How to Become a Time Lord
Hey-o! (Not to be confused with “Hey, Ya!” which you’ll now have stuck in your head for three days because no one writes a better earworm than Outkast.)
As promised, I’m here to deliver the final installment of the How to Become Something You’re Not (and Why You Should) series (check out parts one, two, and three if you missed them!).
During our last lap around the Bold Introvert Blog, we looked at your genius and the value of looking at it as a thing outside yourself.
THIS TIME WE’RE LOOKING AT TIME.
Let’s kick it off by leaning into yet another quirk of human psychology! Leaning into these quirks is way more fun than trying to move against them—which is about as fun as than beating ourselves with a sock full of nickels.
In this case, the quirk is our terrible understanding of numbers. Not that we’re collectively all bad at math but that we’re collectively bad at conceptualizing numbers past a certain amount. (Though some of us are also bad at math. Personally, I’d rather eat a bathtub full of cilantro—which is disgusting and I won’t be convinced otherwise—than figure out how many apples I’d have to chuck at Suzy while driving a rickshaw due east at 6 miles per hour in order to stop her from going to New Haven to buy 12 new umbrellas… or, ya know, do my taxes.)
A NEW BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME (WITH APOLOGIES TO HAWKING).
There are people in the world right now who possess multiple billions of dollars.
So we know a billion is a number that exists, right? But can you actually picture how big a billion is?
Say you earned $1,000 a day, how long do you think it would it take you to earn $1 Billion?
50 years? 100 years? 1,000 years?
No.
It would take you 2,740 years.
2,740.
Humans were still using cuneiform script 2,740 years ago. The city of Rome was just 13 years old, though the Roman Republic was still 200 in the future—and the Roman Empire was 720 years away.
Preclassic Maya people were just beginning to form cities—the Aztec and Inca cultures wouldn’t appear for another 2,000 years.
The Upanishads were starting to be written in India. The Buddha wouldn’t be born for almost 200 years. The first historic solar eclipse to be recorded was happening in China.
The gigantic asshole* Christopher Columbus wouldn’t sail for the Americas for another 2,200+ years.
You’re translating the hieroglyphs I’m painting here, right?
2,740 years was a long ass time ago.
Homer was jotting down the Iliad around this time so let use him as an example.
Our homie Homer would have had to make $1,000 a day every day for nearly three millennia—without spending a single drachma—to show up at your doorstep with $1 Billion.
See the hoops we have to jump through to wrap our minds around this number? We have to break it down into smaller and smaller amounts in order to make any sense of it.
This same idea applies to our understanding of quantities of time, but the cutoff is a lot less than a billion.
We can *sort of* wrap our minds around what a year is but ask anyone who has ever made a New Year’s resolution like “learn to speak French” (or my personal yearly goal to “execute plan for global domination”) and you’ll see that we don’t have a very good idea of what we can accomplish in a year. Or, more accurately, how we can accomplish it.
It’s the reason why so many well-thought-out strategic plans end up on the shelf collecting dust. We set these lofty goals and then we kind of just hope they’ll happen to us.
Instead, what if I take the same goal of “learn to speak French” and then ask, “Realistically, what can I do in the next three months to move closer to Frenching with Pierre (interpret that how you will) under Le Tour Eiffel next year?”
There’s magic in that question and it has nothing to do with Monsieur Baguette. The magic is in the three months.
NINETY DAYS.
That is the length of time our minds can actually comprehend. That is the magic number to keep in mind when we’re developing the skill to become something we’re not.
Let’s go back to the French example. If you think that in the next three months it’s realistic to learn how to conjugate the more important verbs and retain some vocabulary that travelers might need (like “Où est le w.-c., s'il vous plait?” and “Oui, je peux manger chaque croissant dans cette ville! Tiens ma bière.”), you start there.
Then you ask, “What can I do in the next month to get me closer to that three-month mark?”
Then, “What can I do in the next week to get me to that goal?”
“Today to get me to that goal?”
“Right now to get me to that goal?”
Real talk: this seems easy and obvious. So much so that we think we can just do this part in our heads. Because we are over-confident buffoons.
YOU. GOTTA. WRITE. IT. DOWN.
The method is going to be different for everyone. Some of us are high-tech and some of us are analog. And some of us are a mess and need both like me.
I have a weekly calendar of my own creation (because I tried every one out there and they inevitably had a bunch of stuff I didn’t need or lacked the stuff I did). I get the week pages professionally printed and stapled so I have a little booklet full of three months’ worth of weeks.
At the beginning of each booklet, I write out what I’m going to get done by the end of those 90-days on the inside cover and then I get to work. Every Monday I make sure the info matches up with my Google Calendar/Trello/Dubsado/other-wonderful-and-miraculous-tech-that-makes-my-life-easier and voila!—let the world conquering begin!
Getting the stuff all mapped out in chomp-ready bites isn’t even the best part.
The really rad thing about writing these things down in smaller and smaller increments is how fanfreakingtastic it is at the end of those 90 days to look back at how much you got done. If you don’t write it down, the memories of all the to-dos we totally smashed are all too easily lost amidst our latest Netflix binge.
But when we have a historical record of our badassery? That gives us the affirming and inspiring feel-goods that come from recognizing our accomplishments—which is critical when we’re building skill over the long haul.
Okay, now you. Tell me what you’re going to get done in the next three months (unless it’s global domination because I totally called dibs)!
* (Yes, that asterisks led somewhere and was not just a pictogram of the preceding word.) “Saying [Christopher Columbus] ‘discovered North America’ because he murdered a bunch of people in the Bahamas is like claiming you went to China because you once punched someone in the parking lot of a Panda Express.” – Meredith Ancret