Counterclockwise: How to Design Endless Summers with John K. Coyle

Light that spark, Fire Nation! JLD here, and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire, brought to you by HighLevel, the all-in-one sales and marketing platform. Today we'll be breaking down counterclockwise, how to design endless summers. To drop these value bombs, I brought John K. Coyle into EOFire Studios. John specializes in the neuroscience and psychology of time perception, how to design endless summers. And Fire Nation, we'll talk about why life is 90% over at the age of 40, how to expand time, and why does time seem seem to speed up as we get older, and oh, so much more. And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to John and our sponsors. Are you ready for the ultimate all-in-one platform for entrepreneurs, marketers, coaches, and agencies? Build funnels, automate follow-ups, manage clients, and even white label your own software. Say hello to our featured partner, HighLevel, and visit highlevelfire.com to start your free trial. Today, whether your company earns millions or even hundreds of millions, NetSuite helps you stay ahead of the pack. Right now, get the business guide Demystifying AI free at netsuite.com/fire. The guide is free to you at netsuite.com/fire. John, say what's up to FIRE Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with.

Hello, Fire Nation, and thank you for having me, John Lee. Uh, I think that one thing that most people assume about successful people is that they're self-made, and I will tell you that my greatest asset probably is I'm willing to ask for help, which sounds vulnerable and weak, but the reality is when you ask for help, you usually get it.

Fire Nation, one of the reasons why you listen to this podcast, because it's a way to learn from those who have the knowledge to assist, and that's why we're talking about Counterclockwise today, how to design endless summers, because who doesn't want to know and to learn how to design an endless summer? Now, one thing that I will tell you has become even more prevalent in my life, John, now that I've become a father of a 19-month-old, is everybody you meet just says, oh my goodness, time goes by so fast. You're going to blink, they're going to be out of the house. Time is so precious, like enjoy every moment. You hear that? Every time, a million times a day. Yes. So why is that? Why does it seem to speed up? And by, by that I mean time. Why does time seem to speed up as we get older, as things like having kids happen? Why does it speed up?

Well, I think it's because the brain is lazy. Let's start there. Uh, I think, and I, I think there's ample evidence that our sense of time, which by the way doesn't exist in the present, Analyzing how you feel about how something takes place, how long it takes place in the present, is— it's not a very useful thing. Because when we think about time, we're really thinking about the past and what do we remember, what don't we? How long did something feel? Did a week feel like a month? Did a month feel like a week? Did a day feel like a year? Did a year feel like a day? Like, those things are all about memory. And what happens is when we're 8, our brains are on fire, to use your own metaphor. They are. They are. So focused on capturing and storing and recalling memories because everything is new, everything is exciting, everything's dangerous or unique or beautiful, all these things. And so an 8-year-old's brain is constantly writing, storing, and recalling memories. And all 3 of those are important, by the way. So write, store, and recall. As we get older, what happens is the brain gets lazy and it's, you know, it's 3% of your mass and 28% of your calorie burn. And the hardest thing it does is write memories. And so when it looks around and says everything's the same, it says nothing new to do here. And so it doesn't write it down. If you ever got to your parking garage and you don't know how you got there, well, that's cuz the brain said nothing new here to write down. That's writing. The other thing that happens is it'll write it down and then it can't find it. Like, I know I went there, I can't— you're scratching your head, that kind of moment. That's— It was written but hard to recall. And so the most important memories are written, stored, and recalled. When you're 8, well, the brain is always writing, storing, and recalling because it really writes stories and recalls for 2 reasons: never do that again, don't die, and always do that again, ask the girl out, you know, say I love you, right? And so this is the way the brain is sort of wired is It wakes up for don't die or always do that again, procreate. Honestly, don't die, procreate.

So let's take a step back maybe, 'cause you just have a lot of knowledge obviously on this topic. And I really would love to maybe know a little more core-wise on how exactly the brain constructs time out of memories. Like how exactly does that work?

So think about it this way, your brain and my brain right now, are sweeping short-term memory to long-term memory about every 2 to 3 seconds. Think of it as like a Polaroid or a photo, but it's also got sight, sense, smell, and emotions attached to it. But it is 70% visual. By and large, memories are highly visual. So you get this stack of photos that it's creating about every 2 to 3 seconds. Now, where things get a bit interesting— and so that, by the way, that stack of photos is the you that you are. John Lee Dumas is the sum of all his memories, except for your DNA. The you that you become, the decisions you'll make tomorrow, whether you decided to have that kid or not, whether you asked her out or not, all of those things came from the sum of your experiences and memories.

Wow.

And so that stack, the thicker, deeper, and more highly recallable it is, means you've just been alive longer. So the more memories you wrote, stored, and can recall. So the hippocampus is the memory writer. It sits at the top of your your spinal column next to the basal ganglia and the amygdala. So it's doing this every 2 to 3 seconds until something exciting happens. The amygdala sits next to the hippocampus, and when the amygdala wakes up, it tells the hippocampus, write faster, write 50 to 60 times faster, make sure we never forget this. And so this is why things seem to slow down, like in a car crash. or asking that first girl out, because your amygdala wakes up, your frame rate goes up, your sense of time slows down, and amygdala-driven memories are much more highly recallable. We store more data, it's more highly recallable, and since— hence, they're more available. And so 8-year-olds have all kinds of available, recently stored, or even longer stored memories. And as we get older, we try to create safe, comfortable lives where the amygdala isn't awake all the time. And sadly, this is the death of time for adults. There's a reason that this phrase bears meaning, that life begins at the edge of your comfort zone. That's why.

This is really fascinating stuff. And I'm actually right now watching for the first time ever, by the way, I've never seen this show before, but it was raved about by a lot of people. But the movie, the Disney movie Inside Out, and it's just really interesting how they show you what's kind of happening behind the scenes, of course, in the Disney of the short-term memories, the long-term memories, the core memories, all these different things. And like, I'm just like, wow, this is actually a pretty deep movie that I—

It really is, yeah.

I, as an adult, I'm really enjoying. And my son's just kind of like pointing at all, you know, the cartoons and the bright lights, 'cause he's 19 months old. But I'm like, I'm actually kind of enjoying this, which is pretty cool. And I will say this next thing, John, I mean, it kind of bothered me when I read it. And I think it's gonna bother potentially, not bother might be the right word, but maybe it was a wake-up call. You know, for myself and a lot of the listeners is that 90% of life is over at the age of 40. So I'm 45 years old. Why is 90% of life over at the age of 40?

Well, let's first caveat that with, that's for most people.

Oh, okay.

Hopefully not for you and me. But what happens is, and then, you know, this is 90, 98% of adults feel that the time accelerates the older they get. And so when you start plotting experiential time, which I'll sort of separate from chronos time or chronological time, clock time, uh, the way we actually experience time starts to accelerate the older we get. And so when you sort of plot that algorithm, and it depends what, you know, divider or numerator you use in this equation, but roughly speaking, we have stored half of our highly recallable memories by 18. And by age 43, we're at 92% of highly recallable memories. recallable stored memories for your average person. And so that means by age 43, you're, you only got 8% left. Like the fat lady is singing, the bell is tolling. We are at the end. You should be horrified. Uh, and I am, and I was. And, but there are ways to reverse this, which is to design your life to have the kinds of experiences where the amygdala wakes up, where your memory writing system speeds up its frame rate, and where you store more highly recallable memories in such a way that your stack of photos sitting next to you grows exponentially. And so when you do that, you're not half done at 43. You actually, you can live 400, 500 experiential years. And that's, you know, that's really the platform that I'm sitting on now is how to teach people how to do that. And we can talk about how to do that when you ask the next question.

Well, I am going to absolutely get there because that's gonna be something that I think FIRE Nation will be fired up about when we get back from thanking our sponsors. AI is a hot topic right now, and for good reason. As a business owner, you should be asking yourself, how can I make AI work for my business. The possibilities are endless, and guessing is a risky game. So ensure your business is leveraging AI to the fullest with NetSuite by Oracle. NetSuite is the number one AI cloud ERP that's trusted by over 43,000 businesses with a unified suite that brings your financials, inventory, commerce, HR, and CRM into a single source of truth. And with a single source of truth, your AI is smarter. It doesn't just guess, it knows. Imagine your AI intelligently automating routine tasks, delivering actionable insights, and helping you cut costs All with confidence. This isn't another bolted-on tool. It's AI built into the system that runs your business. If my business was in need of a platform like this, NetSuite is what I'd use. Whether your company earns millions or even hundreds of millions, NetSuite helps you stay ahead of the pack. And right now you can get the business guide Demystifying AI free at netsuite.com/fire. The guide is free to you at netsuite.com/fire. netsuite.com/fire.

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Yeah, the first way, which is kind of logical and is sort of obvious to everyone, but, um, and it's the least important, but it's the most understandable, is this notion that time, you know, as we said, speeds up the older you get. And the metaphor I'll make here for why this is happening is like a Uh, fixed flow of water through a garden hose. So time passing through your brain and my brain is much like a fixed flow of water through a garden hose. And when you squeeze the aperture of the end of that garden hose by putting a nozzle on it, putting your thumb over it, what happens to the speed of the water? Well, it speeds up, right? That's how we spray the farther parts of our garden, for example. Uh, I think our brains are squeezing time in much the same way, but in this case, the aperture for time— base times height for an aperture— The base of this or the x-axis is our breadth of experiences. And the y-axis, the one that people forget, is our emotional depth of experiences. And so, if that's the aperture for time, which I think is a really great metaphor, breadth of experiences, uniqueness, and depth of experiences, emotional intensity or risk and uncertainty, well, 8-year-olds have it in spades, right? Like, everything is new. They go the first time to the mountains.

Yeah.

First times at Disney World, first game, first win, first loss, right? Uh, first crush, first breakup, first kiss, you know, like everything's new and exciting. And also, you know, they cry a lot. And so the aperture for time for an 8-year-old's brain is wide open, and time trickles through, and summers last forever. So that's the, the first metaphorical law for how we experience time, and one that I think is pretty easy to grasp. They get more important and less Intuitive as we move forward.

And I will say I have such clear memories. I can just picture my elementary school right now when I was like 7, 8, 9 years old. And each grade when I was graduating and going into the next grade, but you know, of course summer was starting, I would be walking out in June and my parents, we had a lake house, so we always moved from our regular house to our lake house for the summer, which was probably 2 months, you know, right around that timeframe. But when I was walking out as a kid, to me, I was just about to embark on a lifetime of summer. Like it literally, like the word is endless summer here. Like I really felt like I had an endless summer stretching before me, 'cause I was remembering past summers that felt like they lasted forever in a good way, 'cause I loved them. They were great on the lakes, blah, blah, blah. It really felt that way to me, 'cause I wasn't just like, okay, 60-day countdown. I was just like, oh, summer started. I don't really have a concept of when it ends. And I'm just, Going into it is going to last forever. Now let's talk about how to expand time part two, aka inversion.

So this is the one that like everybody gets wrong. You can Google everything anywhere. I think I'm the only person still the only person talking about this. A lot of experience around time, and we can quote you know David Eagleman to Moran Surf to Phil Kotler to. You know, all of the greats, they talk about the way you experience time in the present and how the brain gets things wrong and how the, you know, 3 seconds can feel like a minute and a minute can feel like 3 seconds. These are all fine, fun experiments. I don't think they matter. I think that all that really matters is what you remember. Was it written? Was it stored and recalled? And so when we think about that and when we ignore the fact that the way you experience in the temporal present is all over the place, then we can start to get to the heart of the matter. And the, the reality is for a lot of things, The way we experience time in the present, in the now, is inversely proportional to how we'll remember it. So let me say that again. The way we experience time in the now is often inversely proportional to the way we remember it. And I'll give you 2 quick examples. Long, boring day at work. I'll give you a job of mine. My job was to sit in a cubicle for 10 hours and type letters, numbers, and digits into the green screen of a computer. I had to type periodical codes from new periodicals into Stanford's Green Library when I was in college on Saturdays for 10 hours. I can tell you that day lasted forever in the present. It was so mind-bogglingly boring and tedious, I thought that day would never end. I did that every Saturday for 2 years. I have just described my entire memory bank, my entire stack of photos of that job. There's nothing else to recall because as long as it seemed in the present, it disappears in memory.

Inversely proportional.

First day of vacation, you go to the office, you're going to be gone for a week. You go in early on a Friday at 7 AM, you work through your task list, you're making calls, you're checking off stuff, and then you're going to run to the airplane and go to a new destination, take the Uber to the beach and have a walk and see the sunset and have a nice dinner. And the whole day is gone in a flash. But this is where it gets interesting. In memory, they invert. The long, tedious, boring days disappear to nothing. And the first day of vacation expands. It's lights, color, action. You can zoom in, recall all kinds of details from that sunset, the starfish you saw, the food you had for dinner, the conversation you had with your wife, your time at the beach with your kid. Like, you store so much data in that. And so that's the second law, is the way you experience time in the now, in the present, is inversely proportional to how you remember it. And, you know, the metaphor here is of Just like the garden hose before, the metaphor here is that long boring days are like a surveillance camera. Slow frame rate, gray, black and white, grainy, no sound, nothing to remember. First day of vacation is like an HD camera, 8K camera. You're storing so much information in the present that you're almost like chasing your mental hard drive, catching up, storing all this information to be pulled out later. But in memory, you have a huge data bank. So by and large, when things feel like they're going fast in the present, that's That's probably a great sign that you're storing lots of information.

Wow, that was cool. I could definitely put myself in a lot of those scenarios for sure. Let's move into how to expand time, part 3, which is expansion.

This is the least intuitive, and the metaphor here is that time itself is completely relative, as we know from the physics of time and relativity in general, and the general theory of relativity as proposed by Einstein. But the notion of the 3rd law is that you can sort of create time out of nothing, that you can create moments in literally seconds or a few minutes that are worth a year or longer. You can also have years that are worth just moments. And when I speak to audiences, I'll often ask, you know, does anybody here have an important day in their life that they would trade away a boring month to keep? And everybody raises their hand. And then I say, all right, is there a minute, a moment of such scintillating gravity, of such importance that you trade away an entire year of mundane days to keep? And people sort of shrug and look around. I'm like, let's invert that. What if you could create moments in your life that are worth a year? What if you could create such deep memories in just moments that if you do 5 a year or 10, if you do 10 a year, you don't live 50 more years, you live 500. And the metaphor works here. There's a guy that did exactly that. His name is Eugene O'Kelly. In 2006, he was the CEO of KPMG. He was given 90 days to live because he got brain cancer. And in his next 90 days, he lived like 400 years. He created the kinds of experiences with all the people that he loved that would have taken him multiple lifetimes in a normal circumstance to do. And in so doing, he created so many memories that he felt like he lived 90 more years, not 90 more days. And we can do the same. The chief instigators here, and we can go through them in depth if you'd like after, but are, is it risky and uncertain? Unfortunately, that's the thing that wakes up the brain the most is, I don't know what's going to happen. And people shy away from that, but that's what entrepreneurs do. And so entrepreneurs live a lot longer than other people. Is it unique? Is it different? Will the brain recall it? Is it beautiful? Trauma also works, but let's go with beautiful. Uh, cuz we'll remember both. Is it physically intense? Not always important, but usually. And is it emotionally intense? And then finally, can I get into the flow state, my peak performance zone? When you can stack all 6 of those, uh, risk and, uh, risk, uniqueness, beauty, uh, physical intensity, emotional intensity, and flow state, those are the moments that in 10 seconds become the lifetime memory that there's a before and after in your mental yardstick.

Man, John, I just lived a lifetime of memories in this conversation. So thank you for breaking those down. Of all the things we talked about, there's a lot, but what would you want our listeners to walk away with? If there's one key point from everything, what would that one thing be?

I, I would like to share that and I would like to tell you a closing story, which you can keep or not.

Yeah.

But I'm gonna give you the example of a 6-segment, uh, memory. Um, but my, the, honestly, this is, I know that you're Your audience is successful entrepreneurs. And I know that for probably decades, for most of them, they have been trading their time for money. And time and money are fungible, and they absolutely should. That's what we're doing here, right? You're building a business, you're building a future. But there comes a point, John, where it's important to start trading your money for time. And I feel like so many people fail to do this. Like, you, you've got there, you are there, you are successful, you have assets in the financial realm that are substantial. And now it's time to build temporal assets, time capital assets. And most people have no idea how to invest their time for high returns. And I can guarantee you this, it is never that you're going to get low returns from low risk. So that's my advice to your audience is you're going to have to take some risks with your time in order to get the kinds of returns you want. If I may, I'll tell you a closing story of my sort of ultimate time mindset.

Please do.

So, you know, I think you know this, but I, you know, I went to the Olympics and I was a speed skater and I won a silver medal. And that all sounds great, but in my head, I was a one-timer first loser. I went to one Olympics only and finished second. And so for a decade, that was my identity. One-timer first loser. One-timer first loser. I had nothing to do with the sport for a decade. I didn't talk about it. And watch it, never spoke about it. And then I was invited to be the analyst for NBC for the Olympics 8 years later after I retired. And they— my job was to interview the parents, coaches, and skaters and get the backstories. And so I was warmly welcomed back. Everybody knew me. I knew mostly everybody. But on the 16th of 17 days of the Winter Olympics, a parent of one of the skaters created a moment in about 10, 15 seconds that literally changed the entire trajectory of my life. So we're at dinner and I'm still a one-timer first loser. And he says, I need to tell you something. Can we walk away from the table? And he looked nervous. He was making me nervous. So we walk away from the table. He said, John, I just want you to know that we wouldn't be here right now if it wasn't for you. And I said, I don't know what you mean. He said, you won't recall, but 12 years ago, after you won your silver medal, you brought it to a little reception in Bay City, Michigan. I brought my son Alex. He was 11 years old He'd never skated before. You put your medal around his neck, you sign an autograph. The next day, he decided to join the Bay City Speed Skating Club, and tomorrow he is skating in the gold medal final. And just like that, everything in my life changed. That's the kind of moments we're talking about.

Fire Nation, that is a mic drop moment. And John, if Fire Nation wants to learn more from what you have going on, wants to connect with you, What is your call to action for our listeners today?

Super easy. I'm johnkcoyle.com. I have blogs. I have a new, uh, YouTube page all about time expansion. It's called The Time Expansion Project. You can find the link there. And I'm working on the book Counterclockwise. It should be out sometime next year. Uh, Counterclockwise: How to Design Endless Summers.

FIRE Nation, you're the average of the 5 people you spend the most time with. You've been hanging out with JKC and JLD today, so keep up the heat. And for links to everything we talked about, visit eofire.com. Type John in the search bar and the show notes page will pop right up. And John, thank you for sharing your truth, your knowledge, your value with Fire Nation today. For that, we salute you and we will catch you on the flip side.

Thanks, JLD.

Hey, Fire Nation, a huge thank you to our sponsors and John for sponsoring today's episode. And Fire Nation, what can 4,000 of the world's most successful entrepreneurs teach you? How about how to achieve financial freedom and fulfillment? My first traditionally published book, The Common Path to Uncommon Success, is a revolutionary 17-step roadmap that will lead you to the lifestyle you've been dreaming about. This book took me 10 years of accumulating the genius of the world's top entrepreneurs, and you can get it all in one place when you visit uncommonsuccessbook.com. I'll catch you there or on the flip side. Are you ready for the ultimate all-in-one platform for entrepreneurs, marketers, coaches, and agencies? Build funnels, automate follow-ups, manage clients, and even white label your own software. Say hello to our featured partner, HighLevel, and visit highlevelfire.com to start your free trial today. Whether your company earns millions or even hundreds of millions, NetSuite helps you stay ahead of the pack. Right now, get the business guide Demystifying AI free at netsuite.com/fire. The guide is free to you at netsuite.com/fire.