My friends, you're about to hear my biggest regrets in life and the lessons I learned from them. I hope this will be really helpful for you to learn from my experience so you can make better decisions than me and save your time. It's been 39 years since I've been born already, and I realize that if I could look back, the one thing I'd really love to have back is some of the time I put into activities that were just so wasteful and useless. Going forward, I'm remembering this, and I wish I'd seen somebody else's story like this. I did read a book called The Top Five Regrets of the Dying, which was really good on this particular subject. I'm glad I'm not dying today. I'm in fantastic health, and I have the time to look back and analyze my life in the big picture to help guide me going forward.
On a day-to-day basis, it can be hard to make decisions about, well, should I play this new game that's coming out and live stream it, or what should I do with my time today? But when I look back at the big picture of my life, it's really obvious. Some of the biggest areas where I wasted my time stand out, and some of the areas, perhaps more importantly, where I'm glad I did those things stand out too. So let's start with some of the things I'm really glad I did, and then I'll talk about some of the things that are obvious time wasters.
The Time I'm Glad I Spent
I'm really grateful for all the time I spent with my family. All the time growing up that I had with my mom and dad, my brother, and my friends. That time is precious and was well spent. The trips we went on, the times we hung out at home, the dinners. I spent a lot of time with my family in person and with my friends growing up, and I love that.
I'm really grateful for all the time I was physically active playing sports. Although I didn't play any sports in high school, I often would play a lot of stuff with my brother in the backyard and play at recess. All the times I was physically active and did things that took care of my physical body, like all the hours I played basketball with my friends in college and Ultimate Frisbee. That was time really well spent. It was great fun, and it was useful to keep my body healthy. I don't regret any of that.
I am very grateful for all the time I spent going out with girls and having relationships, dating, and finally meeting my wife. I'm very grateful for all that time. Absolutely no regrets there. Even when things didn't work out, at least I learned something, and it helped me be better prepared to be successful with my wife.
I am very grateful for all the time I spent learning in my life, reading books, studying, going to class, getting knowledge, and expanding my mind. All that time was really valuable. And I'm very grateful for all the time I've had with my kids, raising them and being with them. That's really valuable. Absolutely no regrets there. Even when we had bad experiences and argued with each other, we learned from it, and it's a part of a whole life story.
I also love all the time I've spent doing things like building a garden in my backyard, going to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, and doing yoga. That's time that leaves me with a sober body and brain today, helping other people, making my life meaningful. My body's in shape from yoga. I love everything I've done in the past to keep myself healthy and to change my diet. I'm really grateful for that, because that's why I have such a healthy body today. And the time put into my garden has been valuable learning. I love eating food directly out of my garden. In my experience the nutrition seems to be the absolute best when you just pick something out of your garden and eat it. I'm healthier than I've ever been today, and I really appreciate all the time I took care of my body in the past.
I'm also very grateful for all the time I've spent making music and learning new skills that could be applied to create things like music. I've been watching a video I did recently called I Created Dance Music From Scratch in Real Time with Ableton Live 11. That was such an awesome one, where I took an hour to just play around and make music instead of trying to make just one song. I set it up so there's music going the whole time. And I'm really grateful for all the time I put into making videos that have helped people, tutorial videos, and videos with songs and life lessons from the Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. I had over 4,000 videos on my main Jerry Banfield channel. I deleted them all, because there were so many videos I did regret that were real time wasters, and I needed to clean those up. All the time I put into crypto videos that have been educating people, I don't regret that either.
What I Regret
Now let's talk about what I do regret, because it's just as important to look back and think, well, what don't I regret, and therefore I want to do more of that? And then what do I regret? Those are things I absolutely don't want to ever do again. The only reason I would say that the things I'm going to list are valuable is because they've given me experience to teach from. That said, I never want to do these things again.
First, drinking alcohol. I regret everything to do with drinking alcohol. I would love to see what my life would be like if I never drank alcohol, never used any drugs, never did any mind-altering substances. The only reason I don't completely regret all the 11 years I spent drinking and sometimes using other things like marijuana is because now I have experience to help other people who are alcoholics and go to Alcoholics Anonymous. If I didn't go to Alcoholics Anonymous and help other people stay sober, all that time drinking would just be a complete waste, a complete vacuum, useless time in my life. And while I did have some fun times with my friends while I was drinking, I could have had those same fun times without drinking, and a lot more.
So if you get anything out of this, in my experience even taking a single drink is a total waste of time. Because if alcohol does anything useful, you might want to figure out why alcohol does something that seems to be good for you, and why for some reason you can't just do that thing without alcohol. For example, if you can't just decide to loosen up and have a little more fun and relax, if you need even just a drink occasionally, why? Well, there's an opportunity to learn to control yourself and to enjoy your life more. What I've come to believe is that alcohol and drugs are purely a crutch, purely a waste of time, purely a negative, of absolutely no value, a total waste of time, and something I will never ever do again.
Video Games: My Biggest Time Sink
Next, perhaps the single largest area I've wasted time in my life, although alcohol is much more destructive and often brought down my paychecks, my reputation, and jobs that I worked hard for: video games. I look back at my life and think, I would love to see what kind of life I would have if I didn't play video games. Video games have been the single largest area I've wasted my time.
I just did a video that really triggered this one on my Jerry Banfield Crypto Reviews channel, where I talked about why I quit playing Gods Unchained again, because I deleted all the different videos I'd made of it. It really got to me, because my God, I put tens of thousands of dollars into the game and hundreds of hours into it, at least, maybe even 500 hours. I charge $200 an hour for my time, and people actually pay that because it's worth it. If you make my time worth $200 an hour for work, that's $100,000 worth of time I sunk into Gods Unchained. Combine that with the money, and what do I have to show for it today? I ended up deleting all my Gods Unchained videos. I took a total loss off Gods Unchained. And that's just the tip of the iceberg.
I've spent tens of thousands of hours gaming in my life. If I could do it all again, I'd never touch a video game. Or maybe I'd play a little bit of video games in person with my friends. It used to be fun to sit down and play some Madden with my friends in college, play a few games, holler at the TV, and have fun. But the majority of video games I've played in my life have been by myself, just grinding out games. I remember in middle school just grinding out things like Return of the Jedi, and in elementary school grinding out Empire Strikes Back on Game Boy. Hours and hours just staring at this tiny little screen that was smaller than my phone, with a horrible resolution. So many hours dumped into games for no return. Imagine all the things I could have learned. I could have incredible skills as a musician by now if I'd learned music and played music instead of playing video games.
Some of the biggest times of frustration in my life were when I drank and played video games. I'd get so frustrated. I'd smash the games, smash my keyboard, smash things in my room. I hurt my back one time playing video games. I jumped out and screamed a few curse words. Jumped one way, my legs went one way, my upper body went the other, I twisted my back, and it hurt for months. If you're getting upset and angry playing video games, that's probably a sign you're wasting your time. When you do things that just drain your time for no good reason, often some part of you will get angry about it. If there's one single thing I could do differently in my life after drinking, just time-wise, it would be to never play video games.
And especially poker and gambling. What a miserable waste of time. I remember playing poker in college. I was so bored. The game was so boring. Even though I was good at it and could win more than half, if I played the small ones I could win close to 60 percent of my games, and if I played the higher-stakes ones I'd still win well over 50 percent of the time. In Texas Hold 'em heads up, it was so boring that I often would drink and play a video game while I was playing poker, or I'd sit there and play five different tables. Why would you do that to yourself? I regret all the time I sunk into video games and gambling. And yet my mind still suggests them, because when you've done something for 10,000 hours in your life, it can be hard. It can take time for your mind to reprogram.
Four months without video games, and a lifetime of regret
It's been four months since I've played video games on my live stream. Technically I've helped my kids a little bit with Minecraft, but in terms of any meaningful gameplay, sinking hours into something and learning about it, I don't think I've played more than a few minutes in the last few months. And yet my mind still thinks, Jerry, you should play some video games. I wrote a book about video game addiction in 2012, and I ended the book by admitting that I'd started playing video games again while I was writing it. Now I really don't know what's going on. I've dumped thousands and thousands of dollars into video games, and thousands and thousands more hours. Not just hours playing, either. I took hours that I could have used to make valuable content that really helps people online, tutorials, educational material, music, and I blew all of it playing video games.
I've since deleted all those gaming videos off YouTube because hardly anyone was watching them. Even in 2021, at the height of my gaming popularity, I had huge numbers of people watching. I made over $100,000 playing video games online in 2021, a dream come true to actually make money playing games. And for much of that year I was aggravated and wished I could get out of it, because if I didn't play Call of Duty Warzone or some hot retro game, nobody would even watch my stream. Playing video games as a job was surprisingly dull and boring lots of days, and other times it was unnecessarily emotionally volatile. When you get into video games and it pushes your emotions way out into euphoria, it also sets you up to be bipolar. In my experience, playing video games and drinking set me up for those big, huge emotional swings.
And what do I have to show for all that time today? Useless skills. I got to be one of the best Warzone solo players in the world, a 150-person battle royale where I was winning 10 to 20 of the games. That's a huge amount of skill, and what good is it? I can't use it today unless I play more video games. And I sadly got a bunch of people to install Call of Duty Warzone and start playing it. I'm not sure exactly how many, but it looks like thousands, if not tens of thousands, of people started playing, continued playing, or played more Warzone in 2021 because I played it. How sad that I tricked other people into wasting their time watching my live streams instead of being present at the park with their kids. I remember one of my moderators saying one day that she was at the park with her kids, sitting there watching me play Call of Duty Warzone. Everybody's getting screwed in this scenario, except Facebook. Facebook was making a profit off the whole thing.
If I could do it all over again, absolutely no video games by myself. Maybe I'd play a little bit in person with my friends. I did have some fun playing in person with my friends in college, but that was such a tiny percentage of the gameplay. And I see my kids today getting into Minecraft, acting a lot like me, and maybe, maybe they won't have to dump as much time into video games as I did.
What I would have done with that time
Video games and drinking are definitely my biggest regrets. What would you do with that time? I wish I'd had more time to go out with girls, to have a relationship, to hang out and learn more, instead of learning these pointless video game skills that have no real-world application. I would have spent so much more time learning real skills and building and creating things like music or engineering. I went to college for engineering, but playing video games took so much of my energy that I hardly had any left to put into it. I could have had so much fun and done so much more good for the world by not pouring all this time into video games.
I don't regret most of the jobs I had, but because of all the time I spent playing video games, I didn't have my skills set up for good jobs. The jobs I did have, thankfully, gave me a lot of time. What I do regret are the portions of time I just went to work because I didn't know what else to do with myself. I regret all the times I felt like I had to support myself when I could have just lived at home with my parents and learned and crafted myself and done work I loved. I regret the huge amounts of time where I just traded my time for money, going into a job I didn't really care about, whether it was being a cashier at a grocery store, or a correction officer working in a dangerous environment while being massively underpaid, or trading 40 hours a week as an intern at a court doing boring work, scanning inventory items and putting them in a spreadsheet, miserably boring work. But when you spend all this time and energy playing video games instead of developing skills and creating in a way that's valuable for the world, and you're not willing to accept help, that's what you get: crappy jobs where you don't have value to offer the world.
The videos I made just to sell something
I also regret the things I created as a result of all that. It's a bit repetitive, but it needs to be said again: the things you do have these feedback loops. I played video games, so I created all these gaming videos, which took up space I could have used to create other stuff. Now I look at what I have online and think, what have I been doing? I regret all the videos I made that were purely sales pitches, not even to mention the gaming videos. I made so many videos where my whole goal was just to sell something and make myself money. Today I look at my own work differently: if I'm not providing something genuinely helpful, information that's useful even without me making any money off it, then it's not worth doing. I look back at my channel and I had so many videos I put all this time and energy into just to try and sell stuff.
Today I'm glad I've got my website up at jerrybanfield.com, and the best way to work with me now is to join the Jerry Banfield Family. Sure, you can mention that kind of thing in passing, but I made a ton of videos where the only point was to sell something. I made all these videos selling online courses on Udemy. And I regret not putting more time and energy into YouTube, dumping all of it into trying to sell stuff instead, because I love just putting everything I do out there for free so anybody can access it. I dumped all this energy into putting courses on Udemy when I wish I'd put it on YouTube. In the short term I would have made less money. I did make a lot of money on Udemy, millions of dollars in sales, hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in income for me after all my expenses. But then I got banned from Udemy, and what do I have to show for it? Nothing. I wish I'd just put more time into getting my videos out there, being as helpful as possible, and respecting the terms and conditions.
I got away with violating the terms in lots of places in the past. And while I don't agree with some of the terms and conditions on YouTube, if I'm going to show up and do videos there, I do need to adhere to the policies or go somewhere else where the policies are different. I can always reference learning material and books I'm reading that cover some of the things you can't cover on YouTube directly. But I regret pouring all this time and energy into platforms besides YouTube instead of seeing that YouTube was where it's at.
Fair platforms and a symbiotic relationship
I regret the huge amounts of time I dumped into things like Facebook. What a waste. I helped them make huge amounts of profit off all the energy I put in there, and I got very little out of it in comparison, which is why I've deleted Facebook, deleted Instagram, deleted TikTok. I will not use platforms anymore that don't give a fair share to creators, or that don't have a fair, transparent algorithm that actually gets your content out there. YouTube's algorithm is decently fair and the revenue share is very fair. I get something like 60 percent of the money YouTube makes off my content, whereas Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok give you almost nothing. And X, right now, gives me a great amount of organic reach on my posts and a lot of attention. Maybe someday I'll get income off of it, but the algorithm is fair and it puts my content out there.
So I regret all the times in the past where I focused so much on making money for myself instead of providing value and being useful to other people. I put so much time as a creator into trying to make money for myself, and while it did work lots of times, it would have been so much better for the long term to just focus on: can I make something that's really useful for you? If I make something really, really useful for you, there's going to be plenty of money, especially when I create it in a place with fair money sharing like YouTube. I made lots of genuinely useful stuff on Facebook and they didn't give me anything for it. Everybody putting useful stuff on Instagram is getting nothing back. You're giving value and getting nothing in return.
So I regret all the times I did not pay attention to a symbiotic relationship, where I'm getting what I need and I'm giving what other people need. Lots of times in my business it was all about me getting what I need, doing whatever the minimum was to get you to give it to me. Now I look at it completely differently. I want to give you the maximum I possibly can every day and accept the minimum in return. If I get a few thousand a month off YouTube, that's plenty. I want to focus on giving the most I can every day. So I really appreciate you being here.
If This Helped, There Is More Where It Came From
Thank you for watching this and learning about my regrets. I hope hearing them is helpful for you so that you do not have to make the same ones. If this resonated with you, I have made a lot of other videos on my main Jerry Banfield channel that you might connect with too. I just put up a new video about the 12 steps of AA that I think you will really appreciate if you are struggling with alcoholism. If you are a YouTuber, I have a video about the worst advice for small channels. If you have been through a heartbreak, I recently shared my journey of going from being alone and suffering after a breakup to being happily married.
If you like instrumental background music, I am on my second listen of a track where I created dance music from scratch in real time, and I have made a lot of other music videos recently. If you like rap, my "Get Me Fired" song is pretty good. And if you want to hear everything AI music can be, I made a video where I listen to AI music for 12 hours straight. Thank you so much for your love and support, and I hope this has been useful for you.
If you want to chat with me and actually be heard, the best way to do that today is to join the Jerry Banfield Family, where I read what you have to say and can respond to you directly.
My Final Regret: Pouring Huge Amounts Of Time Into Live Streaming
That brings me to my final regret. I regret pouring huge amounts of time into live streaming, both watching other people's live streams and doing my own. With live streaming, it is never quite right. Either it is not enough or it is too much. Most of the time when you are live streaming, especially when you start out, there are not enough people watching, and then very quickly it flips and there are too many. I came to hate all of you spending all this time on my live streams when I could not even read your comments and see what you had to say. And then you are paying money just to get me to notice you, and most of the time I do not even remember those super chats afterward.
That is why I love the way things work now. I read every comment on my Discord, and I read every comment in my open chat community on the Internet Computer. I love being able to actually hear what you have to say. My regret is that I did not set up a clear, simple system sooner where you could talk to me and I would truly hear you and be able to listen. If you want to see more of that journey and the lessons behind it, I have gathered it in my Life playlist. Thank you so much.