Time
How to make up for lost time?
The time that passed won't come back, but what it taught you stays. Stop counting lost years and protect the hours ahead as your most precious asset.
Years in the wrong job, in a business that didn't work, in a relationship that ended, in a dark period of life. Looking back and seeing "lost" time hurts, because time is the one thing you can't buy back. But there is a way of looking at it that gives the power back to you.
What to do now
- Accept that the past won't come back, and that it wasn't entirely lost. Make a list of what those years taught you: skills, people, what you no longer want. Almost no time is completely lost; it usually turns into experience.
- Stop counting what has passed. "I lost ten years" is a sentence that also robs the present. Swap it for: "what will I do with the next ten?"
- Find out where your hours go today. For one week, write down how you spend your time. Many people are surprised by how many hours go to screens, worry and tasks that don't matter.
- Choose one priority. Whoever tries to recover everything at once recovers nothing. Choose the area that matters most right now (health, family, work, study) and give it the best hours of your day.
- Protect your time the way you protect your money. Say no to what doesn't matter, make appointments with yourself and keep them.
- Use what experience has given you. Those who have lived longer make fewer mistakes in certain things. That's the shortcut the "lost" years offer.
- Beware of regret that turns into permanent sadness. If the feeling of having wasted your life weighs on you every day, talk to someone; go to a primary health unit (UBS) or psychosocial care center (CAPS). CVV answers at 188.
When it happened to Bairo
Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez went through years he could call lost: the time in the shadows, without documents in hand, in his first years in Brazil; the artificial intelligence idea he gave up on too early; the businesses he was pushed out of; the investment that didn't hold.
He doesn't call them that. He says each attempt left something: method, an eye for the future, proof that he could create from nothing, the lesson about whom to build with, the courage to do what he didn't know how to do. The attempt that worked, he says, was the one that carried all the others inside it.
And time became the center of what he builds. Bairo likes to recall a story told by Andy Hertzfeld, a Macintosh engineer: in 1983, Steve Jobs asked for the computer to boot faster and did the math. Ten seconds less, times millions of people turning on a Mac every day, added up to entire lifetimes. For Bairo, lifetime is the measure of everything.
The path
You can't recover the hours that have passed. You can make the next ones worth more, precisely because of the ones that passed. Bairo turned hard years into raw material. You can do the same: accept what was, make use of what remains and protect, as the most precious asset there is, the time still ahead of you.