It's All About Time--Connect Your Someday and Today | Jay Papasan | TEDxTraverseCity

So when you think about

your

dreams and

your

hopes and your relationship with them, your progress toward them, one of the stories you tell yourself, you talk about how little

time

you have, you talk about how much is on your plate, do you some

time

s speak? about how maybe you feel adrift and other people's priorities or maybe a little lost as to where your own are and I tell you, after five years of researching our book and five years of teaching it, that those feelings are quite universal

today

. They are jumping from meeting to meeting every day, racing from opportunity to obligation at breakneck speed and they don't always know why they do it.

Have you ever had that day? You're running from meeting to meeting. You forget to eat. Lunch, you wonder when you look at your schedule, when you actually go to the bathroom and you come home and your spouse asks you, "Hey, what did you do

today

?" and you don't really have a good answer, you're like me. I was busy, well, that's a difficult feeling to live with day in and day out and it's one of the challenges we wanted to address with our book. You know, time is our most precious asset. We all receive the same amount every day no. we know ultimately how much we get and we have hopes and dreams and we want to achieve them, so if we could share a different framework, not just how we see time, maybe it's a little more limited and we would like to believe and also how we can one day

connect

with Today in that reverse order, we can sometimes get much better results, so in the absence of a good approach to time, I would say that most people run around every day acting like they can know everything. everything and do it well, but you can't know it, all life is too complex, you can't have it all, there is too much and you can't do it all because there are time limits, so I'm a business author. and for five and six years I have set out to read 50 books every year, that is one of my main goals.

I need death to give me more ideas to be able to get them out and every year I start with a great rhythm. I have my stack. of books and I'm knocking it out one a week, I'm trying to get to 50 a year, it's a big goal, and I fail every year, like everyone else, like Game of Thrones or West World, and I was three weeks. but you know what I look for and I still read about 45 46 books a year, I don't feel very good about that, but I'm a business author and I realized that this year alone there will be 15,000 business books published.

Those were last year and there will be so many next year, since the rate at which I can read fails, it would take me more than 300 years just to read the books that come out this year, so you can't know everything, no matter how . You have a purpose, but we can make a more conscious decision by understanding that we have limited resources to know everything. We can limit our focus. I could read some books on a topic that really matters to me this year and the next and the next and Over time, that's how you gain a lot of experience by focusing on the same thing over and over again, so if you think about that little triangle in the middle, those are our decisions, we make decisions every day, but they are not always conscious decisions. the moment we make that conscious choice we can choose our slice of that pie and it's the same as having it all, it doesn't matter if you combine the wealth of Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos together, they couldn't have it all.

Washington state, much less Seattle, because there's too much going on and I don't care how addicted you are to Amazon Prime. We can become more aware of how we are going about this and if we have a problem with you, we can acquire something. that doesn't just matter to us, but maybe to other people, we call it collecting, so depending on your means and your passions, maybe you collect cars, maybe they're matchbox type, maybe they're coins, maybe be four-leaf clovers. Last week there was a story about an Austin architect who is passionate about, you guessed it, plastic coffee lids.

He feels so passionate about them that he talks about them and that led him to one of his lifelong friendships with whom he just published a book called Coffee Lids and Guess what this thing is called from the Smithsonian, they would also like to have his collection if There would ever be a time to say that one man's trash is another man's treasure, but you get my point if we are a little more aware, a little more conscious. than we want, then we can have something much more meaningful and it was really this last circle, they can't do it all, that made this less of an intellectual game and more of an emotional game for me, my kids were six and seven. and my wife had just looked at a real estate deal and we were writing this book, we were overwhelmed, we just bought a house, it has a pool and I was learning how to maintain a pool not green and we were absolutely overwhelmed and This will be the first vacation of spring of our kids and we decided we were going to take a staycation and we had this wonderful rationalization: we have a new pool, we want to enjoy it, we will see Austin through the eyes of a visitor and we justified it to ourselves and I remember walking into the writing room and my partner Gary Keller, he has an older son, so he's too in tune with this stuff and he's like, "Hey, where are you guys going for spring break?" and I launch into my story. about the great vacation at home, right, and he nods and, like a good mentor, gives me a kind of wake-up call.

I remember, Jay said, you know you only have about ten left. I was like, what are you talking about? and yes, this idea of ​​Jay Wendy Gus and Veronica going on spring break has an expiration date in ten years. Penelope wants to go with her friends or better yet, they will want her friends to come with you and those friends could be boyfriends and girlfriends. a completely different dynamic, so if you're really lucky, you might have ten left. How do you use them? Remember I went home with my wife. I thought we were horrible parents and I laugh about it now, but I mean, the excitement is still a bit. raw, but it was a wake-up call for us and it was truly a blessing and I remember the next year we asked a different question based on the age of our kids and where we were, what would be the best spring vacation we could take.

We went to Legoland and the San Diego Zoo and all of our trips have been more purposeful because we count down in a limited amount of time knowing that there is a window when these kids still want to have fun with us and it expires and we've taken them to Italy, France and Costa Rica and last year was the craziest trip of our lives. We're actually in the Galapagos Islands and I remember my wife made the horrible mistake of having kids and she starts racking up all these trips we took. I've made what her favorite vacation of all time is.

We have taken some of you. They are in hell. Vacation at home, so we hope that with time and wisdom you will appreciate the decisions we made. We still feel good about it, but this is what I would do. ask yourself when you think about the moment that you and the things that matter to you, does it change the way you want to make some of those decisions knowing that you only have so many visits left with the grandparents that someone calls and with your parents similarly? many more meetings with your friends, walks with your dog or, in our case, trips with your children, it really makes things very clear to us and helps us in this challenge of how to stop doing pinball in our days and address our true priorities. and then we look up and say how do we keep these important things really in the foreground, how do we keep the important things, the important things and I don't just mean our jobs in the next promotion, I mean the things that we pray for in those quiet moments for a fulfilling career, meaningful work, long-lasting and rewarding relationships, thriving children, you know, there are no regrets and we believe it comes down to two things, this limited time frame, right, you don't have forever, friends, we have a number limited time.

We don't know how long, but it's healthier to see it that way and then this other trick that's kind of out there and no one teaches it, but interview after interview with successful people, they work backwards from their goals, it's completely contradictory. but the best analogy I can give you if you're a parent, you know this, you know, you work at the restaurant, you get the three crayons wrapped in plastic and a maze, what's the quickest way to finish a maze, you cheat, you start from the end. and you go to the beginning, here's the thing, it's like life when we see all the options before us and by the way, there are many dead ends, many false turns are missed and then we have to retread our steps to find the right path. path, but if you start at the end and work backwards, it is remarkable how straight and narrow the path appears.

All those wrong turns are still there, but they're much easier to overlook and our time works the same way if you think about them all. The places you might go in the future are just a mini branching tree, but when you look back you tend to see all the milestones that got you to where you are today, we see our past as the important moments and the trick is to get in there. the future and use that same technique what led you to be here today we had 15 minutes at break you could start as your story, the whole story with maybe it was a teacher who sparked a curiosity that just wouldn't fade away maybe they saw a gift that other people missed maybe it was a job or a boss that taught you an important lesson that you decided to carry forward in your life there are these milestones in our life and they feel very clear in hindsight the trick is how to change That moves back and forth in our book.

The Only Right Thing started with an idea that Gary Keller had been teaching this probably since 1996, but in interview after interview with these really successful people, they're all doing the same thing. with the end in mind but with structure so that a big goal doesn't happen overnight, so

someday

go out and say:

someday

I would like to look back, it's my wife and I and I think we did it with our children. We go to college and make it and then you ask a second question based on where I want to be one day. What would we have to achieve in five years?

What would be the only thing that if we achieved it we would feel that we were absolutely on the path? Keep track of that someday goal and write that down and then come back again based on our five-year goal, what would we need to accomplish this year to feel like we're absolutely on track for that and based on our year, what would we do? do this month and according to our month, what would we do this week and according to a week, what would we do today and according to our day, what should we do now?

Did you see what he was doing there? You're not saying Based on my five-year goal, what do I have to do today? That's the wildest thing, but if you've worked backwards to your week, you can pinpoint what you need to do today to nail down your week and it's that milestone and me. I'll be the first to admit that no one has a crystal ball. You know the crowd analysis when I teach this to engineers. They say, "Well, who really knows in this world of technology where we should be in five years?" true, but at the end of this year, if you look at your answers, you will be much clearer about what the next milestone should be because you started on a straight path and it is one of the best tricks we can.

Doing goal setting in the moment we bring our day to today and by the way, that gives you a lot more motivation and reality, so we have time, we have this feeling of working backwards and those are the two skills that I hope you You learn it and apply it to your life. I've talked to thousands of people about this book and the strange thing is that most of them know what their one thing is and they make sense about it: guilt because they don't do anything about it, they don't stop to ask the question, they don't hold that question. awareness in the foreground and therefore that feeling of overwhelming and regret appears again and again, that's how we break that pinballing cycle.

Throughout our days we focus on a limited amount of time and work backwards from our goals, so one of my partners at our private equity firm when I was with her and he, Mitch, had this number framed in his wall and I remember that he himself went. "What is that and he says: that's the ultimate equalizer, it's the number of minutes in a day. I thought that's incredible and she was young and her favorite role was competing with people who had made billions doing what they did. and his strategy was me." I have less experience. I haven't been in the game, but we all have the same amount of time.

If I can invest it better, I can compete with these guys and I think he's right, but I want to do the turn that Gary did. before you start thinking that you have all day to do it if you sleep you have much less time if you work you are even less right if you have an average commute that goes down a little more and now this topic here we know about cell phones and distractions, if you look television or play with anyoneWith those devices, time really shrinks, and when you address meals and bathroom breaks, the reality is that, on average, everyone will have about two hours a day to stop dreaming and start doing to.

Stop dreaming and start doing doesn't seem like a long time, but I can tell you one interview after another, story after story, that if you do that for two hours day after day it adds up to a lot and it adds up faster than you think, which is one of those great secrets. about getting ahead is the classic tale of straight hair and the tortoise, you just make progress and it's methodical, but you're working towards a goal, it's not random and that's how extraordinary success manifests, so I'll leave you with just one last thing. Ask if you haven't stopped to ask yourself if you haven't stepped out into your future and been willing to think about the things you really want to happen in your life and work backwards. it's such a small investment of time it's such a small investment it gives you clarity it makes you aware of the decisions you're making which is your one thing which by the way is the key to escaping the maze of overwhelm, stress and regret clarity is how you go out and knowing that you've said yes to the incredibly wonderful side benefit of saying yes to something makes it easier to say no to everything else, it's like saying yes, implicit in that with no to everything else. a different kind of yes is a question worth asking it's time well spent with yourself figure it out what your one thing is thank you