How to design moments that help you live (almost) forever | John Coyle | TEDxNaperville

Thank you for that. There is no such thing as chronological time. There is no such thing There is no such thing as chronological time. 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, brushes, 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 into the same amount of time. And I was very fortunate in that that investment turned itself into an Olympic bid, and I was able to compete in the Olympics. And I was doubly fortunate that at the Olympics, I was able to squeak by, and on the smallest margin of time, take home a silver medal from the Winter Olympics. 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 it's the difference. In this case, the difference between gold and silver, 2/100ths of a second after a lifetime of training. Let's take it further. Look at the difference between 1st and 10th place. 33/100ths of a second between 1st and 10th place. I don't know if you know how long that is, so we're going to just do a little experiment here. I'm going to clap it out for you. So, 1/1,000, 2/1,000, 3/1,000. Let's split it into 3. 1, 2, 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 4 years because you got 10th place is the difference between— in between these 2 claps. 10 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. In my very first job, I spent a year with Goldman Sachs preparing for an entire year for one moment, and 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. And I began to become aware of this thing that was making me crazy, that there was a distinction between linear or chronological time and what I'll call experiential time. So chron-time, we all know what that is, right? It's the watch on your wrist, it's the clock on the wall, it's how you make it to the trains, planes, and meetings. Experiential time, however, is quite different. Experiential time is the way that— What is experiential time? Was anybody here uncomfortable for the last couple of seconds? Guess how long that little bit of drama took? 5 seconds. 8 seconds. Experiential time is anything but linear. It speeds up, it slows down, it stops. And we've all experienced this, right? You've all been to a long business meeting where you've been there for What seems like 3 hours, and you look at your watch, only 20 minutes has gone by. And the inverse is true, right? When you have a great friend coming in from out of town, you sit down with them, you have a drink, you're at dinner, and you look at your watch 20 minutes later, and 3 hours have gone by, right? 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? Yeah. Yeah, 98% of adults feel this. 98%. So life is not only short, it's actively getting shorter. Well, 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. What I'm about to share with you is going to do 2 things: it's going to scare the hell out of you, and it's going to depress you. I apologize in advance. As it turns out, when I graphed this, I was 43 years old, And according to the actuarial tables for somebody my height and weight, my life expectancy was to be 86 years old. So according to this table, I'm half done, right? And I look around this room and probably the average age in this room probably isn't entirely different. There's a range, but you're approximately in the same place. So you're half done, right? Wrong! No! There's no such thing as chronological time. So you've got to plot this according to experiential time, the way we actually experience time. And how the hell do you do that? We talked before about how long a summer lasted for an 8-year-old, so we'll start with that, right? But I can't plot infinity or forever, so let's instead use that summer as an 8-year-old, very conservatively. A 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 halfway, right? That's a lot less. Let's graph it a different way. So I held the y-axis constant, I let the x-axis of chronology become logarithmic, and what we learn is that halfway is about 18 years old, and at 43, you're not halfway, you're 92% done. So you've got about 8% left. So— The final chord has struck, the fat lady is singing, we are at the end. Does this horrify anybody else besides me? So 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. So I read everything I could. Cheeks Me Sin Hai, Kahneman, Zimbardo, Eagleman, Hamon, everything I could put my hands on. And I was trying to figure out a way— is there a way to manipulate this sort of cognitive bias towards acceleration and reverse it? And let's try to slow down time, try to expand time, try to create time. So I'm happy to report to you that my obsessions are going to be a gift back to you today. And in fact, that I've uncovered 3 rules that appear to govern experiential time, and I'll go through each one of them. Here's the first: contraction. Inversion. And the most important, expansion. Let's go through each one. The first law of experiential time is something we've already been talking about, that basically time, absent other forces, will continue to accelerate. Let me give you a metaphor that will help you think about the way this works in our brains. I think that time flows through your brain and my brain just like water through a garden hose. So for a fixed flow of water, the speed or the velocity of the exit of that water is directly— indirectly proportional to the aperture of that hose. Same goes for your brain, right? So if your brain has a wider aperture, if it's allowing more time to pass through, it's going to go through slower. So what is this? But somehow our brains are contracting. They're actually causing time to go faster. Why is this? Let's take a look at the brain of an 8-year-old. And instead of using base times height for the area of this conduit, let's use breadth of experience and depth of experience. And think about an 8-year-old, right? Everything's new. It's like first time to the ocean, first time to the mountains, first time maybe seeing snow. And they have an incredible depth of experience, right? First crush, first game, and, you know, getting into fights, breaking their glasses. 8-year-olds cry a lot. So their breadth and depth of experience is super wide, right? So their conduit for time is expansive and it trickles through. And summers last forever. Okay, let's think about a 20-year-old. 20-year-olds, now you've declared a major, maybe you've got a job, you've got a set circle of friends, and you've developed a distaste for discomfort. So your conduit for time through your brain is starting to contract, and it's starting to accelerate the feeling of time passing. And now let's go to middle age. Now, I know this doesn't apply to you in the room here, but a lot of middle-aged people I know, their lives are pretty routine. They do the same thing, go to the same places, eat at the same restaurants, they commute to the same jobs, see the same friends, right? Everything is the same. And they've got the modern conveniences of Advil, Paxil, and air conditioning. So it's super comfortable, super safe, and it results in a conduit of time that makes it speed by. So what do we do about this? Well, I love this quote from Hemingway. I can't stand to think that my life is going so fast and I'm not really living it. That's Robert Kahn. Somewhere around 30, people start to get this sense that life is speeding up and maybe they're missing something. So they think about, I need more breadth, I need to do new things. I'm gonna take lessons, piano lessons. I'm gonna take up a cooking class or go back to school. And they increase the breadth of their experiences. But unfortunately, most of the time, they don't really add to the depth of emotion that's attached to those things. They're riskless. They're fearless. There's no real fear of failure. Therefore, it's sort of like putting your thumb over the end of the hose. It doesn't change. The rate of time passing. So how to live like a bullfighter? How to expand time like an 8-year-old? Well, it's pretty simple. You've got to expand the breadth 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 you're going to take voice lessons, sing in front of a crowd. If you're going to sign up to be a triathlete or run a race, care enough about the outcome to get emotionally invested. So how to know if you're doing this right? How to know if you're living life such that you're gonna 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 gonna slow down time to that of an 8-year-old. Just not gonna work. And this isn't for everybody, right? Some people enjoy their safe, comfortable lives. But if you want to slow down time, then enter the bullring. Speaking of rings, let's talk about the second law. The second law of experiential time is the law of inversion. And this is the notion that sometimes the way we experience time in the present becomes inverted in terms of its meaning in memory. So 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 a computer. And then if you got it wrong, it disappeared with a flash and you had to start over again because it had a check digit that This was my job in undergraduate school. And I can tell you that time practically stopped in that room. Like, I would look up after 3 hours of typing the digits wrong, and it's like the second hand had stopped and only 20 minutes had gone by. It was brutal. Let me contrast that 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, right? Speed to the office early at 7 AM. You got a task list, you got your emails, you got your to-dos. And you're cranking through all that stuff and you look at your watch after 20 minutes and 3 hours have gone by, right? And the hands of the clock are spinning. And then you try to get out of there and you get to the airport and you get on the airplane and you go to the hotel and you walk the beach and you have a dinner and you see a sunset and you 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 and And the other felt like a fleeting 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 and digits, they disappear to nothing. I have no memories of my time typing those codes in those computers. That's everything I've shared is everything I know. The first day of vacation, totally different, right? In memory, you have this rich databank of so many things that you remember from that day. Why is this? Let me give you a metaphor to explain this. I think it's like 2 cameras. In the first example, it's like a surveillance camera. It's a slow frame rate, it plods by, it's grainy, it's low resolution, and it doesn't require any storage, and it disappears to nothing in memory. But the first day of vacation, it's like an HD video camera at a high frame rate. It is taking in 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, right? You can zoom in, rewind, it's full color, light, sound, color, action. There's so much to remember from the first day of vacation. So how do you maximize the second law of experiential time? You gotta create those moments, right? Csikszentmihalyi says that flow, right, 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. Let's talk about the third rule and the most important. Experience and time under the right environmental cues, I believe you can actually expand or even create time. Let's talk about the physics of this for a minute. E= mc², everybody is familiar with this formula, right? The law of relativity. Take 2 clocks, leave one on Earth, put the other one on the shuttle, let it do a few laps, and when it comes back to Earth, it actually reads less time than the clock that stayed on Earth. Let's take it further. If you take that clock And you put it near a massive gravitational pull, at some point time actually stops relative to the outside world. And that moment in that place is called an event horizon. And I believe that we can create event horizons in our life where time stops, where we actually create time of such meaning, such gravity that expands our whole perception of time. And there's a man who's done exactly this and I'll share his story in just a second. But first, let's talk about you. So who here in the room would trade an awesome day that's happened over the last few years for a boring week? Trade an awesome day for a boring week. Okay? Let's take it further. Is there anybody in the room that would consider trading a super important, meaningful hour of their lives for a month of mundane days where nothing happened? I'm gonna 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, right? Maybe it's the first time somebody said, I love you, to you, or your first kiss, or the birth of your child, or maybe it's the dying last words of someone you love as you hold their hand. But 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? What if you could create 5 of these a year? What if you could create 10? Really? really living event horizon moments 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 the CEO of KPMG, one of the world's largest and 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, he got all his will and testaments in order. And the next couple of days, he designed the rest of his remaining days and he did some amazing things. He put all of his friends and loved ones in his circles and started with acquaintances and then moved into friends and loved ones and eventually into his inner circle of his nuclear family. And he created experiences with them to unwind. So for the outer circles, it was a call, a phone call, a walk in the park, and he said goodbye to them, but in so doing, he shared with them and the meaning that they had had in his life. And as he moved into the inner circles, 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 or boating or golf or an event. And in these moments, from his own words, he was creating what he called perfect moments where time stopped. And eventually he moved to his inner circle and he started doing those bucket list things with the people he loved most. 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 to go visit the Inuit, something she had always wanted to do. Eugene O'Kelly discovered something about 30 days into that 90 days that fundamentally changed my life. And if you remember anything from this talk, I hope you remember this. Eugene O'Kelly realized 30 days in that by By creating these moments, he was gonna 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 in the book says, I was blessed. I was given 3 months to live. There is no such thing as chronological time. How do you maximize the nonlinear nature of experiential time and design moments to really 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. Yeah, all right, fine, it's gonna speed by in the present, but you're gonna create these expansive 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. Woo-hoo!