The Currency of Time | John Coyle | 669

Good thought leadership plays with the audience's sense of time. It causes them to pause. Wait, what did you say? Tell me more. Thought leadership breaks the trance of everyday life and encourages people to think and consider. But how does that work happen? Today I speak with John Coyle, who as part of the 1994 US Winter Olympic team won the silver medal in speed skating relay. His journey has been a lifelong exploration of time and how we construct it. John is the CEO of Speaking Design Thinking, and in today's conversation we explore moments of setback, self-doubt, reflection, and his research journey. We also talk about how he uses the perception of time to impact his audience's experience. I'm Bill Sherman, and you're listening to Leveraging Thought Leadership. Ready? Let's begin. Welcome to the show, John.

Thank you, Bill. I'm glad to be here.

So you have developed an interest in time. How'd that come about?

There's a sort of made-up word called chronoception, which I've been trying to peddle out there. But this isn't, you know, horology, which is a study of watches or timepieces.

And chronoception as the perception of time?

Yeah, the study of the perception of time.

Okay.

Uh, you know, it really came from my athletic career. You know, for 15 years, about 15 years, I spent all of my time, most of my available time try and put more meters, more miles, more pedal strokes, more skate strokes into the same amount of time in order to, you know, achieve some sort of ephemeral rewards in that world.

And you did short track ice skating, is that correct?

Short track speed skating in the Olympics, and also I did velodrome cycling as well.

Oh, okay. So you were on the bike as well as on skates.

Yes, but only turning left.

Okay. Yeah. And As I think about that, both of those are measured in the hundreds, if not the thousandths of seconds.

Hundreds of seconds determine first from second from third. And, and the, the insight that athletes all know is that, you know, it's the old Seinfeld joke, gold, silver, bronze, never heard of you. I was moving my neck backwards with each little notch. Uh, it's true, right? Like nobody's ever heard of the fourth place person. And so hundreds of seconds determine a reset of the trajectory of your career based on how a particular race, particularly the important ones, goes. And the insight I had as I retired from sport at age 30 was, oh, that's true in real life.

How so?

That a lot of the things that determine our alternate futures tend to happen in moments. There may be weeks, months, years going into them., but you said yes or you didn't. You took the promotion across town or didn't. You took the job or you didn't. You asked her out or you didn't. She said, I love you, or you didn't. You know, all of these things tend to happen in moments and they reset your trajectory. And when those trajectory setting things happen, well, the alternate futures are fundamentally different. And the Greeks knew this 2,000 years ago. They had more words. Time is the most common word in the English language, Bill. We overuse it. The Greeks had two words, Kairos and Chronos. Chronos being clock time the way we tend to use it, planes, trains, and automobiles. But Kairos being the human time, the way, and their etymology, the deeper meaning is when everything happens at once and the trajectory is reset, which I just love that term.

So let's jump in a time machine, if you will. I want to go all the way back to you as you're on your athletic track towards the Olympics. And you were self-coached to begin with, right?

I was. Well, I had a local coach.

Talk a little bit about that journey and your experience of time and how that changed in that journey.

Sure. Uh, you know, I was, I was raised in a, in Detroit area. So there was good cycling and speed skating clubs there. And, you know, when I finally, uh, left the club and joined the Olympic team, having been 12th place in the world the year before with no coach and no training program. I was pretty sure I was going to go from 12th to 6th to 1st in the 2 years I had to prepare for the next Olympics. That did not happen. Um, the team, well-intentioned as they may be, put me on a plan of fixing my weaknesses. And I actually went from 12th to 34th to not even making the team 2 years later, finishing, uh, 30th in the U.S. trials that I had won 2 years prior. So at this point I'm studying, I just finished studying under David Kelley at Stanford about design thinking and As always, design thinking anchors back to, are you solving the right challenge? And I was like, hmm, maybe fixing my weakness isn't the right challenge. Maybe I need to design a better, different question or challenge. How do I design for my strengths? Which, by the way, is the title of my second book. And so I quit the team, not the sport, trained all by myself again for the next year. And in the same meet where I was 30th the year before and where hundreds of seconds determined first from second, in the first race back, I set a US record by 5 seconds and a world record by a second.

So you mentioned David Kelley.

Yes.

Not only of design thinking, but also of IDEO. You've also been influenced by Philip Zimbardo. Yes. And his work as well. Let's, let's do the Zimbardo connection, and then I want to talk a little bit about your career. And how you went from student and athlete into the world of thought leadership. But first, let's connect with Zimbardo.

So Zimbardo was my Psych 101 teacher, and he had a big section of the course was on his fascination with time, which I adopted later on. He's written several books on time, The Time Paradox. He has the ZTPI, which is Zimbardo Time Paradox Inventory. And, you know, basically the, the question he had started to ask that I'd sort of picked up the mantle on is why does time seem so different under different circumstances. So fast forward and I'm done with skating and, uh, you know, retired from my career and I noticed that summers are getting shorter. And so I start getting obsessed by this notion of why is time speeding up? Why has nobody solved for this? Why aren't we fixing this? Why can't we go counterclockwise? Well, somebody must have figured this out. So I actually emailed him and called him and oddly he picked up, which I was not expecting. And I described what I was going through, and I was in my early 30s, and the time was speeding up. And he's like, oh, that's true. All cultures, 98% of adults feel this way. Uh, it doesn't matter geography, culture, environment. I'm like, what do we do? How do we go counterclockwise? And his answer was really my life's challenge, which was, well, nobody's done that research. And I was like, okay, sign me up, sign me up.

So it sounds like in some ways that's a moment of transformation in your definition of moments that matter, right?

100% Kairos moment. That became my obsession ever since that, about, you know, 15 years ago.

Yeah, because you could have turned left and went, oh, nobody studied that. Well, someone should, rather than, well, that's me.

Right, right. And that's where David Kelley sort of features in, which is if nobody has an answer to a complex question, we're probably asking the question wrong. And so, you know, it's a reframing of Abraham Lincoln, but instead of How to have more years in your life. A better question is, how do you have more life in your years?

So you had a corporate career as well before thought leadership. Let's weave that strand in there and also some of the clients, because I want to talk about thought leadership through the lens of some of the clients that you had worked with.

Let's do that.

So what was your corporate career like, John?

Well, so I, I retire from the sports of speed skating, cycling at age 30, never had a real job. And then oddly, my first gig, I went into consulting because that's the only people that hire people with no experience and pay them at least a decent wage, but they make you work, you know, 80 hours a week. And my first gig was— go ahead.

At least as the analyst, right? Then, you know, as you move up, it's an entirely different gig, but starting out as an analyst in the back boiler room. Totally different gig.

Yeah. So, uh, my first gig oddly centered around time again. I worked with 2,000 people for 1 year. So 2,000 man-years of effort to make 1 second happen. Y2K. So all of us consultants working with Goldman Sachs, trying to get all of their computers to go 12:31:99 to 01:01:00. And so, you know, my life is still continuing to circle around time. And then my next client, very next client, Oddly was Enron, uh, where I was, uh, thrust into the role of helping to design the trading systems that would increase trade velocity and decrease trade time by putting trading systems online. So I, I designed, uh, uh, bandwidth trading, uh, freight trading, uh, power trading and gas trading for Jeff Skilling and Ken Lay of Enron, who were my indirect bosses through the partner on the consulting firm.

And so Enron was basically promising an idea of, hey, we can optimize and create value that's latent in the energy market, right?

Yes.

We have an idea of how not only to manipulate time, but how to create value, right?

100%. And if you get back to it, like the currency of time. Increased trade velocity, more trades, more people in the trade chain, more ability to be more fungible throughout the trade chain creates additional value. Every step has a value component and that's what they were creating.

Well, that's the efficient market hypothesis, right?

And it, and it worked until it didn't. I mean, they corrupted it. We built completely legitimate systems just to say it. Exactly.

So you have, and an idea, but then you also have someone who starts using it for deceptive purposes, right? Rather than authentic, valuable purposes where the idea adds value to the community and to the polity rather than just the individuals who are promoting the idea.

100%.

So what else happened in your career? Work with anyone else?

Well, in that same region of the country, there was a, um, a cyclist by the name of Lance Armstrong that I shared a cycling team with for a brief period. So I'm the only person on the planet to have worked for Jeff Skilling and Ken Lay and cycled on the same team as Lance Armstrong, the two greatest frauds perpetrated in modern mankind by most people's estimations. So, but I never whitewashed trades and I never doped. So. There is that.

And again, you have a question of the message and the messenger versus the reality, right? What is being said versus what is happening? And I don't want to go in too deep on the story of Armstrong or deep into the story of Enron. But I think if we're going to talk about thought leadership, it's important to go, who is the messenger that's talking about this? And why do we listen to them and trust them with their perception of an idea, right? You're telling me, hey, I'm figuring out a way to, you know, manipulate the perception of time. Okay, interesting. You have my attention for a short period of time there. How are you going to earn that and actually convince me, yes, this guy's credible and he has something of value to me?

Well, I think a brief brain science lesson might help you. Uh, please. So we live in the present. So we live in these short-term memory increments that are somewhere between 10th of a second to 7 seconds. It's about the range that we write short-term memory to long-term memory. And most often, how you and I, it's about every 2 to 3 seconds. So your hippocampus, that's the memory writer, is writing memories from short-term to long-term about every 2 to 3 seconds when things are normal. If you're trying to remember a long number like pi, you might hold up to 7, but that's about the most the human brain can do. What gets interesting though, is when there's a stimulus that awakens the amygdala, which sits right next to the hippocampus. When the amygdala wakes up, it says, write faster, write more, and remember it. And so your frame rate goes from 2, every 2 to 3 seconds to 10, 20 times per second. So your frame rate goes up, which means things seem to slow down. This is why it feels like you're in slow motion in a car crash or when you're about to ask that girl out for the first time. Uh, when everything gets intense, that's because the amygdala has woken up. It's told the brain to write stuff down faster for 2 reasons only, Bill. Never do that again, or I'll always do that again. It only wakes up those reasons.

Don't die.

Please procreate. Avoid the car crash. Ask her out, but get a yes. And so the writing memory is at this rapid frame rate. And that's why, uh, you know, summers for 8-year-olds feel like forever because their amygdala is pretty much awake all the time because everything's scary or new or exciting, unusual. And so they're writing everything down and storing in a highly recoverable fashion. And then we get lazy as adults. You know, your brain's 3% of your mass, but it's 28% of your calorie burn. It's a giant light bulb. It's lazy. Hardest thing it does is write memory. So it just says nothing new to write down here. And that's how you got to the parking garage without knowing it. So what we need to do, if you want to expand time, if you want to dilate time and experience summers like when you were a youth, you've got to create more of these unique, intense experiences where your emotions are on fire, where your amygdala is awake, where there's some risk, unfortunately, which people try to avoid. Uh, but if you live in a world that's risk-free and completely safe all the time, you're going to lose decades.

So we're bouncing around, but that takes us to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and flow state.

Yes.

And then you and I had a great conversation about Steven Kotler in The Rise of Superman, where he argues, and I think rather compellingly, that not only are athletes doing what they do because of flow state, but the rest of the world pays to watch athletes, poets, you know, Broadway performers, musicians access that flow state constantly on command. And we pay a premium for it because we know something important is happening. Yes.

And what happens in the brain, by the way, is you got the frame rate up because By the way, from Kotler's book Rise of Superman, the easiest access to flow, at least in the world of sports, is the high-risk sports. Right, right.

Most of his examples are like snowboarding and things where you look and you go, you, you make a wrong mistake, you could easily die.

100%. Swimmers are not getting in the flow state like, you know, skiers and surfers and things like that. And the reason for that is that risk factor, which triggers the amygdala, which wakes it up, which causes memories to be written factor. And then if they get in the flow state, What we know about the flow state is you remember 4 to 5 times as much. So now if you're writing down memories 100 times faster and you're storing 4 to 5 times more of that, you're literally writing 400 to 500 times more memories per minute. And you know that I've told you this before. This is my, the positive of my entire book and, you know, philosophy is memories are the currency of time. The more you have, the more you store, the more you can recall. The longer you've been alive. And so that's why flow state athletes are literally dilating time. They are expanding time beyond all temporal boundaries.

And you become a time junkie in some ways, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Do you want a whole week to go by and you don't remember it ever? Like, I don't want that. Certainly not a month. Definitely not a year. Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. To wake up and go, hey, we've been married 20 years. Did you notice? I didn't notice. Yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

So Cutler, I think, also makes the claim, which is really interesting, that flow state is accessed when you're pushing yourself 3 to 4% beyond your skill level, right? That there has to be not only that risk, but the, oh boy, I don't know if I can do this, that sinking feeling in your stomach where it's, as you said, activating the amygdala as well as even in that, do I ask someone out? Right, right. You're paying attention, you're minding the details.

Yeah. Oh, and, and that's right, it was around 3 or 4%. More than that, you're probably in overwhelm. Less than that, you're not fully triggered into the potential to get in the flow state. Once you get in the flow state, it sometimes starts with adrenaline, which works for some of these adventure sports, but then it's epinephrine, and then it's serotonin, then it's dopamine, and then it's oxytocin, and then it's andonamide, which as Tyler has said, and we've skied together, we're friends. Uh, if you got, took all of those chemicals externally, which by the way is meth, coke, heroin, like it's all the bad things, uh, you'd be dead or drooling. Uh, but the brain, right, right. Naturally. And when it does so in the right order, you've created the perfect landscape to settle down, store and recall. Intense memories that are never forgotten, that have a before and after.

So I want to switch. Everything we've talked about is the foundation for this piece of the conversation. How did you get into thought leadership? Because there's a difference between raising your hand and said, huh, nobody's really studied that adjustment of the perception of the time, to I'm going to tell everybody that I can. About what I'm learning. Those two things are not a logical sequence, at least for most people, right? In the thought leadership community, we make that choice. How did you make it?

Well, I suspect that many of your listeners have been, are going through, or will go through again some imposter syndrome. So I, I definitely had my period of that, uh, and my business partner At the time when I was writing my second book, which was my first real book, I was slowing down and I'm like, ah, but I'm not a doctor. I'm not a PhD. I'm not a neuroscientist. Like, why should anybody listen to me? And she had the perfect answer, which is somebody we both know. She's like, Kotler does not have a PhD. He is not a neuroscientist. He takes information, journalist, from super smart people that can't speak English like normal people. And he translated it. Translates it into a way where other normal people can actually understand it. I'm like, oh my God, that's what I do. So that was really the transition was I can, I think, reasonably well understand fairly complex information from at least the types of things I study and turn it into stories, narratives, and metaphors that are easily recognized by others.

But you could do that through coaching other athletes. You could do executive coaching. What leads you to the stage or to writing? Why do you choose the modalities you do?

I make an argument, again, this is completely biased, but I think that maybe storytelling might be the most important skill of emergent leadership today. We know very much from behavioral psychology that if you want people to change, an organization, a group, a team, even one other person to change their behavior, They have to be emotionally committed to that change. They can nod and smile rationally all day. We had a word for that in consulting, which I won't say out loud here, but it was grin F. Mm-hmm. Nod, smile, walk away, and do nothing with what they just learned. But when you can get people emotionally engaged in a story that's a—

Thank you for spending 6 figures on that PowerPoint, which you— Spot round file. Yeah.

Yes. But when you get people emotionally involved, and I think the best way is through storytelling. Then they just might actually act on the information that supports the story or the story that supports the data.

Well, it's interesting. You go back to invocations in storytelling, Shakespeare, Henry V, "O firm muse of fire." Go back to classical Greek epics, "Rage goddess, sing of the rage," right? These are not small emotions. These are not the petty parking ticket offenses. This is tell us the 7 deadly sins. Make the invisible visible and meaningful to us, which ties back to what you talk about of wake the amygdala up.

Mm-hmm. 100%. I mean, Dylan Thomas, right? Rage, rage against the dying of the light. Yeah. Right. Let's not do that. And this whole, by the way, just as a whole pet peeve of mine, but this whole idea of grace, agefully, gracefully aging and just accepting that I'm just going to get old and die. No, I don't. I don't accept any of that. I don't, I'm going to go out. I'm not going to, I'm going to burn out or fade away. One of the two.

If you're enjoying this episode of Leveraging Thought Leadership, please make sure to subscribe. If you'd like to help spread the word about our podcast, please leave a 5-star review at ratethispodcast.com/LTL and share it with your friends. We're available on Apple Podcasts and on all major listening apps, as well as thoughtleadershipleverage.com/podcast. So I want to go into a meta conversation. How does your understanding of time influence how you practice thought leadership? And that might be your work on stage. That might be how you approach the work or why you approach it. I'm asking an open-ended question and we're going to dig deep into this, but how does the object of your study, time, influence how you practice thought leadership?

Great question. So, you know, I, I, I'm a keynote speaker by trade. I stand on stage for 45 minutes to an hour most often, sometimes longer if I'm lucky. And what I like to do, I like to Trojan horse.

Well, if you're lucky, you get the standing ovation, right? Very few people get a standing ovation. Well, you were an athlete at the Olympic level. You can get a standing ovation for, you know, a performance in athletics and That's less than 45 minutes, I guess, for a keynote.

Right.

But few people get a standing ovation for just doing what they do.

True. That's true. And you do get, you know, used to that. There was no podiums at Goldman Sachs, oddly.

That's a great quote. I don't know where I'm going to use it, but that's a great quote.

I like it. My award after a year of working 8 hours a week was a PM, a partially meets expectations.

So back to the question. So how does time influence your practice of thought leadership?

So one thing that I sometimes tell my clients is that I, I'm a bit of a Trojan horse when it comes to what they buy and what they get. So in theory, they buy—

that's thought leadership, right?

Innovation leadership, creative teams, how to create a culture of innovation, how do you inspire each other to double down on their strengths. These are all, you know, more rational frontal cortex things. And then I lay a framework like design thinking out in like 2 minutes, and then I start telling stories. And then I surprise them by getting them emotional. And they, they don't expect that. They don't see it coming. And so they're looking around trying to wipe the tear out of their eye, not expecting this is about to hit them right here, not just here.

So, and many good keynoters use story. Either at the opening or if you have a great closing, your last 5 minutes, that's what the client and the audience remember. Yeah, yeah, exactly. You're talking about using the construct of the speech as a manipulation of time and activation of emotion.

100%. I—

you went down at like the minute or the second level. How do you construct— walk us through this and I'd like to hear your sort of approach to designing and customizing the keynote.

My keynotes follow exactly perfectly the monomyth or the hero's journey.

Mm-hmm.

Um, so it's a 9-step or 10-step, whoever, you know, uh, and so, you know, I start in the ordinary world and move to an extraordinary world and I bring back to the ordinary world. I have the adventures, I have the near-death crisis moment, and then I bring them back to reality fundamentally.

The answer to the call, all of those.

Yeah. Yes. And so if I may, I'll tell my closing story.

Please.

Which I think you will see is, well, it's my most important kairos moment, meaning a moment where my trajectory was reset. I've had multiple, obviously everybody has in their life, but this is probably continues to be the most important and it's 19 years ago. So I'm, I make one Olympics only and I get second place. Which is in my head as a competitive athlete, a one-timer first loser.

Now that sounds silly, which is a harsh way to judge in a planet of 8 billion people, but you know, everybody else looks and goes, I could never do what he just did. Right.

But we're all seeking the gold medal.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I think my performance pressure that you put on yourself as much as anything. Anyway, I'm sorry, I'm interrupting. Oh no, it's okay.

So, you know, I, I, I had trained for, you know, 8 years and only won Olympics. I failed to make my second team. So I got off the ice. I did not put on my skate guards. I destroyed my skates walking across concrete to my car where I took off my skates in the car, bawling my eyes out. I drove to Arizona, 45 hours away from Lake Placid, and I had nothing to do with the sport for nearly a decade. Didn't watch it, didn't talk about it, got a new job, went to Goldman Sachs, went to Enron, did all that stuff. And then 10 years later, uh, NBC called me, asked me to be the analyst for the next Olympics, and I couldn't say no to that. So there I am back in the sport at the Olympics, not competing, but in my head, still a one-timer, first loser. But everybody knew me and I was warmly welcomed back. And, you know, people do recognize the silver medal is something. Um, and, but on the 16th of 17 days of the Winter Olympics at dinner, the night before the gold medal round, one of the parents of one of the skaters who I'd been talking with the whole 2 weeks. Pulled me aside and changed the entire trajectory of my life. It's the only reason we're talking right now, Bill. So we're at dinner. He looks across me, he looks nervous, and he says, I need to talk to you. And I was like, oh, okay. So we walk away from the table and we move into the corner of the room. He says, I just want you to know, John, that we wouldn't be here right now if it wasn't for you. And I said, I don't know what you mean. I said, you probably won't remember, 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 at the time. He never skated before. You put your medal around his neck. You signed 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, Kairos moment, everything changed. I started coaching. I got my daughter skating. I continued to announce for NBC. I continued to be the analyst for them. And I started talking about it, which I had never done. And now this is all I do for a living, which is to speak and tell these kinds of stories. And that's often my closing story. Uh, the way that story ends, just so you know, is I wrote him a letter that night telling him my whole life was going to change. And he wrote me back 3 days later saying he just got home to Bay City, went to his son's room, looked at his bulletin board that holds only the most important rewards and memories from his skating career. And pinned in the right corner was a picture of us together. So he went downstairs, he printed off the photo. With Alex's medal around my neck, which she had won the next day, put it back in the same corner of the bulletin board, stepped back and contemplated all the things that had to have taken place for those two photos to be in that place together. And its conclusion was, I guess you'll never know what you'll do or say or not do or say that could change someone's life forever.

I can see how you close there on the keynote. I want to push you further.

I'm ready. Okay.

How does that impact— because you're making a choice every time you speak. Sure, you know, it's a gig, it's another audience, but at the same time, you're choosing to speak, to share what you've learned. How does that story Do you feel a sense of obligation? Do you feel a sense of joy? Are you chasing after more transformative moments? What's getting you out of bed to do this again and again to tell this story and why?

Uh, great question.

Yes.

More often than not, I have a pretty good line of people that want to tell me their story at the end of the talk, which I absolutely love. And, you know, every once in a while I get the kind of story that really, really just makes everything worth it. Not that I don't love what I do anyway, but I'll tell you one example of many. Guy waited for a good hour on a Friday at 4 PM to talk to me. It was a big line and he was last in line. He was very emotional and he said, hey, I just, I just had to tell you this. Like, you got off stage. I walked out in the hallway. I called my wife. I was supposed to go to brokerage meeting over the weekend in Florida. And instead I said, honey, no. I'm not going. I canceled my flights. Saddle up the car, get the kids ready. When I get home, we're going to drive the 5 hours to Des Moines to visit their great-grandparents who they've never met and might not if we don't do it now. And I was like, yes, this makes everything worth it.

I think where I look at is the manipulation of time comes both from conscious choice. You, you can poke the amygdala yourself, or you can surround yourself with people who are also poking it. And then you get sort of in an ecosystem bubble, if you will. And You're right. Life is so much better when it slows down. You're encoding your present. You could describe it as mindfulness. You could describe it as, you know, a balanced state. I think we've, for as many languages and cultures that we have in the world, we have many words to describe that. But this is where we aspire, many of us, to be in that quiet place where time feels forever and you're doing a million things at once. 100%.

Time stops, speeds up, slows down, does all of these things when you're in those modes.

So you talked about, you know, not fading out. As a goal. How's thought leadership fit into that? Is this something you see yourself continuing doing? Is this a step on your journey? How does it fit into the puzzle?

I think the time topic is the rest of my life, honestly. Um, you know, I'm going to be meeting with a neuroscience friend of mine, Moran Cerf, uh, in 2 weeks when I'm in New York. And inevitably he or David Eagleman or some of my other inputs will say the same thing, which is Everything I'm about to tell you is wrong. It's just less wrong than last time because we have learned more about the brain in the last 9 months than in the entire history of the human race, which is always true. And so there's just so much.

And how cool is that? Right?

It's amazing. Yeah. Yeah. So that's why the book hasn't written itself. Cause every time I talk to these guys, there's new information that I'm trying to incorporate.

And at some point I have to declare a finish line and I just see the inscription on the front that says, this book is wrong and outdated, but please read it anyway.

100%.

So you said something I want to jump back to. You said time is going to be the focus the rest of my life, right? And if I were to borrow a metaphor, it's almost like a nuclear reaction. You've started it and it's self-sustaining. It continues. You don't have to wake up in the morning and say, oh, time to think about time, right? You're not punching the clock here. This is like having dessert in some ways, right? It's like I get to do what I love.

100%. It's a burning passion and I love to talk about it. I will talk about it ad nauseam with anybody all day, every day. Uh, but my favorite is when I have a really smart, inquisitive person that asks challenging questions like you, Bill.

Well, thank you. And one of the things I look for, and I know this is turning a little bit into mutual admiration, is that I look specifically, uh, for guests who, when they talk about their area of expertise, and their passion. And I know in a podcast this is hard to capture, but you look at the nonverbals, you look for the spark in the eye, the genuine smile rather than the fake smile, that energy. You see it in the face in the moment. There's a presence, as you said, you could talk about it with someone all day. And you could probably talk about it at the 101 level all day, as much as you could with top neuroscientists, right? And you can make that switch. And those are both good days. Am I right on that? Or am I misinterpreting?

I understand. Because, you know, the part of the 101 is, I mean, after I talked to Miranda, I'm going to have to like process a bunch of new big words. You know, but how do I, you know, make the— make those things, you know, palpable to people that don't spend all their time reading these weird manuscripts that I tend to read?

Or someone shows you an fMRI and goes, look at this, this is cool, and you're like, it's a picture of a brain, right? Why are you excited?

Right, things are glowing, I don't know.

Yeah, exactly. And how do I explain this to others in a language that they will understand. Because you're right, as knowledge increases, it doesn't always remain accessible. It's locked behind journals. It's, you know, an increasingly smaller percentage of the world that even understands the technical details, the peer-reviewed paper that maybe only 7 people in the world can fully understand and fact-check. Right? And when you look at that percentage of an audience to the people on the planet, where how many people are impacted by their perception of time? I would argue a large percentage, if not all. I'm sure there's a counterexample I'm not thinking about. Someone who's like, yeah, no, I don't want to encode more moments and have, you know, Yeah, exactly. Set that aside. This is going back, as you said, in Western tradition to Greek philosophy, and you could pull out the concept of eudaimonia. What is a life well lived and fulfilling, not only for us but for others?

100%. Well said.

So, I want to ask you two questions as we wrap up here.

All right.

And they're— one is retrospective and one is prospective. Okay. The retrospective question is, and you, we talked about imposter syndrome in several different ways. One in thought leadership, one as defining the silver medal in the Olympics as one-time first loser. Right. Given your understanding now, whether you're talking with the self that storms out failing to qualify for the second Olympics, or the young self who puts on his skates the first time, or someone working in consulting, right, what advice would you give your younger self around time and imposter syndrome?

I'm going to quote a German cyclist. Uh, I think it's Hans Ulrich, who has a quote that I just love. I think because I had really great parents who truly believed in me, I was able to adopt this sort of mentality, which was self-belief beyond all reason. At some point, I stopped caring what other people said. Like when I quit the team and not the sport to train on my own, nobody wanted that to happen. Everybody told me it was a bad idea, except for my parents. And you know, when I quit my job 10 years ago to go into speaking, having no idea if this was actually going to pay the bills, thought I'd be couch surfing for a while, um, which I did actually for about 3 months. But, um, if you have a passion that keeps you ignited every day, all day, and I know this is a bit clichéd, but you know, self-belief beyond a reason, you're going to make it work. You're going to make it work.

And to underscore that, I think almost everyone who spends a long period of time in the field of thought leadership figures out how to make it work for them. And your answer, John, isn't another keynote speaker's answer, let alone someone who might be primarily an executive coach or consultant. We've all got to figure it out in our context. My second question, a little bit different prospectively. What is the challenge you're working towards now that you're trying to crack in thought leadership? What is that next defining moment you're working towards? And it might be personal or it might be, hey, I want to get on X stage. There's many ways to define impact and success. What are you working towards?

Another great question. You know, for the first 9 years of speaking, it's a B2B gig, right? When I'm talking about innovation, leadership, creativity, design thinking, strengths, resiliency, it's primary—

your customers are corporate clients and your buyers are execs or event planners, and because they have a conference with a theme and they say, get me a speaker.

100%. So my, my target market can be extremely small and niche. It doesn't matter as long as I get 40, 50 gigs a year. I'm, I'm good. Yeah. The market I don't yet understand, and this, you are my first podcast of even attempting to be in a podcast. Uh, I mean, I've been on before, but other people invited me. This is the first time I sort of help invite myself is I want to move more to a B2C model. I'd like to have broader reach. I would like to be able to have more people hear this message that time and money are fungible. And if you're not trading your time from your money for time, you should be. If you have financial resources, which is going to be, you know, most of the audiences that see me, these kinds of podcasts are probably not for, you know, the people that watch this have some financial resources more often than not.

Right, right. Yeah. And so cracking a larger audience to move beyond, and you can debate of you're, you have a large audience of people in white collar jobs that work who will come to events, but not everybody goes to the event in Scottsdale at the Princess Hotel, right? You know, and there's a lot for everyone who goes there. There may be 10 employees that aren't there.

100%. May I tell a quick story to share what? Please. Yep. I was with a friend of mine. He's a CEO, but he's got 2 kids. They were 14, 16 at the time. And he was like, can you just tell them a little bit about this time stuff? So I gave him the sort of short version, TED Talk version. And they looked at each other and they're like, so what you're saying is I'm basically wasting my time doing the same thing every day. Why am I doing this? Why am I even going to school?

I'm like, hello, you created existential rebels. Yeah, at 6 years old or something.

But what I love is the next day they walked to school, which they never done. It was over 8 miles. It was like 2 and a half hours. And they came back so excited that afternoon. Like, we saw all this. I never, I didn't know all the stuff that was on the way to school from our house because I've always bitched about in the car. And they've both kind of gone on to be, I mean, they were already that way because they're dead, but they've both gone on to be pretty adventurous and Cal's traveling the world doing video blogs about all his adventures and, you know, hopefully I had a little part of that.

Well, and that's the thing is impact doesn't have to be world-changing. It's about compounding, right? And the change, the small changes you make with one individual can be massive, like a butterfly effect. You know, if you pull into chaos theory, I am at. So John, I want to thank you for joining us today. Thank you also for suggesting and inviting yourself on the podcast. And I, I call that out because we as a podcast, and we're now 660-some episodes deep, right? Yeah, we've had conversations with many people that we know, but at the same time, there are amazing people out there that we don't know who come to us and say, hey, I got a story about thought leadership, and we welcome that. So thank you. And if you want to talk to us, reach out. Yes, we do welcome pitches. Again, thank you, John., and thank you for sharing your stories about time and how to manipulate it.

Thank you, Bill. Look forward to having coffee soon. We're very local to each other, by the way.

Down the street.

Yes. All right.

Thanks, John.

Bye.

Okay. You've made it to the end of the episode, and that means you're probably someone deeply interested in thought leadership. Want to learn even more? Here are 3 recommendations. First, Check out the back catalog of our podcast episodes. There are a lot of great conversations with people at the top of their game in thought leadership, as well as just starting out. Second, subscribe to our newsletter that talks about the business of thought leadership. And finally, feel free to reach out to me. My day job is helping people with big insights take them to scale through the practice of thought leadership. Maybe you're looking for strategy, or maybe you want to polish up your ideas. Or even create new products and offerings. I'd love to chat with you. Thanks for listening.