How do people become useless? Common signs: staying up past midnight immersed in novels or mobile games; spending holidays indoors filling leisure time with variety shows and relying on takeout; going through the day aimlessly, following routines without knowing what they've accomplished; parroting others without independent thinking, easily being led by trends.

Knowing you should get up but lying in bed all day playing on your phone; knowing you should sleep but opening a game; knowing you have homework but partying every night; knowing how to waste time but thinking it won't happen to you. Subconsciously feeling that "real life" hasn't started yet.
Psychology's "20-Mile Rule": walking 20 miles a day from San Diego to 3,000 miles away is ideal, taking about 5 months. But very few can do it. The first type walks more on good weather days and hides when it's windy or rainy; the second type walks exactly 20 miles regardless of the weather.
Most of the time, we are not without goals—those vocabulary books abandoned after reaching C, the stubborn belly fat that won't go away in half a year, New Year’s resolutions that fade away. Having high ambitions but low execution isn't a bad thing; the height of your hands is always below your eyes. To reach new heights, you must constantly elevate your perspective. The key is not to let your ambitions stay stagnant.
Kazuo Inamori: The so-called meaning of life is ultimately a moment-by-moment accumulation.
Starving and buying steamed buns, eating six and only feeling full after the seventh, regretting not eating the seventh from the start. In reality, many pursue quick success: "Master Japanese in a month," "Learn to write and earn over ten thousand a month in two months," "Learn short video marketing in two weeks and make 100,000." If mastering writing could be achieved in a short time, then Haruki Murakami and Keigo Higashino wouldn't have spent decades honing their craft.
Any achievement requires gradual accumulation; only focusing on the glamorous side ignores the long-term effort. Seeing yourself full after eating the seventh bun, but ignoring the fabric of the seventh item, forgetting you already ate six. Making money, learning, and developing work skills all require continuous effort in a specific field. You can't skip the first six and go straight to the seventh.
Golden years are only so many; if you always pursue quick success with superficial efforts, your competitiveness will decline with age, and you'll gradually become useless. Malcolm Gladwell's "Outliers": "10,000 hours of practice are necessary for anyone to transform from ordinary to a world-class master."
Avoid consuming "low-density information": stay highly alert to the flood of popular entertainment news, and focus on classics that stand the test of time. Read classics instead of bestsellers; watch high-quality documentaries instead of mindless variety shows. The more information you filter out actively, the more attention you preserve, leaving more mental space to find and digest truly valuable things.
Reduce engaging in draining activities and shift your interests toward creation. Be cautious of anything that provides "easy high achievement": sudden romantic encounters, endless levels in games, fantasy novels, easy wealth, instant gratification. These are essentially short-term pleasures that drain happiness in the second half of life.
Only through creative activities can you achieve lasting health and happiness: spend a year learning useful skills, a month cultivating good habits, a week building useful thinking patterns, a day accompanying loved ones, an hour writing detailed review journals. Aim to emulate those who are accomplished—engage in creative pursuits with long-term benefits. The longer you do, the more you'll realize the advantages.
The key to achieving great success is not innate talent or divine favor, but dedicating your most precious attention to creative endeavors and putting in extraordinary effort.
No one can wake a person pretending to sleep, but walking 20 miles every day is the fastest way to reach the other side.