Seth Godin:

This podcast isn't very long, but I hope you will find that it's worth your time.

Seth Godin:
Hey, it's Seth, and this is Akimbo.

Seth Godin:
First question: Who discovered America? Who discovered Australia? Well, you could
say Christopher Columbus or James Cook, but you would be wrong. Because there were
already people in both places by the time they got there. What those men did is
reported back to the rest of Europe what they had seen, and once people had seen
it, they couldn't un-see it. Suddenly, those things were on the radar. So the
question is, "Who discovered time?" Because time modern time – time informed by
choices, by opportunity cost – is a really new idea. In 1974, Marshall Sahlins
wrote a breakthrough book called Stone Age Economics. if you took someone from the
stone age, from only 5,000 years ago, 10,000 years ago, and adopted them as an
infant, they would grow up to be indistinguishable from the people around us today.
And yet, the world of the caveman – stone age economics – was really different than
the world of today.

Seth Godin:
He estimates the people had to work two or three hours a day, to forage and find
enough food to thrive on. So what did they do the rest of the time? Did they check
their email? Did they build giant sculptures? Did they engage in never ending
debates with each other? Well, we don't know about the last one. But, we assert
that they spent most of their time having a good day – lying around, chatting,
napping, not doing much of anything else. Sort of the way you would expect some
healthy lions or tigers to act in the bush. Then, things began to change.

Seth Godin:
Let's fast forward a little bit to the late 1800s. In an extraordinary confluence
of idea and success, H.G. Wells, the guy who did War of the Worlds, invented the
time machine. Not only did he write the best-selling, most important time machine
book of all time, but he invented the idea of the Time Machine. James Gleick wrote
the definitive book on time travel, and in it he points out that Wells invented it
– he discovered it. So, what happens with the time machine?

Seth Godin:
Well, they're fictional of course, but you can get in your time machine and go back
in time or forward in time. Suddenly, time is an axis – the same way left, right,
up, and down are axes. Suddenly, we think a lot about how we are choosing to spend
our time. Is it worth the energy spend our time? We spend our time like a resource.
We use it like a tool, but that's new. Opportunity Cost is the economic idea that
every single time we spend time, we are making a choice about what to not spend it
on.

Seth Godin:
There is a buffet in Coney Island that used to make some of the best Falafel in New
York City, and as you went through the buffet line, the rule was simple – all you
can eat, as long as it fits on your plate. So, the question is, "What are you going
to put on your plate?" Because any item you put on your plate, is taking room from
something else you could have put on your plate. There is an opportunity cost.

Seth Godin:
So, back to this idea of time travel. My favorite time travel book is called
Replay, by Ken Grimwood. It is remarkable. And, in the book, he posits that,
involuntarily, someone keeps getting thrown back in time to relive his life. When
it first starts, I think he goes back to being 14, and he lives that life for 10 or
20 years, before he gets thrown back again – to do it again, each time a slightly
shorter duration.

Seth Godin:
So his consciousness remains as if he is on one timeline, but he gets to relive his
action. When you think about this, it's really, sort of, disturbing. What would you
change? Because if you changed something in your 15 year old self, or 19 year old
self, maybe your kids wouldn't end up being born. Maybe those key events of your
life that you remember, would never happen.

Seth Godin:
And one of the things that goes on, which is common in any novel about immortality,
is that people get bored. Once we know we have unlimited time, once we feel like
opportunity cost starts to go down – "Oh, don't worry about whether you watch The
Sopranos tonight, you'll get a chance to watch it tomorrow".

Seth Godin:
We get bored. We are actually hooked on opportunity cost. We are emotionally hooked
on constantly making this choice about how we will choose to spend our time. Qantas
Airways just introduced a 19-hour flight, perhaps the longest flight you can take
today. My first reaction was, "Well, you're never going to get that day back". You
know what? You never get any day back. Because, as we go through time, we don't get
a do-over.

Seth Godin:
Another great book about time is a trilogy by Ben Winters called The Last
Policeman. So, try to imagine this; there's a huge asteroid headed for Earth. It's
going to crash within a year. It's so big, we can't do anything about it. Word
leaks out, everyone has a year to live. What would you do?

Seth Godin:
Well, in the novel, some people go crazy. They leave their spouse, they hit the
road, they participate in orgies, or they murder people – "What the hell, we're
only going to live another year". Some people kill themselves – they can't deal
with the fact that the end is coming on a certain date. And some people, like the
title character, go to work. Like the woman at the diner – they go to work.
Because, after all, and that's the metaphor, maybe you only have a year left
anyway. So one of the key questions of our lives is, "Are we going to pass the
time, or spend the time?" When we think about the huge contributions that Newton
made to math and to the way we see physics, what would happen if he had spent way
less time, 'wasting time' on Alchemy, and more time developing 'the next thing'.
What would have happened if Darwin hadn't been so afraid, and hadn't stalled for
10, or 20 years before he published his book? What would those contributions have
been like, if he had been able to keep working on his big idea?

Seth Godin:
Marcel Duchamp, who I mention all too often – who was one of the great conceptual
artists, and a thief – took 20 or 30 years off to play chess. Spend the time, pass
the time, waste the time –opportunity cost keeps showing up. And, we can't talk
about time without talking about special relativity, without talking about
Einstein, without talking about the twins paradox. Two identical twins are born,
and when they turn 18, one of them gets in a really fast rocket ship and he heads
off on a mission that, to him, lasts about two years. When he gets back, his twin
brother is 30 years older.

Seth Godin:
So, who exactly is living their life – at what pace? Is getting more done, clearing
more email, making more connections over and over again – as fast as we can –
racing through the buffet line, again and again – is that the way we should be
spending our time? What about the people who are binge watching videos on Netflix?
They are clearly passing the time.

Seth Godin:
What do they get for all of the opportunities they passed up? And then, after all
this racing – for eighty, or a hundred, or a hundred and twenty years, because we
are not immortal – when we get to the end, is someone going to keep us alive
against our wishes? Are we going to be forced to suffer for a year, when time feels
like it takes 20 years? Because it seems like we've decided to spend tons and tons
of effort, and money, and emotion, to change the way people, at the end of their
time, engage with their time.

Seth Godin:
So, time is one of the only things that's truly under our control. If you're put in
prison for 50 years, someone has taken away your freedom. But, they haven't taken
away the way you engage with your time. When we sit you in front of the internet
with all of those things to click on, and when we persuade you to swipe right or
swipe left, or dig deeper into the endless rabbit hole of social networking, we are
giving you options – on how to spend your time, on what narrative we will bring to
the time that we are spending, on how we look at opportunity costs.

Seth Godin:
So, if you had H.G. Wells's time machine, if you are in Replay and were sent back a
day – let's just do a day – if you had yesterday to do over, what would you do
differently? And then the last question, of course, is "You do have tomorrow to do
over – how will you choose to spend it?"

Seth Godin:
Thanks for listening, we'll see you next time.

Seth Godin:
As always, I love to hear from you. Please don't hesitate to submit a question. To
do so, visit Akimbo dot link. That's A K I M B O dot L I N K, and press the
appropriate button.

Hi Seth, this is Ryan from Salem, Oregon. I recently decided to take on a full time
job for the first time in about 10 years. I've been self-employed for quite a long
time before this. And, I still have a lot of creative projects, books, and a
podcast that I really want to focus on. However, I haven't had the emotional,
mental and physical energy that I was hoping that I would have, from no longer
needing to hustle and find new clients – because now I have this full-time job. So,
I guess my question is, "Do you have any suggestions for how to carve out the
necessary time to do the kinds of things that I want to do, while still juggling
the bureaucracy and the nuances of working full-time job?" Thanks so much for what
you do, I really appreciate it.

Seth Godin:
I love this question, because it applies to every single person who's listening to
this. Here's what the late Zig Ziglar said, "Have you ever met somebody who didn't
eat lunch, who all afternoon is walking around and saying – 'I can't believe it, I
was so busy. I didn't even get to eat lunch today'". That's sort of rare among
people who are listening to this podcast. Most of us, if we choose to eat lunch
every single day – in fact, there are lots of things we do every single day.

Seth Godin:
The challenge is to do things that you want to do, by making them not optional –
"I'll get around to it, I'll carve out the time," but to make them on the inside of
the circle, not the outside – to make them things that we always do. Esther Dyson,
the great investor and pundit, has gone for a swim – at least a mile – every day,
for as long as I have known her. And we met in 1983. How does Esther Dyson find the
time?

Seth Godin:
Well, actually, what she does is, she always goes for a swim and then she finds the
time for the other parts of what's important to her. That if you put something
inside of the circle, then you always do it. Jeffrey Katzenberg, every morning,
makes between one, and one and a half hours of phone calls – one after another,
working his way through a list of people he calls all the time. "Hey, what's up?
It's Jeffrey. Okay, talk to you later" – every single day. Just like eating lunch.
Just like Esther Dyson, going for a swim.

Seth Godin:
So, you only need to make the decision once. Isaac Asimov decided 'once' to write
for six hours, every single day. You may have decided to take a job that has a
staff meeting, every Friday at three o'clock. And so, there's a staff meeting – not
because you need a staff meeting, but because it's Friday at 3 o'clock.

Seth Godin:
So, what I would argue is that, if you care about lifelong learning, you will spend
an hour every single day reading something. And, no, you're not allowed to shortcut
it. You're not allowed to put it off till tomorrow. It doesn't matter what else is
going on, this is something you do – every single day. The rest of your life is
carved out of what's left, not the other way around. If we can reimagine it that
way, it's pretty stunning how we can choose to invest our time.

Seth Godin:
Thanks for listening, we'll see you next time.