99. How to Conquer Time

What in life deserves our time and attention and what things don't. I hope that as we consider that question along with other topics on this show, that we can all learn to live our lives just a little more intentionally. This is Seth Roberts. Thanks for joining me on Skipping Stones - “How to Conquer Time.”

It seems like men, in particular, me included, really like to think of things in terms of conquering and mastering. As unlikely as it is that any of us will conquer the world, it seems to reflect our desire to achieve. Conquering the world, of course, is the ultimate achievement. And so, I think that's what draws us to the idea.

But for normal people, I think what's truly relevant is learning how to conquer our own time in order to conquer anything, whether that be the world or brushing your teeth in the morning. There's nothing more necessary than to master our time. The world tends to be a pretty unequal place, but where time is concerned, we all get the same number of hours in a day to do with it what we will.

What gets done during that time, whether it's conquering the world or living a content and fulfilling life, is a result of how we use what I consider to be our most important resource, which would be our attention.  Money's a resource, food's a resource, but at the end of the day, any and all resources are not usable without the ultimate resource, which would be our attention.

We can't eat food without paying attention to eating it. We can't spend money without paying attention to what we want to spend it on, should we happen to succeed in conquering the world and making everything in it. Ours, we can only use as much as we're able to pay attention to. Our attention is the ultimate factor in what happens during our lifetime.

And the biggest mistakes I think we'll ever make are not so much where we choose to put that attention, but rather. How many things we try to pay attention to at the same time; it's less about choosing what to do and more about choosing what not to do. So, tying this back to the idea of conquering, my understanding is that it's a pretty foundational military principle to not divide your forces.

Even if the enemy has overwhelming numbers overall, you can overcome that. If their army's split up. Part of Napoleon's early success was how fast he could move his troops. He won some battles by simply arriving before anyone else expected him to, and he's able to rout a partially assembled army because the rest of the opposing troops were still a day or two out from arriving.

After defeating the one, he would then go and face the other army that was meant to join the one that he just beat, and then he'd rout them as well. So even though the other side overall had more resources in terms of manpower, it ended up being irrelevant. Like most people, I'm prone to splitting my attention to some degree.

I no longer have an option. Because I chose to have a family. I chose to start a business, and I chose to do a podcast amongst other things. Deep down, I know if I just chose to focus my attention on only a few things instead of 20, I would excel in those. I think we dream up these ideas that we can be great at everything we do, or that we will just be so naturally talented when we find the thing we were meant to do.

But it takes true focus to excel at something. The sun shines every day, but nothing ever catches fire from it. But if you focus its light with a magnifying glass, that's a different story. The beauty of narrowing your attention is that it gives you enough experience to become competent at something and maybe even master it.

The beauty of it all is that when you can be exceptional at one thing, you finally have something to build upon. You can spend 20 years trying to become a scientist, a businessperson, and an attorney all at the same time and get nowhere, or you can spend 10 of those years becoming a scientist, only then invent something and then learn to be a businessman for the next 10 years.

At which point, maybe you can just pay someone else to be your attorney instead of making a profession out of it. Every person that has ever become exceptional at something began being all in on something specific. I can't think of a single quote super company that didn't originate somewhere down the line with very focused beginnings, Amazon began with Jeff Bezos selling books online from his garage.

The Koch brothers' Fortune started when their father created a more efficient process of converting oil into gasoline, and Bill Gates got his start spending his spare time hacking his school's computer. The more people seem to narrow their focus, the more opportunity presents itself later. Now, who would've thought an online bookstore would be threatening Walmart?

And who would've thought that a family rooted in the oil industry would now make most of their money off of a paper company? And who would've expected a nerdy teenage hacker to build Microsoft? We can't get good enough to see those compounding benefits unless we focus our attention for long enough to excel in it.

Athletes, singers and billionaires do not usually get there by accident. There's some amount of investment that has to be made into something for a long enough time to be successful. And when we do become good at one thing, other opportunities open up. But not only that, when you become good at one thing, you now understand the process to excel and could easily dedicate your attention somewhere else and become an expert all over again.

All things are within our grasp, but. Not all at the same time. It's hard to recognize that investing time and investing attention are not the same thing. Plenty of people invest their time into things. An employee invests time every day into their work, but if they aren't investing much of their attention into their work or into something else, they aren't necessarily getting better at anything.

I was at the doctor's office the other day when I heard a nurse tell a patient that they had nothing to worry about because the nurse had been doing this particular procedure for 16 years, and it annoyed me because nobody actually cares how long a person has been doing something if they still suck at it.

Sometimes I think we like to hide behind time to give us a false sense of progress when it's truly irrelevant if we haven't invested our attention. Nothing in life is more precious than your attention. All the money in the world makes no impact on how well you use your attention. If you continue to split it over 20 different things, you will continue to stagnate.

And if you don't consciously choose to invest that attention into something for longer than a month, then you will never feel like you conquered anything in your life. The best decisions you may ever make might not be what you chose to do in life, but what you chose not to do.  Don't hide behind time to give yourself a false sense of progress.

If you want to conquer time, you need to conquer your attention. And with that, you have a chance to conquer anything. This is skipping Stones. You can find this podcast anywhere you choose to listen to podcasts. For more information about me, feel free to visit skipping stones sr.com. And if you enjoyed the show, please like or subscribe. 

If there is a topic you would like me to speak on, please feel free to email me. At info@skippingstonessr.com, new episodes will be released weekly every Monday.