Episode Transcript
[00:00:04] Have you ever dreamed that you could pause time and then do whatever you wanted?
[00:00:10] You know, I think most people dream of doing something great.
[00:00:15] They want to have some great knowledge or interesting skill, or they just want to complete some really awesome project.
[00:00:24] Or more precisely, they want to have done something great in the past.
[00:00:31] You know, I don't really want to learn a language that's slow and frustrating and annoying, but I would love to have learned another language in the past so that I can speak it.
[00:00:43] But I never seem to have the time.
[00:00:46] You know, I dream about it and I think about how great it would be, and years go by and I'm still just thinking about it.
[00:00:55] And a couple more years go by and I spend a lot of time thinking about it, but somehow it's still the same distance out in the future.
[00:01:04] Why?
[00:01:05] We're doing something for every single minute of the day. We work, we eat, we poop, we play video games, we text, we watch tv, we go out to the gym, we spend time with family, we travel places, and of course, we doom scroll through social media. There's literally no additional time in the day because we are always spending it doing something, even if we're just sitting around. Truly great and valuable things are those things that necessarily take enormous amounts of time and focused effort to complete. I mean, think about it. If it's quick and easy to do, then by definition, it's cheap.
[00:01:51] So how do you do it?
[00:01:53] You have to explicitly and consciously trade something you are already doing for the work of doing the thing that you want to have.
[00:02:04] For example, I have a decently successful podcast called Bitcoin Audible.
[00:02:10] And the reason is that about eight years ago, I deliberately made the choice to uninstall the game League of Legends and trade that time that I played the game for working on the podcast instead. Now, recording a podcast does not have nearly the instantaneous dopamine hits that coming up from bot lane through the brush to gank mid and landing a perfect dark binding to get first blood does.
[00:02:39] But because I made the decision to work on the show instead of playing the game on the first day, then I made the same decision again on the second day and the third day and every day after that.
[00:02:51] I now get to trade my time going to work to work on the show, because this is what I do now, and I love it.
[00:03:01] And you know, at the beginning, it felt like such a huge cost. Like I was just like, I didn't want to let it go. All I could think about was what I was losing. And that game is fun, dude. But looking back now, I don't regret it at all. And I don't really miss it all that much either. But you know, I can imagine how much I would regret if after eight years I was looking back and I was still working at pretty much the same job and all I had was the memory of a bunch of good ganks, maybe some custom skins for my imaginary game character, and I was still just thinking about how cool it would be if I had my own show. In fact, I just wasted 40 minutes on Twitter and Nostr before realizing that if I actually want to have more of these videos, I had to get off of that place and come over here and actually do the video. You know, something else I've always wanted for almost a decade actually is I wanted to have written a book.
[00:04:00] But the years just go by and it's like I never have the time to just sit down and write. So of course I don't have a book today. But about a month ago, I made another explicit trade.
[00:04:15] I will never poop again with my phone. Instead, I take my daylight computer that has none of those distractions or anything. I've just got my writing app and I sit down and I write. And I poop a lot. All the time, actually. That's a lot of time to get writing done. Sure, I will miss thousands of rage baiting comments on social media that I have to angrily correct with my for angry thumbs, but before the year is out, I'm probably gonna have a book. And I am specifically saying it publicly in this video against the advice of my wife who doesn't want me to mention that I wrote it while pooping so that I will either finish it or I'll be embarrassed publicly for not having done what I set out to do. So speaking of pausing time, most Americans spend over four, four and a half hours scrolling on their phone every day.
[00:05:08] And in fact, for the younger generations, it's even worse. It's almost six hours. If you take out the time to sleep, assuming you can't replace that, that's actually like 130 days out of the year.
[00:05:23] So maybe I can't pause time, but what if I could trade that time, or even just some of it for something I'd rather have done? I just have to make the decision to not play the game, to not go out drinking, to not get on socials or watch that episode of the show, or pick up the phone. And you know, it's not really that. There's something super wrong with those things.
[00:05:50] It's just a question that you have to ask is what will I regret more having not done the difficult decisions aren't the ones to do something great.
[00:06:03] It's about deciding what not to do so that you can do something great.
[00:06:11] It's not easy, but it is simple.
[00:06:16] Otherwise, what are you going to wish you had done in the past when there's no time left to do it?
[00:06:26] Think about it.
[00:06:27] But that's just my two sets.
[00:06:38] One of the most important things I do is I put these guys on every night at about 8 o'. Clock. These are the nightshade glasses from Chroma. What I really love about these, especially when I'm editing, is is that they let a small band of purple through so I can actually still see a lot of the color without actually affecting my hormones and my circadian rhythm. If you are looking at screens all the time you should check it out. There's a 10% discount with code bitcoin audible and there's a link right down in the show notes.
