You’re Not Stuck, You’re Just Using Your Time Wrong

Every single day we find ourselves stuck in some form or another: Stuck on hold for an hour. Stuck in a job we don’t like. Stuck across town because a meeting was cancelled. Stuck with an obligation that someone else signed us up for. Stuck in a failing company. 

We’re stuck—we don’t have a choice about that. But we do have a choice about something else: What will we do with this time? 

In 1946, Malcolm X was sentenced to 10 years in prison. Even accounting for the shameful American racism and whatever systematic legal injustices existed at the time, Mal-colm X was guilty. He deserved to go to jail. And now he had roughly a decade to sit in a cage. 

As Malcolm X entered that prison he faced that same choice. He faced what Robert Greene—a man who sixty years later would find his wildly popular books banned in many federal prisons—calls an “Alive Time or Dead Time” scenario. How would the seven years he would serve play out? What would Malcolm do with this time?                                

According to Greene, there are two types of time in our lives: dead time, when people are passive and waiting, and alive time, when people are learning and acting and utiliz-ing every second. Every moment of failure, every moment or situation that we did not deliberately choose or control, presents this choice: Alive time. Dead time.

Which will it be?

Malcolm chose alive time. He began to learn. He explored religion. He taught himself to be a reader by checking out a pencil and the dictionary from the prison library and not only consumed it from start to finish, but copied it down long‐hand from cover to cover. All these words he’d never known existed before were transferred to his brain. 

As he said later, “From then until I left that prison, in every free moment I had, if I was not reading in the library, I was reading in my bunk.” He read history, he read sociol-ogy, he read about religion, he read the classics, he read philosophers like Kant and Spinoza. Later, a reporter asked Malcolm, “What’s your alma mater?” His one word answer: “Books.”

Prison became his college. He transcended confine-ment through the pages he absorbed. He reflected that months passed without him even thinking about being detained against his will. He had “never been so truly free in his life.” 

And yet, here we are, stuck in our own way. Maybe you’re sitting in a remedial high school class, maybe you’re watching for the numbers to come in on your newest launch, maybe it’s a trial separation, maybe you’re stuck making smoothies or living at home while you save up money, maybe you’re stuck waiting out a contract or a tour of duty. Maybe this situation is one totally of your own making, or perhaps it’s just bad luck. 

The ego in all of us wants to complain about how this situation sucks. How it’s unfair. How we’d rather be doing just about anything else. And it’s this attitude that creates dead time we can never get back. In this way, ego is the mortal enemy of alive time. 

But if we’re humble, accepting and creative, we can transform seemingly terrible situations—a prison sentence, a dysfunctional job, a bear market or depression, military conscription, a failing company— turned those circumstances into fuel for greatness.   

We can ask ourselves: What can I accomplish here? What can I do with this time? Think of what you have been putting off. Issues you declined to deal with. Systemic problems that felt too over-whelming to address. Dead time is revived when we use it as an opportunity to do what we’ve long needed to do—from having difficult conversations to squeezing in some quiet reading time. 

Francis Scott Key wrote the poem that became the national anthem of the United States while trapped on a ship during a prisoner exchange in the War of 1812. Viktor Frankl refined his psychologies of meaning and suffering during his ordeal in three Nazi concentration camps. Not that these opportunities always come in such serious situa-tions. The author Ian Fleming was on bed rest and, per doc-tors’ orders, forbidden from using a typewriter. They were worried he’d exert himself by writing another Bond novel. So he created Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang: The Magical Car by hand instead. Walt Disney made his decision to become a cartoonist while laid up after stepping on a rusty nail. 

“Many a serious thinker has been produced in prisons,” as Robert Greene put it, “where we have nothing to do but think.” Well, at the very least, our situation can be used for that. To get some serious thinking done.

It’s easy to angry, to be aggrieved, to be depressed or heartbroken. I don’t want this. I want ______. I want it my way. But this accomplishes nothing!

As they say, this moment is not your life. But it is a moment in your life. How will you use it? 

Let us say, the next time we find ourselves stuck: This is an opportunity for me. I am using it for my purposes. I will not let this be dead time for me. The dead time was when we were controlled by ego. 

As Booker T. Washington most famously put it, “Cast down your bucket where you are.” Make use of what’s around you. Even the dead time. Because while its occurrence isn’t in our control. Its use, on the other hand, is. 

This piece is adapted from Ryan Holiday’s book Ego is the Enemy, published by Penguin Portfolio                                                           

Ryan Holiday is the bestselling author of Ego Is The Enemy and three other books. His monthly reading recommendations which go out to 50,000+ subscribers are found here.