Transcriber: Jelena Vukovic Reviewer: Nadine Hennig
Thank you for that.
(Laughter)
There is no such thing as chronological time.
How long did summers last as a kid?
Splashing through lakes, riding bikes across busy streets,
crushes, broken hearts, crushes and dirty knees.
We all know summer lasted forever as a kid.
Everything was new.
We really lived everything we did.
And now, how long do summers last in this world so mundane?
I don't know about you, but I ache for endless summers again.
My obsession with time started early.
As an athlete, I began to chase time,
and as a speed-skater and cyclist
I spent more than 20 years trying to compress
more laps, more miles, more meters, more strokes
in the same amount of time.
I was very fortunate in that,
that investment turned itself into an Olympic bid.
I was able to compete in the Olympics,
and I was doubly fortunate that at the Olympics
I was able to squeak by in a smallest margin of time
to take home a silver medal from the Winter Olympics.
(Applause)
So you can imagine that as an Olympic athlete
even small amounts of time really matter.
Let me show you why.
Here are the results from the 2002 Winter Olympic games
for the 500 meters.
What I want you to focus on is not the time itself,
but the difference.
In this case, the difference between gold and silver
is 2/100 of a second - after a lifetime of training.
Let's take it further.
Look at the difference between first and tenth place.
33/100 of a second.
Between first and tenth place.
To know how long that is, we will do an experiment here.
I'll clap it out for you.
1/1000, 2/1000, 3/1000.
Split it into 3.
1-2-3, 1-2-3, 1-2-3.
So the difference between the gold medal and being sent back to Siberia to train
for another four years because you got tenth place,
is the difference in between these two claps.
(Clapping twice)
Ten guys went by in that space of time.
Crazy, right?
Oddly enough,
my life continued to center around time as I entered the working world.
At my very first job, I spent a year with Goldman Sachs
preparing for an entire year for one moment.
That was Y2K.
An entire year we spent in order to make a clock go
from 12:31:99 to 01:01:00.
After that I spent time with Enron, yes, it's true,
and I helped them design trading systems
to increase trade velocity and decrease trading times.
And it was about this point in my life that my obsession with time morphed.
I began to become aware of this thing that was making me crazy,
that there was distinction between linear or chronological time
and what I'll call "experiential time."
We all know what chron time is.
It's the watch on your wrist, clock on the wall,
how you make it to trains, plains, and meetings.
Experiential time, however, is quite different.
Experiential time is the way that...
Was anybody uncomfortable for the last couple of seconds?
(Laughter)
Guess how long that little bit of drama took.
Eight seconds.
Experiential time is anything but linear.
It speeds up, it slows down, it stops.
We've all experienced this.
You've all been to a long business meeting that seemed like three hours,
but only 20 mintes went by.
The inverse is true, right?
A great friend is coming to town.
You sit down, have a drink, have dinner,
look on your watch 20 minutes later and three hours have gone by.
But the thing that really made me crazy
and I really started focusing on is this notion
that time itself was accelerating and that life was speeding up.
Anybody here in the room feel that?
98% of adults feel this.
98 percent.
So, life is not only short, it is actively getting shorter.
I've got some bad news for you.
I've graphed this, I've done the math, and it's a lot worse than you think.
(Laughter)
What I'm about to share with you is going to do two things:
scare the hell out of you, and depress you.
I apologize in advance.
As it turnes out, when I graphed this, I was 43 years old.
According to the actuarial tables for my height and weight,
my life expectancy was to be 86 years old.
So, according to this table, I'm half done, right?
I look around this room,
probably the average age here isn't entirely different.
There's a range, but approximately around the same place.
So, you're half done. Right?
Wrong!
No, there's no such thing as chronological time!
Plot this according to experiential time, how we actually experience time.
How do you do that?
We talked before about how long a summer lasted for an 8-year-old.
We'll start with that.
But I can't plot infinity or forever.
Let's instead use that conservatively, summer as an 8 year old
starts to feel a lot like a year as a 20 year old.
Which starts to feel a lot like a decade in middle age.
And now, for you math majors, if you plot the area under this curve,
and you take the value of the remainder of your life,
that's the slice that's left.
That's not half way! Right?
It's a lot less. Different graph.
I held the Y axis constant,
I let the X axis of chronology become logarithmic.
And what we learn is that half way is about 18 years old
and at 43 you're not half way, you're 92% done!
You've got about 8% left!
(Laughter)
The final cord has struck, the fat lady is singing,
we are at the end.
Does this horrify anybody else besides me?
(Laughter)
When I saw, when I first did this math a few years ago, it made me crazy.
I was bound and determined, I'm going to fix this.
I've got to fix this, I can't live this way!
I read everything I could.
Csikszentmihalyi, Kahneman, Zimbardo, Eagleman, Hammond;
everything I put my hands on.
I was trying to figure out a way to manipulate this sort of cognitive bias
towards acceleration and reverse it.
Let's try to slow down time, try to expand time, try to create time!
I'm happy to report to you that my obsessions
are going to be a gift back to you today.
In fact, I've uncovered three rules that appear to govern experiential time.
I'll go through each.
Here's the first.
Contraction.
Inversion.
And the most important, expansion.
Let's go through each one.
The first law of experiential time
we have already been talking about.
Basically time [unclear] and other forces will continue to accelerate.
I'll give you a metaphor to help you think about
how this works in our brain.
Time flows through your and my brain just like water through a garden hose.
For a fixed flow of water,
the speed or the velocity at the exit of that water
is indirectly proportional to aperture of that hose.
Same goes for your brain.
If your brain has a wider aperture,
if it's allowing more time to pass through,
it's going to go through slower.
Somehow our brains are contracting.
They're actually causing time to go faster.
Why is this?
Let's look at the brain of an 8-year-old.
Instead of using base times height for the area of this conduit,
let's use breadth of experience and depth of experience.
Think about an 8-year-old. Everything's new.
First time to the ocean, to the mountains,
first time maybe seeing snow,
and they have an incredible depth of experience.
First crush, first game, and getting into fights,
breaking their glasses.
Eight-year-olds cry - a lot.
Their breadth and depth of experiences are super wide.
Their conduit for time is expansive and it trickles through.
And summers last forever.
Let's think about a 20-year-old.
You've declared a major,
maybe have got a job, a set circle of friends,
and you've developed a distaste for discomfort.
Your conduit for time through your brain is starting to contract and to accelerate
the feeling of time passing.
And now, let's go to middle age.
I know this doesn't apply to you in the room here,
but a lot of middle aged people I know have routine lives.
They do the same thing, go to same places,
eat at the same restaurants, commute to the same jobs,
see same friends, everything is the same,
plus the modern coveniences of Advil, Paxil and air-conditioning.
It's super comfortable, super safe
and it results in a conduit of time that makes it speed by.
What do we do about this?
I love this quote from Hemingway.
"I can't stand to think my life is going by so fast
and I'm not really living it." That's Robert Cohn.
Somewhere around 30 people start to get this sense
that life is speeding up.
They could be missing something.
They think, I need more breadth, do new things,
I'm going to take lessons, piano lessons,
I'm going to take up a cooking class, or go back to school
to increase the breadth of their experiences.
But unfortunately, most of the time,
they don't really add to the depth of emotion.
They're attached to their things, riskless, fearless,
there's no real fear of failure.
It's sort of like putting a thumb over the end of the hose.
It doesn't change the rate of time passing.
So how to live like a bull fighter, how to expand time like an 8-year-old?
Well, it's pretty simple.
You've got to expand the breadt and depth of your experiences.
If you're going to go sign up and take piano lessons,
sign up for a recital - in front of a bunch of people.
If taking voice lessons, sing in front of a crowd.
If you've going to sign up to be a triathlete or run a race,
care enough about the outcome to get emotionally invested.
How to know if you're doing this right?
How to know if you're living life to slow down time
like an 8-year-old?
If you're not willing to cry
based on the outcomes of one of your new experiences,
you're not slowing down time to that of an 8-year-old.
Not going to work. This isn't for everybody.
Some people enjoy their safe comfortable lives.
But if you want to slow down time, then enter the bull ring.
Speaking of rings, let's talk about the second law.
The second law of experiential time is the law of inversion.
This is the notion that sometimes the way we experience time in the present
becomes inverted in terms of the meaning and memory.
Imagine your job was to sit at a computer
and type in these long strings of digits - numbers, letters and symbols
into a green screen of computer and if you got it wrong,
it disappeared with a flash, and you start over again
because I did check digits, this was my job in undergraduate school.
And I can tell you that time practically stopped in that room.
I would look up after three hours of typing the digits wrong.
It was like the second hand had stopped and only 20 minutes had gone by.
It was brutal.
I'll contrast it with a different day.
Think about the first day before you go on a week long vacation.
Maybe you take a half day at work.
Speed at the office at 7 a.m. with a task list,
you get in on your emails, you've got your to-do's
and cranking through the stuff
look at the watch in 20 minutes, 3 hours have gone by!
Hands of the clock are spinning, you try to get out,
you get to the airport and get on the airplane,
go to hotel and walk to the beach, you have a dinner, see the sunset,
have a cocktail and the whole thing is over in a flash!
Yet, both of these examples are one linear day.
But in the present temporal perspective
one felt like an eternity, the other felt like a fleating glimpse.
But this is where it gets really interesting.
In memory, as you move into the temporal future
and look back at the temporal past,
the days in digits, they disappear in nothing.
I have no memories of my time typing those codes in those computers.
Everything I've shared is everything I know.
The first day of vacation, totaly different!
In memory you have this rich databank
of so many things you remember from that day.
Why is this?
A metaphor would explain this.
It's like two cameras.
In the first example, it's like a surveillance camera.
It's a slow frame rate, it flods by, its' grainy,
it's low resolution and it doesn't require any storage,
it disappears to nothing in memory.
But the first day of vacation, it's like an HD video camera:
high frame rate, it is taking up so much data
you can't keep up with it in the present.
That's why it's fleeting and streaming by you.
But, man, your databank, you can zoom in, rewind,
it's full colour, lights, sound, color, action -
there's so much to remember from the first day of vacation.
How do you maximize the second law of experiential time?
You've got to create those moments.
Csikszentmihalyi says that flow,
the notion of flow where time speeds by or doesn't exist in the present
as you're focused on something you love, if you can create more flow moments,
you can expand time and memory which is the way that you remember time
and you can expand your life.
The third rule is the most important.
Experiencing time under the right environmental cues,
I believe, you can actually expand or even create time.
The physics of this is:
E=mc2 - everybody is familiar with this formula, the law of relativity.
You take two clocks, one on Earth, the other one in shuttle.
After a few laps, when it comes back to Earth,
it actually reads less time that the clock that stayed on Earth.
To take it further, you take a clock, put it near a massive gravitational pull,
at some point, time actually stops -
relative to the outside world.
At that moment, that place is called an "event horizon."
I believe that we can create event horizons in our life,
where time stops and we actually create time
with such meaning, such gravity
that expands our whole perception of time.
There's a man who's done exactly this. I will share his story shortly.
But first let's talk about you.
Who here in the room would trade an awesome day
that has happened in the last few years, for a boring week?
Trade awesome day for a boring week.
Let's take it further.
Is there anybody who would consider trading
a super important meaningful hour of their lives
for a month of mundane days when nothing happened?
I'm going to take it even further.
Is there a moment, a minute in your life,
of such scintillating, extravagant importance, so meaningful,
that you would trade a year of days for it?
A year of days for it. A minute for a year.
Well, the good news is
I personally have lived the value of a year in a moment,
and I have sadly lived the value of a moment in a year.
And for everybody, these event horizon events are different.
Maybe it's the first time somebody said "I love you" to you,
first kiss, the birth of your child,
maybe it's the dying last words of someone you love
as you hold their hand.
These events exist in the Universe, and they bend and they warp time.
And they can create time.
What if you could create these moments, create five of these a year?
What if you could create ten really living, event horizons a year?
Instead of living 40 more years, you could live 400 more years.
Let me introduce Eugene O'Kelly.
At age 57, Eugene O'Kelly was a CEO of KPMG,
one of the world's largest and the most successful accounting firms.
At age 57, Eugene O'Kelly was diagnosed with brain cancer.
And given 90 days to live.
Eugene was a super smart man,
he spent his first day unwinding himself from the business,
the second day got his will and testaments in order,
and the next couple of days,
he designed the rest of his remaining days.
He did some amazing things.
He put all of his friends and loved ones in circles.
He started with acquaintances, then friends and loved ones,
and eventually his inner circle of his nuclear family.
He created experiences with them to unwind.
For the outer circles, it was a call, a walk in the park.
He said goodbye to them, while he shared with them
the meaning that they had had in his life.
For his inner circle, he started recreating the moments
when they first met, how they first bonded
or one of the most important things they'd done,
whether it was a baseball game, boating, golf or an event.
In these moments, from his own words,
he was creating what he called "perfect moments where time stopped."
Eventually, he moved to his inner circle
and he started doing those bucket list things
with the people he loved the most.
New experiences across the world and his final trip was to unwind
with his 14 year old daughter.
He planned a trip to Prague,
and along the way on a private jet a visit to Inuits.
Something she had always wanted to do.
Eugene O'Kelly discovered something
about 30 days into these 90 days that fundamentally changed my life.
If you remember anything from this talk, I hope you remember this:
Eugene O'Kelly realized, 30 days in,
that by creating these moments,
he was going to live longer than he would have
if he had never gotten cancer.
I love the first line from his book called "Chasing daylight."
The very first line of the book says:
"I was blessed. I was given three months to live."
There is no such thing as chronological time!
How do you maximize non-linear nature of experiential time
and design moments to live almost forever?
First law: avoid contraction!
Expand the breadth and depth of your experiences.
Take risks! Find joy! Be willing to cry.
Second law: inversion.
Build a life full of those high speed moments of "flow."
It's going to speed by in the present,
but you're going to create these expensive memories.
Find more ways to create those memories.
And third, and most important: expansion.
Design event horizon moments of "really living" -
experiences of such gravity that time ceases to exist at all.
Every man dies. Not every man really lives.
I don't know about you, but I want to really live.
Thank you.
(Applause)