The Fallacy of Time

Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day.

You fritter and waste the hours in an off-hand way.

Kicking around on a piece of ground in your home town.

Waiting for someone or something to show you the way…

When I first heard this song in high school I was like “This is the coolest song ever!” I just loved the way it sounded.  I was moved by the melody. Twenty plus years later, it still sounds cool as ever, but it’s the meaning that really hits a chord.

The other day I thought about time in a way I haven’t before and I’m sure most people haven’t. When we think about how much time we have left, we normally think in terms of years: I have about twenty more years; I have about fifty more years, etc. For me it’s forty. But I randomly thought about it in terms of months—specific months. I thought about the new year approaching and I said to myself: “I have about forty more Januarys left…I have only forty more Januarys left in my life!” It was a shock. Now days, months fly by so quickly.

We inherently have a flawed sense of time. We tend to underestimate how long things take and overestimate how long we have—whether that’s for the day, for the month, for the year, or for the rest of our lives. For instance, we tell someone we'll be there in ten minutes. But it’s almost always more than that and never under. Or we say we are going to do A, B, C, D, and E today and at the end of the day we’ve accomplished about half. Throughout my life I’ve been hired at numerous new restaurants who were in the process of opening. They all took longer to open than they told me, most of them significantly longer. Things just take longer than we think. And when we combine this with our tendency to overestimate how much time we have, we can go through life without ever accomplishing our dreams.

When I started Pride & Joy almost a decade ago, I was so self-assured it would be successful. I thought this simply because it was what I wanted to do like someone deciding to become a teacher or an engineer. I was totally naïve and arrogant to think I could jump into an industry I know nothing about and ultimately succeed without giving my very all. And I thought I had so much time that I would inevitably succeed, which caused me to move with my foot barely on the gas. Now ten years later, I’m barely up and running.

Don’t make the same mistake. Time moves faster than we think. We can’t wait for the perfect time or when we feel 100% ready in order to get going because that will never happen. And time alone doesn’t guarantee we reach our destination. These are all traps that inhibit us from moving forward. Go hard now.

You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today.

And then one day you find ten years have got behind you.

No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun.