(Laughter)

There is no such thing as chronological time.

There is no such thing as chronological time.

There is no such thing as chronological time.

How long did summers last as a kid?

Splashing through lakes, riding bikes across busy streets,

crushes, broken hearts, crushes and dirty knees.

We all know summer lasted forever as a kid.

Everything was new.

We really lived everything we did.

And now, how long do summers last in this world so mundane?

I don't know about you, but I ache for endless summers again.

My obsession with time started early.

As an athlete, I began to chase time,

and as a speed-skater and cyclist

I spent more than 20 years trying to compress

more laps, more miles, more meters, more strokes

in the same amount of time.

I was very fortunate in that,

that investment turned itself into an Olympic bid.

I was able to compete in the Olympics,

and I was doubly fortunate that at the Olympics

I was able to squeak by in a smallest margin of time

to take home a silver medal from the Winter Olympics.

(Applause)

So you can imagine that as an Olympic athlete

even small amounts of time really matter.

Let me show you why.

Here are the results from the 2002 Winter Olympic games

for the 500 meters.

What I want you to focus on is not the time itself,

but the difference.

In this case, the difference between gold and silver

is 2/100 of a second - after a lifetime of training.

Let's take it further.

Look at the difference between first and tenth place.

33/100 of a second.

Between first and tenth place.

To know how long that is, we will do an experiment here.

I'll clap it out for you.

1/1000, 2/1000, 3/1000.

Split it into 3.

1-2-3, 1-2-3, 1-2-3.

So the difference between the gold medal and being sent back to Siberia to train

for another four years because you got tenth place,

is the difference in between these two claps.

(Clapping twice)

Ten guys went by in that space of time.

Crazy, right?

Oddly enough,

my life continued to center around time as I entered the working world.

At my very first job, I spent a year with Goldman Sachs

preparing for an entire year for one moment.

That was Y2K.

An entire year we spent in order to make a clock go

from 12:31:99 to 01:01:00.

After that I spent time with Enron, yes, it's true,

and I helped them design trading systems

to increase trade velocity and decrease trading times.

And it was about this point in my life that my obsession with time morphed.

I began to become aware of this thing that was making me crazy,

that there was distinction between linear or chronological time

and what I'll call "experiential time."

We all know what chron time is.

It's the watch on your wrist, clock on the wall,

how you make it to trains, plains, and meetings.

Experiential time, however, is quite different.

Experiential time is the way that...

Was anybody uncomfortable for the last couple of seconds?

(Laughter)

Guess how long that little bit of drama took.

Eight seconds.

Experiential time is anything but linear.

It speeds up, it slows down, it stops.

We've all experienced this.

You've all been to a long business meeting that seemed like three hours,

but only 20 mintes went by.

The inverse is true, right?

A great friend is coming to town.

You sit down, have a drink, have dinner,

look on your watch 20 minutes later and three hours have gone by.

But the thing that really made me crazy

and I really started focusing on is this notion

that time itself was accelerating and that life was speeding up.

Anybody here in the room feel that?

98% of adults feel this.

98 percent.

So, life is not only short, it is actively getting shorter.

I've got some bad news for you.

I've graphed this, I've done the math, and it's a lot worse than you think.

(Laughter)

What I'm about to share with you is going to do two things:

scare the hell out of you, and depress you.

I apologize in advance.

As it turnes out, when I graphed this, I was 43 years old.

According to the actuarial tables for my height and weight,

my life expectancy was to be 86 years old.

So, according to this table, I'm half done, right?

I look around this room,

probably the average age here isn't entirely different.

There's a range, but approximately around the same place.

So, you're half done. Right?

Wrong!

No, there's no such thing as chronological time!

Plot this according to experiential time, how we actually experience time.

How do you do that?

We talked before about how long a summer lasted for an 8-year-old.

We'll start with that.

But I can't plot infinity or forever.

Let's instead use that conservatively, summer as an 8 year old

starts to feel a lot like a year as a 20 year old.

Which starts to feel a lot like a decade in middle age.

And now, for you math majors, if you plot the area under this curve,

and you take the value of the remainder of your life,

that's the slice that's left.

That's not half way! Right?

It's a lot less. Different graph.

I held the Y axis constant,

I let the X axis of chronology become logarithmic.

And what we learn is that half way is about 18 years old

and at 43 you're not half way, you're 92% done!

You've got about 8% left!

(Laughter)

The final cord has struck, the fat lady is singing,

we are at the end.

Does this horrify anybody else besides me?

(Laughter)

When I saw, when I first did this math a few years ago, it made me crazy.

I was bound and determined, I'm going to fix this.

I've got to fix this, I can't live this way!

I read everything I could.

Csikszentmihalyi, Kahneman, Zimbardo, Eagleman, Hammond;

everything I put my hands on.

I was trying to figure out a way to manipulate this sort of cognitive bias

towards acceleration and reverse it.

Let's try to slow down time, try to expand time, try to create time!

I'm happy to report to you that my obsessions

are going to be a gift back to you today.

In fact, I've uncovered three rules that appear to govern experiential time.

I'll go through each.

Here's the first.

Contraction.

Inversion.

And the most important, expansion.

Let's go through each one.

The first law of experiential time

we have already been talking about.

Basically time [unclear] and other forces will continue to accelerate.

I'll give you a metaphor to help you think about

how this works in our brain.

Time flows through your and my brain just like water through a garden hose.

For a fixed flow of water,

the speed or the velocity at the exit of that water

is indirectly proportional to aperture of that hose.

Same goes for your brain.

If your brain has a wider aperture,

if it's allowing more time to pass through,

it's going to go through slower.

Somehow our brains are contracting.

They're actually causing time to go faster.

Why is this?

Let's look at the brain of an 8-year-old.

Instead of using base times height for the area of this conduit,

let's use breadth of experience and depth of experience.

Think about an 8-year-old. Everything's new.

First time to the ocean, to the mountains,

first time maybe seeing snow,

and they have an incredible depth of experience.

First crush, first game, and getting into fights,

breaking their glasses.

Eight-year-olds cry - a lot.

Their breadth and depth of experiences are super wide.

Their conduit for time is expansive and it trickles through.

And summers last forever.

Let's think about a 20-year-old.

You've declared a major,

maybe have got a job, a set circle of friends,

and you've developed a distaste for discomfort.

Your conduit for time through your brain is starting to contract and to accelerate

the feeling of time passing.

And now, let's go to middle age.

I know this doesn't apply to you in the room here,

but a lot of middle aged people I know have routine lives.

They do the same thing, go to same places,

eat at the same restaurants, commute to the same jobs,

see same friends, everything is the same,

plus the modern coveniences of Advil, Paxil and air-conditioning.

It's super comfortable, super safe

and it results in a conduit of time that makes it speed by.

What do we do about this?

I love this quote from Hemingway.

"I can't stand to think my life is going by so fast

and I'm not really living it." That's Robert Cohn.

Somewhere around 30 people start to get this sense

that life is speeding up.

They could be missing something.

They think, I need more breadth, do new things,

I'm going to take lessons, piano lessons,

I'm going to take up a cooking class, or go back to school

to increase the breadth of their experiences.

But unfortunately, most of the time,

they don't really add to the depth of emotion.

They're attached to their things, riskless, fearless,

there's no real fear of failure.

It's sort of like putting a thumb over the end of the hose.

It doesn't change the rate of time passing.

So how to live like a bull fighter, how to expand time like an 8-year-old?

Well, it's pretty simple.

You've got to expand the breadt and depth of your experiences.

If you're going to go sign up and take piano lessons,

sign up for a recital - in front of a bunch of people.

If taking voice lessons, sing in front of a crowd.

If you've going to sign up to be a triathlete or run a race,

care enough about the outcome to get emotionally invested.

How to know if you're doing this right?

How to know if you're living life to slow down time

like an 8-year-old?

If you're not willing to cry

based on the outcomes of one of your new experiences,

you're not slowing down time to that of an 8-year-old.

Not going to work. This isn't for everybody.

Some people enjoy their safe comfortable lives.

But if you want to slow down time, then enter the bull ring.

Speaking of rings, let's talk about the second law.

The second law of experiential time is the law of inversion.

This is the notion that sometimes the way we experience time in the present

becomes inverted in terms of the meaning and memory.

Imagine your job was to sit at a computer

and type in these long strings of digits - numbers, letters and symbols

into a green screen of computer and if you got it wrong,

it disappeared with a flash, and you start over again

because I did check digits, this was my job in undergraduate school.

And I can tell you that time practically stopped in that room.

I would look up after three hours of typing the digits wrong.

It was like the second hand had stopped and only 20 minutes had gone by.

It was brutal.

I'll contrast it with a different day.

Think about the first day before you go on a week long vacation.

Maybe you take a half day at work.