Time and Space: How you can slow your time on Earth

In this article, I will share two powerful quotes to show you that you can accomplish more in a week or even a day than the average person does in a year or decade.

Time is not what you think it is. Time and space are more of a metaphor. They're not a reality. They're also as Einstein would say relative. They're subjective and individual. My time is not the same as your time. This is kind of a core concept of Einstein's theory of relativity.

I'm going to go into the two quotes and show you how you can start living in and accomplishing and expanding and stretching time out such that you can accomplish and achieve more internally and externally in a day than maybe the average person does in a decade.

So a core premise of Einstein's theory of relativity is that space and time are interconnected and that the faster an object moves through space relative to another object the slower that time goes. So let me give you a super practical example. If one person is going for retiring with a million dollars it takes them 30 years to do that. That's space and time. It takes them 30 years to get from one destination to another destination. The destination is retiring with a million dollars. If one person takes 30 years to do that and another person can achieve the same goal in terms of getting to a million dollars and let us say three years then that person's time slows down and it's 10 times slower. Remember the faster an object moves through space relative to something else the slower its time goes. This is called time dilation.

It has been shown a lot in movies. For example in the movie Interstellar: Where the astronauts jump on a planet that's moving fast compared to our Earth. And basically for every hour that they're on that planet seven years pass by on Earth. Because time is really slow for these people. Their planet is moving fast compared to Earth. In other words, one hour passes by for these people on this planet and seven years pass by. These people's time is going much faster because they're moving slower and so the question is what is movement?

Movement is two things: it's external movement, meaning that externally you go from one destination to another. The internal movement is where you actually transform and grow and evolve internally. This would mean letting go of a lot of the past connections that you have, the things holding you back from your past identity, and also evolving and becoming a lot more emotionally developed. So with this idea in mind that space and time are relative, they're subjective and also there are things that you can shape. Time can fold, it can shape, can be stretched, it can be squeezed.

If you can take a single destination or a desired destination. Let us say that you want to write a book, as an example, that might take you 10 years or it might take you 10 months. And if you can find a way to do it in 10 months then your time is 10 times slower relative to your other self. That's on a different trajectory. So if you can find a way to scale distances much faster, then your time will slow down.

So now this brings us to the two quotes. The two quotes are: the first one is from Abraham Lincoln, he said: it's not about the amount of years in your life it's about the amount of life in your years.

There's a great concept on this called psychological flexibility where you're willing to step out of your comfort and knowledge Zone and learn and grow and have courage and willingness to grow and evolve but also you're willing to go inward.

One of my favorite quotes comes from Alcoholics Anonymous that all progress starts by telling the truth. Progress is two things: one is it's external it's scaling. Some distance could be in any goal running a marathon, getting to a certain threshold financially. Any goal there's going to be Pathways to getting there that are long introductory, that take a long time. There are other trajectories that you can cut the time in half that'd be like time folding or you can go through a wormhole and you can get there in like one-tenth or 1 100th of the time. If you can travel the same distance in a dramatically shorter period what that means is that your time slows down because you're moving faster. Similarly to the planet, the faster you move through space relative to something else the slower your time is and so you can travel the same distance. In 24 hours, you can travel the same distance externally but also internally by being open, by being courageous, expanding and stretching yourself emotionally and maybe even spiritually, and letting go of a lot of things holding you back. You can travel the same distance relative to someone else maybe that they don't travel even in a full lifetime.

The question is how do you travel very far externally and internally? Externally it's really about goal Clarity and goal honesty. All progress starts by telling the truth if you're clear where you want to go and you're willing, to be honest. About that most people are not honest or clear about what they want and so they ended up creating all sorts of complex Pathways to get there. If you're clear on what you want, goal Clarity, and if you're honest about what you want Go honest. And if you're not embarrassed or not worried about what people think you can find very direct Pathways.

You can let the future determine the present rather than letting the present shape your path forward. The key thing here is psychological flexibility. Psychological flexibility has a lot to do with identity and identity has a lot to do with what you're most committed to. And so if you get committed to something and you're willing to find Pathways.

A big aspect of goal setting motivation and even hope is what's called Pathways thinking. Once you get committed or clear on a goal or a purpose then you begin reverse engineering and finding Pathways of getting there. You become highly flexible in the process and then ultimately learn and adapt and find Pathways. Often those Pathways can be through relationships. Finding relationships that will help you get there. You also once you get highly committed you become a lot more open to feedback rather than avoiding truth. Rather than avoiding feedback you dramatically seek it. You're not overly worried about your current self. This is also a powerful Insight when it comes to identity. Is it that your current self is not who you are? This fits with the idea of a growth mindset. People with a growth mindset are less defined by who they are right now and they're more defined by who they want to become. Whereas people with a fixed mindset overly identify with who they are now and who they've been in the past and that leads to fragility that leads to having a fragile identity.

Dr Daniel Gilbert gave a Ted Talk on this called the psychology of your future self and one of the things he said in that talk is that your present self is as fleeting as the present moment. Who you'll be in five minutes from now is different from who you are right now. So rather than overly identifying with who you are now, it's a lot more powerful to identify with your desired Future Self. And then ultimately do what your future self would do or use your future self as the filter.

And hence psychological flexibility is not defining Yourself by your present emotions. As a bias most people overly emphasize their present emotions and so once they either get bored or distracted or fearful they then overly magnify that they cope. They revert and they avoid the truth or they avoid making the next step. If you get connected to your future self, if you get committed, you will then find Pathways you'll adapt, you'll emphasize more the identity of your future self. But also the emotions of your future self and you're not devaluing your career itself but you're not inflating your current self. You're not making your future self real you're recognizing that my future self is just a snapshot in time. In the future, I'll be different and who I am now doesn't matter that much. I love a quote from Brene Brown on this subject. Brene Brown said: If you're trying to be right then you're not going to learn much because you're overly trying to prove your current knowledge to become dogmatic whereas if you're trying to get it right then you're going to be open to changing your views. You're if you're trying to get it right then you're open to learning and also you're open to letting go of your current flawed knowledge. We all have a flawed perspective. None of us have perfect knowledge. Our future selves hopefully will be wiser and better than we are today. And so once you get committed, part of this idea of Pathways thinking is that rather than trying to prove your knowledge rather than trying to be right you're seeking to try to get it right which means that you're just really asking genuine questions.

Once you start asking genuine questions and seeking feedback, becoming open and honest about your blind spots then you start transforming fast. Most people won't do that. Most people avoid the truth about their future they avoid admitting what they most want. They also avoid getting feedback and being open and honest about their patterns. Being opening on about their past and where they're still holding on to the past so you can transform your full life more in a single day and you can stretch that time out. You can accomplish more, you can experience more, you can scale time more meaning. You can cover crazier distances in a day internally and externally than most people do in a decade. Your future software as if you're avoiding things and you're avoiding hard truths you're avoiding admitting what you want you're avoiding getting feedback you're avoiding facing your past you're avoiding facing your future and I would argue that most people as a whole have a generally avoidance orientation where they're operating mostly out of fear. There's a lot of research that shows that 80% or more of people operate generally out of fear, anger, meaning that they still haven't reframed and reshaped their past into post traumatic growth and so they're essentially fagging their past into their future rather than letting their future shape what they do in the present. They're letting the past shape. They are making the present rather than the future shape what they're doing. In the present most people are not going to be developing and expanding in their psychological and emotional flexibility instead they become increasingly emotionally rigid over time where they have less and less options over time because they're so hooked. And tied to their narratives and stories of the past in the present they have fewer and fewer options thus they become increasingly fragile.

Back to the idea of a fixed mindset leads to fragility. The more fragile you are the longer over time the more you break down. Whereas the more you have a growth mindset and are flexible the more anti-fragile you can be the more that you have increasing options. That's a really powerful quote by Abraham Lincoln: that it's not about the amount of years in your life it's about the amount of life in your years. And the second quote that I didn't even share which I forgot about came from Peter Thiel. Peter Thiel is a billionaire and he said that if you have a 10-year plan why don't you just try to accomplish it in six months? Let's just say that you do have a 10-year plan of writing that book or running that Marathon or X Y and Z. If you just brought the timeline down and made it six to 12 months. There's an idea called Parkinson's law and it says that work fills the space of time that you give it. So if you give yourself 10 years to do something it's going to take 10 years. If you give yourself 10 months then you might be able to find a pathway. If you make that 10 months of commitment you might not get there in 10 months but you're going to make dramatically more progress and your time is going to go a lot slower. You're going to be ultimately stretching a lot more in a given day because you've got a lot more of that intense timeline and as someone who is an author, I know that when I give myself a deadline I get to work. There's something about that in Psychology they call forcing functions. It's about creating external factors that ultimately lead you to do what you want to do shaping an environment that ultimately allows you to be the person you want to be. Your current self is not who you are and as you get more and more committed to your future self and adapting and finding new and effective Pathways you can become anti-fragile and you can continuously transform your past. So that your past is a gold mine propelling you forward. Your past is an asset that keeps paying you back rather than a liability that keeps sucking you dry.