As a culture, we once had a reasonable relationship with time. Think about your parents and grandparents reflecting on their childhood; so often they reminisce that “life was slower then.”
Then we got on the fast track. The implication was that those who were going to “win” were the ones who were moving fast. “Faster” equaled more efficient, more productive, and therefore more successful. We practiced new techniques with our planners and PDAs to get more done in a day. “Fast” became synonymous with “better” – an association we have been paying for ever since.
Now we’ve moved from the fast track to warp speed. We keep trying to somehow fast-forward ourselves to do more and more, faster and faster all at once and all the time. In some cases the pace becomes absurd as we try to do more of what we’ve always done faster than is humanly possible. But there’s a limit to our capacity. Even if you see yourself as a Porsche in the fast lane of life, Porsches can only go so fast. At some point you’re going to crash. In order to avoid breaking down, we need to stop trying to go faster and faster and cross into a new way of thinking altogether. We don’t need to go faster from Point A to Point B. What we need is a portal. A trap door. A shortcut.
Physicists call it a wormhole – a way to link distant points in space that would otherwise take years, decades, or centuries to travel even at the speed of light. To get the image of a wormhole, imagine a worm traveling over the skin of an apple. To get to the opposite side, the worm can traveling the entire distance around (the long way), or he could take a shortcut by burrowing through its center (the short way). To date, wormholes are more science fiction than science, but the image can help us rethink what’s possible with time.
Maximizing Time is one of the ideas I share with leaders in the book, The Inner Edge: The 10 Practices of Personal Leadership. To learn more, go to www.TheInnerEdge.com. You’ll find an overview of the book, endorsements by such thought leaders as Marshall Goldsmith and Stephen Covey, and more!
You, too, can become a time traveler, slipping through time using shortcuts that lead almost instantly to a new way of life. To do that, you’ve got to shift your thinking. It’s time to get off the “fast track” and learn to find the shortcuts.