Time & Perspective Quote by Bryant H. McGill

McGill’s line flatters the reader into moral clarity: if you want your life to count, stop obsessing over productivity-as-self and point that energy outward. The construction is absolutist - "No time is better spent" - which isn’t meant as a philosophically airtight claim so much as a motivational lever. By ranking service above every other use of time, it quietly demotes the usual modern idols: hustle, self-optimization, and the anxious bookkeeping of personal achievement.

The subtext is a rebuke to a culture that treats time like a private asset. In a world of calendars, metrics, and branding, "service" becomes a kind of counter-economy: value measured not by what you accumulate but by what you relieve in others. The phrase "fellow man" signals a broad, almost civic humanism; it’s not about charity as performance, but about belonging to a shared moral neighborhood. It also smuggles in a promise: altruism won’t just help them; it will rescue you from the emptiness of self-preoccupation.

Context matters because McGill writes in the contemporary self-help/spiritual-inspirational tradition, where aphorisms are designed to travel: on posters, in speeches, across social feeds. That portability explains the quote’s simplicity and its strategic vagueness. "Service" can mean volunteering, caregiving, mentoring, activism, or simply decency. The line works because it offers a high standard without specifying a program, letting readers feel both challenged and instantly absolved: you already know what “service” should look like in your own life.