Thoughts on the Subject of TIME
Medium writer Moreno Zugaro wrote a very frank and open lament about how he utilized – or failed to utilize – his time as a younger person. As a result of intense personal reflection, he wrote five unbelievable insights on the subject of how people view and experience time.
Please tune in this week as Wayne share’s Zugaro’s remarkable thoughts, discusses an incredible business book which have took up this issue, and gives a concrete example of how one very successful person teaches others to respect his time.
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Hi everyone. This is Wayne Rivers at FBI where We Build Better Contractors.
This week I have some thoughts on time. Moreno Zugaro wrote an article in January of '23 in Medium, I guess it's a website,
Medium, and he talked about at his current age he reflected about how he had spent some of his time as a younger
person. He said that he'd spent 20,000 hours playing video games and socializing with his friends. And he asked the
question, "I wonder where I would be right now if I'd use just 10% of that time productively." And that really struck me
because I think one of the greatest pains that we feel in life is the pain of regret.
When we look back of something that we did or didn't do and just have this heart-wrenching pain that you could have
done something better, you could have made a difference, you could have chosen an alternative path. So, he had five
unique views about time that I thought were really interesting so I want to share those with you. The first thing is that he
says that time issues are never about time, they're about priorities. When people say, "I don't have time," he says that's
bogus. It's all about where you put your priorities.
If you live to age 80, you've lived 70,000 hours. Think about that, 70,000 hours. It seems like we ought to be able to crowd
in the important things in life into 70,000 hours, doesn't it? We have 168 hours a week. And if you think back to the Neil
Pasricha book, a third of those are spent at work, a third of those are spent at asleep, and then a third that's where you
live the rest of your life. And it just seems like the idea that I don't have time means I'm not setting priorities the way I
think I should probably set my priorities.
The second thing is you've got to value your time. People, other people value your time as much as you do. So, if they see
you dithering your time away on foolish things like video games as Moreno talks about, then they're going to associate
that with the fact that you don't value your own time so I have a great story about that. I have a friend that sold his
company for millions and millions of dollars before the age of 40. And everybody associates that with genius. He's just a
hardworking, innovative guy. He started another company now, but people always wanted to take him to lunch and pick
his brain about this or that. And he just found out that was crowding out other important things that he wanted to do in
life.
And so, he said, "Sure, I'll go to lunch with you, $200 and you pick up lunch." Well, nobody wanted to pay $200, but what
he was teaching those people is he valued his time. And by gosh if I value my time, then you're going to value it too. And
I think it was a perfectly clear message. Some people think he was a jerk for doing that, they were offended, but why
would they be? He's simply sending a loud and clear signal, "This is what my time is worth, and you're going to have to
pay for it."
The third thing is he says there's no waiting. I'm the worst. I'm so impatient, and when I have to wait in line, I'm just pulling
my hair out. It's terrible. But he says you've got to live in the moment. You've got to look around and experience things.
And this impatience and this hurry up stuff that we sort of impress on ourselves is a big waste of time. Don't wait in line.
Don't wait in traffic. Experience things. And so now with technology, we can listen to podcasts in the car. I tend to take
books and magazines around with me when I know I'm going to have to wait in line or I'm going to eat lunch by myself,
and then I can get some reading done during that period of time and it's not just staring up at the ceiling, gumming down
my sandwich.
The fourth thing is the biggest waste of time is doing things that don't need doing at all. And he talked about the definition
of the word priority. It came from Latin, prioritas, which meant first in rank, order, or dignity. Priority was always singular.
It was never considered a plural until the 1940s when American corporate time management experts turned it into a
plural. All those centuries, priorities stood for one thing. And now just in the last 100 years or so, you can have multiple
priorities.
You've got to focus on the things that are really important. We talked about Dwight Eisenhower and Stephen Covey's
model for determining what's urgent and important. You've got to choose the things that have the highest impact. I was
writing something the other day about HABU, your highest and best use. The more time you can spend at work taking
advantage of your highest and best use, the more productive you're going to be, the more productive the other people
around you are going to be, and the happier you're going to be.
And the fifth thing is, when we think about paying for things, don't think about paying for things in the context of money.
Think about paying for things in the context of time. If I want to buy a new pickup truck, and I read now that you can spend
six figures on a pickup truck, if I'm going to spend 100 grand on a pickup truck, how much time did it take me to earn that
a $100,000? So, let's say it took me six months. Is that pickup truck worth six months of my time, really?
You've got to think about time. We talked about the book ages ago, one of my all-time best business book
recommendations, Time Really Is Money by Rob Slee, S-L-E-E. Time Really Is Money. And he makes the case in that book
quite compellingly that there is an actual direct correlation. And if you spend your time doing 15 dollar an hour jobs versus
$5,000 an hour jobs, guess what? Your company's going to stay here. You're going to stay here. You're not going to be
able to get to that next level. So don't think about paying with money, think about paying with time.
He wrote at the end of his article, "Today we'll leave the world and never come back. Don't waste it." And if you think
about what your life consists of, it's the moment to moment things that we do. We only have these seconds, these fleeting
seconds and hours. And if we choose to do X, that means we are not doing Y. So, find a way that you can spend more time
doing the things you love to do the most, the things that give you energy, how you can spend time in your highest and
best use. And as a result, we'll all be happier. Let's have some comments from you. This is Wayne Rivers at FBI where We
Build Better Contractors.
