The Time Billionaire

Hello and welcome to the Curiosity Chronicle, a weekly podcast where I provide actionable ideas to help you build a high performing, healthy, wealthy life. Today's podcast is brought to you by AG1 by Athletic Greens my all in one daily supplement. Seriously, this stuff replaced an entire cabinet of supplements for me in One Daily Scoop. There's a reason it's been a staple of my morning routine since 2011 and I will never go back. If you want to try it and get a couple of free goodies along the way, go to athleticgreens.com sawhill to take advantage of a limited time offer. Now onto today's piece the time billionaire in 2019, Graham Duncan, the co founder of East Rock Capital, appeared on an episode of the Tim Ferriss show. During the conversation, Duncan proposed a concept that changed my life. The Time Billionaire A million seconds is 11 days. A billion seconds is slightly over 31 years. I feel like in our culture we're so obsessed as a culture with money and we deify dollar billionaires in a way. And I was thinking of time billionaires that when I see sometimes 20 year olds, the thought I had was they probably have 2 billion seconds left, but they aren't relating to themselves as time billionaires. End quote. The Central Point Time is our most precious asset. When you're young, you are literally rich with time. At age 20 you probably have about 2 billion seconds left. Assuming you live to 80 by 50, just 1 billion seconds remain. But as Graham Duncan pointed out, we don't relate to ourselves as the time billionaires that we really are. Most of us fail to realize the value of this asset until it is gone. On the Shortness of Life in his on the Shortness of Life, the Stoic philosopher Seneca says, we are not given a short life, but we make it short and we are not ill supplied but wasteful of it. To me, being a time billionaire isn't necessarily about having the actual time, but about the awareness of the precious nature of the time you do have. It is about embracing the shortness of life and finding joy in ordinary daily moments of beauty. My friend and truly brilliant writer Tim Urban created a life calendar that breaks down your life into weeks. Each box represents one week, so each row represents one year. As you fill in the weeks, it creates a very clear reminder of the time past and time remaining. I started thinking about this more with the birth of my son in May 2022. It's scary to look at the data on the short time we get with our children. It peaks in our 30s and declines shortly thereafter Key Lessons the magic years will fly by if you let them be present in every moment. Slow down and embrace the sweetness. Time with our parents and siblings is no better. It peaks in childhood and declines after age 20. Time with family is limited. Time with parents declines sharply after age 20. We have to prioritize and cherish every moment. Diminishing time with family and children is replaced by more time alone. It steadily increases throughout your life. Key Lessons Embrace solitude and flex your boredom muscle. Find joy in the time you have to yourself. There will be a whole lot of it as you get older. Becoming a Time Billionaire Last summer, I was on a walk with my newborn son and an older man approached me. He said, I remember standing here with my newborn daughter. An old man came up to me and said, it goes by fast. Cherish it. Well, my daughter is 45 now. It goes by fast. Cherish hit me hard. The next morning, I had my son in bed and felt a profound sensation. For the first time in my life, I had enough. As ambitious people, we spend most of our lives playing a game. Everything we do is anticipation of a future. When it comes, we just reset to the next one. I can't wait until I'm 18 so I can x I can't wait until I'm 25 so I can yell I can't wait until I'm 45 so I can z It's natural. But it's a dangerous game, one that we will lose eventually. We waste a lot of energy on past and future when present is all that's guaranteed. We push for more, but really, we need to find our enough. Never let the quest for more distract you from the beauty of enough. To be sure, there are no right answers here. No one can tell you what to think about time. I'm just trying to provide insights on how to think about time. All of life's most important journeys start with asking the right questions. This is a good place to start. A simple closing reminder. Treat time as your ultimate currency. It's all you have, and you can never get it back. Spend it wisely with those you love in ways you'll never regret. That's all for today's piece. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you learned something, and I hope you'll share it with others. As always, until next time, stay curious, friends.