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Title: What Could You Accomplish in 7 years?

Want a shocker? Take the average amount of time that you watch TV or play Video games per day, e.g., two hours (below the national average). Do you realize that over a period of 60 years, you will spend the equivalent of 7 ½ years, sitting in front of the TV every waking hour of the day? ! Imagine what a person could accomplish given 7 ½ years in which to accomplish it! 

1. In some fields, you could go through college and get a Masters and Doctorate. 2. Become an accomplished guitar or keyboard player. Spend a year immersing yourself in another culture and get a conversational understanding of the language. Spend the next 6 1/2 years continuing mastery of the language and impacting the culture. 3. Become really good at several sports.

[To really make it sink in, go through the math with your group, letting some youth help with calculators. Here it is: 2 hours x 365 (days per year) = 730 total hours of TV per year. Divide this by 16 to get the total number of days of that year that I would have spent every waking hour (16 hours) watching TV (45.625 days). Multiply this by 60 to get the total number of 16 hour days I would have spent totally on TV over a period of 60 years (2737.5). Divide this by 365 to find the total amount of years I would have spent watching TV every single waking hour of each day. I come up with 7.5 years of spending every waking moment watching TV!]

An easier way to figure it (but perhaps not as easy for youth to see) would be to say that 2 hours is 1/8 of the waking hours of a day. So 1/8 of all my waking time is spent watching TV. Thus, 1/8 of my next 60 years are spent watching TV [60 divided by 8]. This gives me 7.5 years.

Another way to introduce this point: What Could You Accomplish in 7.5 years? 1 - Earn a Doctorate degree. 2 – Become an accomplished musician 3 – Master some field you want to excel in 4 – Become formidable at some sport 5 - ..... or, simply watch 2 hours of TV per day over a period of 60 years.