UNCONVENTIONAL THINKING BLOG

Einstein fiddled with time in ways few of us can understand. But we don’t have to. The lesson I gleaned from him is that time bends and, if you are passionate about something — anything– time can never be a limitation. You simply ignore the clock, the need for sleep, the nonsense about a balanced life–and you shoot for your dream. Your invention. Your enterprise. Your film, your book, your life saving drug. If you are the master of time, they all dominate it.

So often, I hear people tell me “There’s just not enough hours in the day.” I say, there are as many as you want– if you truly want them. For those who hear the tick, tock, tick, tock of the clock marking all of the moments of their lives, who are slaves to time because everything is oh so overwhelming, then yes there are limits to what they can do. But to others who are determined to accomplish something major, to defy the odds and win, the sounds they hear are the electric currents of innovation running through their brains.

When I was a kid I worked in a factory a few summers, punching in at 8 am, out for lunch, back in when I returned, out for coffee breaks, in again until closing time. I was a slave to the clock because the work was tedious and the system imposed time on me. What amazes me is how many people imprison themselves with time clocks of their own invention:

“I just can’t seem to squeeze it in.”

“I want to do it but everyone else is competing for my time.”

“My work day is already 8am to 6pm. It’s crazy to do more!”

Sure there is a thing called time and of course it moves forward relentlessly but there is another form of time– a punishment, a ceiling, a limitation– that we impose on ourselves. And that is the form of time that separates those who achieve from the those who take up space until the buzzer rings and they are free to leave.

Einstein also posited that it is impossible to move faster than the speed of light. And true as that may be in the world of physics, it is an abject lie in the world the rest of us live in.

The truth is, every great person who has made a mark on the world moved ten times the speed of light, laughed at clocks, paid no heed to time, punched in and out of nowhere, thought of sleep as a necessary evil and composed the Fifth symphony or built Apple while others tied their fate to a system of measurement that has no real meaning at all.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 21st, 2011 at 3:00 pm and is filed under Unconventional Thinking . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.