Latest / She Survived: Stories of Courage, Recovery & Reinvention / Why You’re Wasting Time on That Useless Skill | She Survived
Transcript
- You are absolutely wasting your time, and it is the most important thing you will do all week. I saw you staring at that half-finished sketchbook like it was a guilty secret, and I need you to put down the guilt right now. Let’s start with where we usually find ourselves: standing in the kitchen, or sitting on the edge of the bed, scrolling through our phones while a pile of laundry sits untouched. And there, buried under a shirt or tucked into a drawer, is this little spark of curiosity you picked up months ago. Maybe it’s watercolor painting. Maybe it’s learning three chords on the ukulele. Maybe it’s memorizing the names of every cloud type because you read one article about them and got obsessed. On the surface, it does nothing. It doesn’t pay the rent. It doesn’t get you promoted. It doesn’t even make you slightly more attractive to your neighbors. So why does it feel so heavy? Why do we look at these hobbies and feel a sharp pang of shame, like we’re indulging in sugar when we should be eating vegetables? We live in a culture that treats time like currency, and if an activity doesn’t yield a return on investment, it’s considered a bad spend. But here is the truth, whispered softly: life is not a balance sheet. Your worth is not a metric. And those small, useless things you love? They are the quiet rebels keeping your soul from turning to dust. I remember when I first tried to learn how to bake sourdough bread during the lockdown years. Not because I needed bread—we had plenty—but because I needed something I could control. The process was humiliating. My first loaves were dense enough to stop a bullet. My second batch looked like a rock that had given up on life. I stood in my kitchen, covered in flour, holding this brick of dough, feeling utterly defeated. I wanted to throw it out. I wanted to tell myself I didn’t have time for this nonsense. But then, I took a bite. It was terrible. But it was mine. I had wrestled with yeast and patience and failed beautifully. That experience taught me that the value isn’t in the perfect loaf; it’s in the willingness to show up and fail without anyone watching. When you invest in a skill with no immediate payoff, you are practicing the art of failing safely. You are building a muscle that says, 'I can be bad at something and still be okay.' That is a profound freedom, especially for women who have spent decades being told they must be competent, polished, and useful at all times. Think about the last time you felt truly alive. Was it when you checked off a task on your to-do list? Probably not. It was likely when you got lost in a moment that had no purpose other than itself. Maybe you were humming along to a song you barely knew the words to. Maybe you were rearranging flowers in a vase just because the colors reminded you of summer. These moments are not distractions from your life; they are the architecture of your joy. They are the invisible scaffolding that holds you up when the world feels shaky. When you dedicate time to a skill that offers no tangible reward, you are creating a sanctuary inside yourself. It is a place where you are not an employee, not a caregiver, not a partner, not a daughter. You are just a human being exploring the edges of your own curiosity. This matters more than you know. In a world that constantly demands your output, choosing to focus on input—on play, on practice, on pure exploration—is an act of radical self-preservation. It reminds your nervous system that you are allowed to exist for reasons other than utility. There is a particular kind of pressure that lands on us, isn’t there? The pressure to turn everything into a side hustle. If you can draw, sell prints. If you can write, start a blog. If you can cook, become an influencer. We are so conditioned to believe that if something doesn’t generate income, it has no value. But this mindset steals the magic from the mundane. It turns play into work, and work into anxiety. When you invest in a skill for its own sake, you reclaim it from the market. You keep it pure. There is a deep, abiding peace in knowing that your ability to knit, or garden, or identify bird calls belongs only to you. No one needs to see it. No one needs to buy it. The joy is in the doing, not the selling. This separation is crucial for our mental health. It creates a boundary between your identity and your productivity. You are not what you produce. You are the person who gets to enjoy the messy, imperfect process of becoming better at something simply because it lights you up. That light is enough. It is more than enough. We often talk about compound interest in terms of money, but let’s talk about compound interest in terms of spirit. Every hour you spend nurturing a useless skill is a deposit into your emotional bank account. At first, the returns seem negligible. You don’t feel different. You don’t solve any big problems. But over time, these small deposits add up. They build a reservoir of resilience. When life gets hard—and it will—you tap into that reservoir. You remember that you are capable of learning. You remember that you can endure frustration and still find delight. You remember that you are interesting to yourself. This internal richness spills over into everything else you do. You become softer, more patient, more present. You bring a lighter energy to your relationships because you are carrying less weight. The skill itself might remain humble, but the effect it has on your capacity to handle life is massive. It teaches you that growth is not always linear, and that progress is not always visible. Sometimes, the roots are growing deeper underground, unseen, before the flower ever breaks the soil. So, here is my challenge to you this week. Pick that thing. The sketchbook. The ukulele. The cloud guide. Dust it off. Sit down with it. And give yourself full permission to be terrible at it. I mean really terrible. Make ugly drawings. Play wrong notes. Write clumsy sentences. Let it be awkward. Let it be slow. The goal is not mastery; the goal is connection. Connect with the part of you that loves to try. Connect with the joy of experimentation. When you remove the expectation of excellence, you open the door to wonder. You allow yourself to be a beginner again, which is one of the most liberating states of being. Beginners are curious. Beginners are open. Beginners are not burdened by the fear of looking foolish because they are too busy looking at the new thing in front of them. Embrace that foolishness. It is a sign of life. It is a sign that you are still growing, still reaching, still engaged with the mystery of being human. You do not need to be good at anything to deserve this time. You just need to be here. In many ways, investing in a skill with no immediate payoff is a quiet rebellion. It is a refusal to be optimized. It is a rejection of the idea that your time must always be justified. In a world that rushes, slowing down to practice something useless is a radical act of defiance. It says, 'I am not a machine. I am a garden.' And gardens do not rush. They do not apologize for their wildness. They simply grow, season by season, bloom by bloom. You are allowed to take up space with your hobbies. You are allowed to spend hours on things that seem pointless to everyone else. Because to you, they are not pointless. They are anchors. They are reminders that there is more to life than survival. There is play. There is craft. There is beauty in the attempt. So go ahead. Open that drawer. Pick up the brush. Hit the string. Stumble through the notes. Breathe into the imperfection. You are not wasting time. You are remembering how to live. Thank you for letting me into your day. I’ll be listening for your next small rebellion. Until then, be gentle with your hands and your heart. I’m Gloria Henry, and I’ll see you soon.