When a movie or a book gets boring some way through the middle, our tendency is to not immediately drop it and move on to the next thing. Instead, we sit through the boring parts waiting for the interesting bits. This happens with all the content that we consume.

Now that there are rewind and fast forward and on hover previews like Youtube, we can easily skip to the parts that are interesting and not sit through the whole thing. But this isn't always possible. Books are still old school that way. So are theatre performances and movie screenings.

As we move closer and closer to our own realm and away from the fictional (or non-fictional) worlds that we are consuming as content, like conversations on the phone, dinner conversations with friends and acquaintances, text messaging, and the things we do in our own lives, we don't have the fast forward or rewind buttons.

We have to sit through things.

There is an alternative though. And that is to throw your hands up and walk out. If you are half way through a boring book or a movie, you might seriously consider cutting your losses and not completing the book or the movie. Because you feel that your time is better spent doing something else, even if that something else is watching a movie that is more interesting.

While we are very good at doing this in the content that we consume, we are not very good at doing this in our own lives. In our realm, when we are in the middle of our stories, playing out our role of the protagonist, we don't always know when to hit stop and start a new movie. We default to sitting through it and waiting for things to get more interesting. Meanwhile, we crib that things are boring.

Although we don't have the ability to rewind, we do have the ability to look back. If you try to remember what you did yesterday, or a week ago, or a month ago, or a year ago, or several years ago, the farther you look back, the lesser you remember. What you remember clearly are the highlights.

And when we're sitting through something, we aren't creating highlights. So when we look back upon this period later on in life, we'll hardly remember anything.

You can be working towards anything. You might succeed in it. You might fail. It doesn't really matter.

The only measure of success is whether you are creating highlights that you can fondly look back to.

Every now and then, look back on your life and see what the highlights that you remember are. If not many are from the recent months, then it is time to stop sitting through it and go create some.

I'll sit through it. But not long enough to go long periods of time without creating highlights that I can look back fondly on.