If I don’t like a book I don’t feel the need to finish it, because life is really to short to waste your time on something that isn’t doing anything for you or your soul. That’s not to say that some unpleasant things aren’t necessary, or that unpleasant things can’t lead to pleasant things later on, but generally speaking we put up with a lot of unpleasant things that we shouldn’t.

Obviously we have to do our chores and mind our manners. We don’t want to be rude and we still need to put in hard work to get positive results. I’m not talking down on any of this. Of course you need to take care of your responsibilities and the ones you love, but sometimes we continue dealing with unpleasant things far beyond when we need too. We keep reading the bad book and watching the bad show. We keep following the people on Instagram who make us feel bad about ourselves. We keep the sweater that makes us look fat. We stay friends with the people who we don’t like. We get in fights about topics we don’t care that much about. We keep doing the workouts we hate instead of finding one we like.

Why are we doing this to ourselves? It’s certainly not benefiting us and it’s not for the benefit of others. Maybe we feel obligated. Maybe we don’t want to acknowledge the fact that it’s unhealthy or unpleasant. Maybe we think that if we stick to it long enough something good will come out of it.

Whatever the reason, we need to stop torturing ourselves just because. We only have a certain amount of time on our hands, our lives are only so long. We don’t need to waste any of it on doing things that have no benefit. We also need to stop wasting time on unpleasant things that have the same benefit as a pleasant thing. If you hate a certain healthy food that doesn’t mean you hate them all. So leave the brussel sprouts you hate and move on to the broccoli that you like. Just because you need to do something doesn’t mean you have to do it in the worse way possible. Sometimes it takes work to find all the pleasant things. Sometime you have to waste time on the first episode or two of a show to decide it’s not worth your time. That’s okay, spend that time, but don’t waste a second more than you need too.

They teach you in business books that your time is money, but your time is also your happiness. So don’t throw it away so willingly. Delegate it to where it needs to go, and delegate the rest to what makes you happy.