“The man who has lived the most is not he who has counted the most years but he who has most felt life.” —Jean-Jacques Rousseau

People often quote that time is one of the most precious assets that we have in life. Unlike money, time is not replaceable. I can’t get more time because I’ve lost time. What if I can tell you that you can hack time and slow it down.

One of my favorite books is called Slipstream Time Hacking: How to cheat time, live more, and enhance happiness.  Benjamin Hardy beautifully explains how even thinking about your time from the perspective of distance traveled vs passing of the years that you will realize that you can do so much more. 

Hardy further explains that time feels relatively the same from person to person. We all recognize that we have 24 hours a day and likely sleep around 10 or 11 in the evening and wake up around 7 or 8 in the morning. However, what is unique to each individual is how fast they travel or speed in the time that they do have. 

In this book, he describes the concept of wormholes which our events or decisions in our life that accelerates us deep into our future before we ever imagined. Wormholes can either appear randomly throughout life as opportunities or can be created by us. Yes, that’s right we can create our wormholes to accelerate our life quickly in the future we’ve dreamed of.

An example of wormholes that show up in life is like getting a promotion or your friend asking you to join them on a trip to Europe for a couple of weeks. You worked hard and now promoted to a role that gets you closer to your dream job. Or you’ve never been to Europe and now have the opportunity to go with some of your best friends on a fun-filled adventure. These wormholes helped accelerate your life further into living and experiencing the life you’ve always wanted in the future. Now the opposite also exists, you can reject your promotion or choose to say no to go on that the trip. You choose not to jump into the wormhole and stay the course or your current speed through life.

As mentioned, you can also create your wormholes. These can be bolder moves such as quitting your job and selling everything so you can move to Barcelona to pursue a career as a chef. Perhaps before this bolder move you’ve always told yourself that you planned to save up about $20,000 and move sometime next year. The bold move essentially saved you about one year’s worth of time that would have been spent going through the motions saving up money.

Time can be either be your enemy or your biggest advantage, it depends on how you look at it.

Kobe Bryant was famous for waking up early around 4-5AM in the morning to train for basketball. if the average basketball player started his training at 7AM and ended his workouts at the same time Kobe did at 12PM, Kobe would accumulate an extra 2-3 hours a day on that average player. Over a 20 year career, Kobe would have accumulated a significant time spent in training vs the average NBA player. In fact, it wouldn’t even be close. Just another reason why Kobe was such an elite athlete, he created his own wormholes every day by waking up early and taking the extra step to be great what he does. 

Another wormhole is the COVID pandemic, unlike individual wormholes, COVID put the entire world through a wormhole by forcing everyone to work remotely, use delivery services, avoid travel, and much more. Some people say that COVID has accelerated our time into the future. Companies are reconsidering their real estate strategy, while employees are reconsidering where they live. We may live in a world where people may consider living in a different city every month instead of signing a year-long lease or even buying a property. 

COVID, for better or worse, altered time and the future. A lot of aspects of life that we expected 5-years from now are instead happening as we speak.

I think you understand how important wormholes are to get you to where you want to be. Are there wormholes in your life today that you aren’t taking or intentionally saying no to? Are there are wormholes around you that you didn’t realize at first but actually opportunities for you? How can you create your own wormhole? 

As Peter Thiel famously said, how can you achieve your 10-year goal in six months?

In conclusion, remember that time is best measured by distance traveled. 

How can you live a life of an 80-year-old in 25 years? I hope you see time differently.