Hacking Time

I began writing the story below in September 2021 after being interviewed by HackerNoon and realizing that they used a quote from my interview as part of the title ‘Time is The Great Equalizer’.

At the time I was writing a blog called CryptoFireside and so I’d been thinking a lot about value, tokenization, and these types of topics.

‘What if time was tokenized?’ I thought to myself.

The conclusion that I came to is that it kind of is. It’s not that time itself is valuable. Because for all we know, time might not even exist. But it's what you do with it. It's times potential. And it is not even something we created or even discovered, it just is.

In some weird way, time holds unparalleled levels of potential within it, this potential value is not much different from how an atom holds massive amounts of potential energy dependent upon quantities of protons and electrons and how you cook them up.

Fast forward and it is now April 2023. For some reason, I’ve just let this draft sit and ferment which is odd because that’s not how I write.

Well for some reason this story has taken a lot longer to come out. Anyway, here it is. FYI, I have no background in physics or mathematics, or even philosophy (clearly). This is just a story about time that will help you think about it differently. Use it for motivation.

As I sit here typing on my laptop, it’s a Saturday morning in September, I'm getting over a cold and have just made a warm cup of coffee. I have 26 unopened and unread emails sitting in my inbox. Now you might be thinking 26 emails is nothing. Well for me, 26 unopened emails is a horror movie. I manage my inbox with both religious fanaticism and military precision.

Because of that, I know why my inbox has 26 unopened and unread emails. I even know what those emails are about. I just haven’t had the time to give them my focus or energy.

I started a new job two weeks ago and whilst I love my new job, the beginning of it has robbed me of my time.

And it's not just my inbox. My house is a mess, my poor dog hasn’t been walked, I haven't exercised, and I've not attended any of the scheduled wrestling matches I have with my five-year-old son or talked to my ten-year-old daughter about her latest Alice and Miranda novel.

This is what happens when we start something new, we give it our time, well actually, we give it our attention and focus and time just happens to move forward while we are doing that thing because that is how our reality works.

Time is linear apparently, we use it to manage and measure physical reality.

It takes X amount of time to get from here to there. And if I am doing this at this time, I cannot do that.

But what if time was not just something we used to measure and to plan, what if it was more than that, how else can we think about time?

Time as A Leveler of Man

The cool thing about time is that both the richest person in the world right now, currently Jeff Bezos with $177 Billion, and the poorest person in the world, probably someone in South Sudan, both have the exact same amount of time.

Think about that.

The richest and poorest people in the world have the exact same amount of time.

Sure, you can argue, well actually Jeff Bezos has more time to do what he wants and the poor guy in South Sudan spends his day doing stuff he needs to do to survive.

Yep, that's true, but they both have the same amount of hours, minutes, and seconds. Jeff Bezos no matter how rich he is, cannot buy a 25th hour and the guy in Sudan no matter how poor he is cannot lose an hour and have 23 instead of 24. And vice versa.

Of course, stating the obvious, one will probably outlive the other, therefore having more time lived, yet today, they have the same.

Isn’t that interesting?

We’re not the same, but our time is.

Our money is not the same, maybe you have more, our genetics are not the same, our location and knowledge are not the same, and nothing is really the same outside of being human, having two arms, two legs, and a functioning body, apart from that we’re different except for time.

It almost feels as if the playing field in this little life experiment we’re all living was purposefully designed to even everything out. Everyone gets 24 hours. And every 24 hours, we get a mini reset, and then the whole thing resets again and everyone gets another 24 hours.

Rich, poor, sick, healthy, no matter the country, the level of wealth, gender, the color of your skin, the level of intelligence or education, you can’t have or experience or live through and access a different amount of it.

It is the greatest leveler of man that I know.

It’s the greatest equalizing thing that we have. All of us that is.

People argue that we’re all different, and because of that and because of where we are born and what we are born into, somehow it makes life unfair. The trendy kids these days call it privilege. Some people get more, some get less, and arguments for and against can be made.

But what if time was the thing that neutered this potential unfairness and made it so that our realm is provably fair by one important metric? What if time was the fairness code?

Time takes no sides and it also takes no prisoners.

It's everywhere all at once, yet it is nowhere and we all have access to the same amount.

We all experience it whether we like it or not and some people are really good at using it to their advantage while others just watch it go by and sometimes purposefully like in the act of meditation or just by sitting on the front porch staring off at nothing.

The elite can manage time better by squeezing more efficiency from the day, but even they are not able to make more of it. If they could, time would be the most valuable thing in the Universe.

Why isn’t it already? Or maybe it is, and if it is, why doesn’t everyone act like it?

Successful people are certainly good examples of time managers, it's almost like they understand how to use it better. But is that all there is to it? Money? Status? We have plenty of examples of rags-to-riches stories if we are to use wealth as a metric for life success. Elon Musk, Oprah Winfrey, J.K. Rowling, Steve Jobs, and the list goes on. These are people not even born into it and yet were able to achieve it because they mastered time.

What if happiness was a metric of a successful life instead of wealth, I think it is. Does happiness cost time? That depends on what makes you happy.

Let's agree for now that it’s neither happiness nor wealth but something completely different that defines a successful life, maybe it’s achieving a God-like potential. Well, interestingly that's been done by both the rich and poor. And it took them time.

Jesus Christ was allegedly born into a fairly well-off family and part of town for the period, which I suppose you could call upper-middle-class in comparison with our time period, yet he chose to live a humble life and spent his time healing the sick and making other miracles happen. Buddha or Siddhartha Gautama was born into royalty and just like Jesus, he chose to live simply and spend his time meditating and teaching, Muhammad, on the other hand, was born not so well off but elevated himself by becoming a merchant and marrying a wealthy widow, he spent his life building the religion of Islam.

What about the people that do not want wealth or happiness or to achieve Nirvana, but instead they just want a level of health, human connection, or to achieve something in their life that their condition is supposed to keep them from?

Well to that I would say, Helen Keller was supposed to be destined to be a deaf mute, a ball of human flesh, unable to communicate with the outside world, and yet her teacher Anne Sullivan spent her time teaching Helen how to communicate. Helen was able to learn how to be human, brilliantly within a fairly short amount of time.

Scientists tell us time is not quantitative, but we act like it is.

When you were born, you were given the same amount of it that I was given when I was born. Your mother was given the same amount as you and your father was also given the same amount. Your aunts, uncles, brothers, sisters, neighbors, classmates, colleagues, and the lady at the bus stop right now all have the same amount too.

We even talk about time as if it is a tangible, physical thing even though it is not. We talk about spending time, finding time, losing time, wasting time, and giving time, it’s almost like we all subconsciously know that time is the most valuable thing in the known Universe, and so we talk about it that way.

Time makes us what we are. And boy does it stress us out at times!

Our whole lives are built around this thing called time.

Birthdays, alarm clocks, holidays, the new year, astrological times, ‘how old are you?’, ‘how many times have you been around the sun?’, school time, work time, eat time, sleep time, and more.

Time is Money!

If you begin to think of time instead of time but instead as dollars and cents, can you now see how I have the exact same as you, and yet we can live completely different lives, how is that possible if we have the same amount? It’s because it's not the time itself, it's the potential of it.

I can spend my time digging holes in the dirt while you spend yours doing something completely different.

World records are broken in mere seconds and yet there’s a kid out there somewhere right now sitting in his room playing his fifth straight hour of Minecraft.

Some of us, unfortunately, use our time to do drugs, drink, overeat, oversleep, or whatever other nasty thing we can think of. And some people do things to the point they get locked up and have their time taken away from them completely. 5 years, 10 years, 20 years, life!

We punish people by removing their access to freedom and society and forcing them to just sit and watch time go by.

While some people consciously or unconsciously allow time to slip by, others use it to achieve levels of profound mastery!

This is where the 10,000-hour rule comes from which Malcolm Gladwell introduced to the world through the prior works of Herbert Simon and William Chase.

The concept is that we can achieve mastery over almost anything in life if we dedicate ourselves to it for 10,000 hours or more.

Karate, chess, Call of Duty, mud hut building, ice skating, snowboarding, parenting, guitar, stock trading, writing, and more. The combination of events that need to happen is simple, focused attention and an amount of time.

You don't need a time machine, a sports almanac, or some paranormal gift of prescient visions to be able to hack time, you just need to know and understand that every second of every day is yours. You get to choose what you do with it. Do you study, work out, train your dog, make love, make art, experience something scary, have a meaningful conversation, work on your business, meditate, make a cheese sandwich, hug your mother or do you use it to get into meaningless Twitter debates?

Archimedes the great Greek mathematician, inventor, and astronomer once said:

Give me a place to stand, and a lever long enough, and I will move the world.

In my view, that place to stand is the here and now, on the steps of time itself, and the lever is the action by which time is used. It’s limitless. You can achieve peace, happiness, money, success, or anything else that you want.

Start using time consciously and stop letting it use you. Because it will use you. Your body will bear the scars of time whether you like it or not. Time is the only thing that we cannot hide from. Well, maybe that and taxes.

If time was a wave you can either sit in its path and let it crash against you over and over again until you’re too tired to go on or you can realize what it is and surf it!

When I titled this story Hacking Time, it wasn’t because I had the knowledge of time machines or secret physics, it was because the awareness of time itself IS the hack.

All you need to do is to be aware that this thing we call time has within it, limitless potential, all you have to do is to use it consciously.

I know that sounds cheesy, but ask yourself how many people you know that waste their time. They unconsciously just allow it to move past them while they sit idle binge-watching Netflix and eating bad food and they do this their entire lives, and before they know it, they’re on their death bed and there's no going back.

I’ve talked a lot about us all having the same amount of time, and it's true that we do, but the other reality is that it does eventually run out, and we never truly know when that is.

If you want to hack time, live your life like it’s running out and spend your time consciously.

If you want to chill, have a nap, or drink a few cold ones, do it, but do it consciously, have a nap if you need to, this isn’t a work-yourself-to-the-bone hustle lifestyle post, it’s a motivational one that shows you even if you think you have nothing at all, no advantage to speak of, you do in fact have time, and if you are aware of it, and you use it consistently, you’re going to get there, wherever that place is in the end because this IS the reality hack.

Use time to your advantage, use it consciously, and watch the magic happen.