Teach a man to fish...
And he's likely to end up letting that new skill collect dust as he lays back on his couch, scratching his hairy belly whilst watching old re-runs of Bewitched. Assuming you do teach him and he does allow your words of wisdom to whither up and die before ever seeing the light of day: was teaching him a waste of time, in retrospect? Was there a better use of time?
Is time really valuable?
Time is one component (kinetic) of potential energy output - the other being the potential energy of the system/ organism in question. Of course, talent/ skill measures the potential quality of order that can be achieved from any given amount of energy output.
No matter how much brain or brawn a human might have, he/ she will accomplish precisely NOTHING without the time dimension to space. So, to put it another way, time is the MOST VALUABLE dimension, if what we value is doing stuff (getting things done).
Why do stuff when we can also not do stuff?
Good question!
No, really, it's actually a very good question. I mean, think about it, what do you really accomplish by building things or writing a "brilliant piece of literature"? Okay, so you might receive positive attention from people for some amount of time and maybe even be compensated with a lot of money, thanks to the high quality of your energy output. Translation: you'll appeal to the pleasure/ reward center of your brain
...then what?
Maybe you'll spend the money on X, Y, Z...you know the story - live the life of luxury, full of comforts, blah, blah, blah...again, you've already heard it. Money allows you to keep slamming the pleasure button with a warn-out mallet.
Slowly, with every drawn out tick of the clock, you grow towards total cell-failure, more aged than you would have been without having all that money, thanks to all the exotic alcohols and drugs it afforded you to experiment with. Maybe you hit a point wherein you're all pleasured-out, tired and in, every way, ready to conserve energy for the inevitable last breaths, maybe not, but death comes-a-knockin', regardless.
Odds are
You emotionally plateau some years after becoming rich/ famous - you wear the pleasure button down to the point that there's no button left to push and you sit there bored and growing in apathy with every passing high-noon.
Good use of time? Hmm.
Furthermore, now that things have slowed down, you find it more difficult not to think about father time and his promise to take everything away from you. Where do you run from the fear of losing it all? To what experiences will you turn for comfort? The bitter end is inevitable. The writing is on the wall. Depression sets in deep.
This moment has you wondering: why even make an effort to do anything at all in life? Why expend all the energy to accomplish great feats when death will take it all away in the end, leaving one with no memories of those great events ever happening?
Why not just be a nihilist? Eh? Nudge, nudge...
Better yet, why not see if we can come to know what time is and whether or not there even is something that can be taken away, or lost, from life?
Perhaps the best use of time is to see if our fears of losing out to time are justified. Perhaps we are (consciousness is) eternal/ timeless. Perhaps time has zero value to our actual (spiritual?) well-being. Perhaps we're currently focused on all the wrong things.
Perhaps.
I like the word "perhaps"
Perhaps I said that as a joke on myself. Perhaps. Perhaps not.
Know thyself
Who is this "I" that one calls a "self" and what, if anything, will stand on the other side of death to the organism that's attributed to that self? Can we know, or experience, death before dying?
I'm your authority and I answer with an emphatic "yes"
Just kidding :) But, seriously, the most recently posed questions might be the most valuable ones that can be asked. How to know? That's for each of us to deal with individually.