time when you will be burned down with troubles, your body will grow feeble, your teeth decay, and your eyesight falls.
Then you will not be able to do any changes to your life.
In as much as there are some who have gotten old, and regretted some part of their youths, there are those who think they have not had enough time to do all they wanted to do, so I would say they are the ones whom the paradox (What a pity that youth must be wasted on the young) suits.
Change where you would love to belong today.