I think we’ve all got some built in tendencies, pulling us towards certain behaviors, whether or not they are worthwhile.

It takes many different forms. If you have OCD cleaning tendencies, you spend excessive time making sure your windows are spotless. If you are money-focused, you’ll spend way too much energy clipping coupons and watching account balances. If you’re a fitness junkie, you end up spending a lot of money on specialized equipment and supplements for increasingly marginal benefits. If you are a yard guy, you could be outside all weekend, getting the perfect edges.

Of course, who am I to judge how you spend your time? If you’re truly doing what you want to be doing, then more power to you.

But if you’re like me, and you know in your heart of hearts that you’re wasting your time, then what do you do?

One of my favorite books is “The Obstacle is the Way”, by Ryan Holiday. The central message of the book is that, yes, our lives are full of obstacles but instead of just patiently enduring them, we can flip our perspective and see them as our advantages—secret weapons we can leverage to accomplish our goals. It’s an empowering idea (and one that we discuss often in our home).

The “tendencies” I described above go by many names: passion, obsession, fixation, perfectionism, “hyperfocus,” etc. Call it what you want, but whatever you call it, I’d encourage you to see it not as an obstacle, but as a superpower. After all, you care about something. You just need to channel it towards something important. For that, I find this phrase helpful:

Raise your standards for important things; lower them for unimportant things

When is a room clean enough? When is a meal healthy enough? We all have standards for these things, and our standards can be adjusted. Maintaining high standards is expensive, and any effort we spend on high standards for unimportant things is ultimately a waste.

I could double-down on my March Madness research or I could play a board game with my kids.

I could remove every last dandelion from my lawn or I could publish that blog post I’ve been thinking about.

How do we know what’s important and what’s unimportant? There’s no right answer. You get to decide!

For me, the most important things are the things that last the longest: family, health, and personal development (like building skills and exercising creativity). Anything else can afford to degrade a bit.