Designing Event Horizon Moments
Lesson 8 from: How to Expand Time and Live a Full LifeJohn K. Coyle
Designing Event Horizon Moments
Lesson 8 from: How to Expand Time and Live a Full LifeJohn K. Coyle
Lessons
Class Introduction
00:50 2The Earth is Flat: Time is Linear
03:37 3The Antecedents of an Obsession with Time
09:23 4Life isn't Just Short, is is Actively Getting Shorter
03:40 5The First Law of Chronoception: Contraction
06:12 6The Second Law of Chronoception: Inversion
17:46 7The Third Law of Chronoception: Expansion
05:41 8Designing Event Horizon Moments
09:13Lesson Info
Designing Event Horizon Moments
How do we design these event horizons? It's possible and I'm going to get into it. We talked before about the drivers. Uniqueness, beauty, physical intensity, emotional intensity, and flow state, and stacking all of the above. We can stack all the above, we can have 10 event horizons per year, you don't live 43 more years, we live 430. So how to do this, okay, I can give you a few examples. The easiest thing for people to latch onto is buying these and absolutely, money buys time, there is no question. I think the best use of money is to buy time, not things. To buy experiences, not things. And so how do you do that? Well I have a friend that, heard this story and he got back to me about a year later. And what he did was really, really cool. Took money but it was really cool. So he had an 11 year old son who was gonna be turning 12. They live in Australia and his son had been watching football, soccer with him since he was five years old or so. His native England UK soccer club. So for...
seven years this kid has been watching this soccer club from the UK, never been to the UK. Huge fan, has the jersey, huge fan of the game, and for his 12th birthday, his father bought two tickets to London. Didn't tell his son, packed him up, took him to the airport. They got on a plane, he's like, where we going, you'll see when we get there, they land in London, 70, how many hours later, they get in a bus, they head to the stadium of the club where there's going to be a game that day. They walk into the stadium where he is greeted by the team, given his uniform, dressed with the team, walks out on the field, warms up with the team because he is the mascot today. His father bought that. Sat on the sidelines with him, went to the half time with him, got his jersey signed afterwards, high fives from the whole team. I don't know who got more out of this, him or his son, but he can't tell the story without tearing up. But he bought that and that's totally possible, you can design stuff using money, there's nothing wrong with that, but these are free too. Monica my business partner tells a story of two summers ago, heard there was gonna be a meteor shower. Two sons, I think they were 10 and 13 at the time. Woke each one up, it was a school night, she didn't care. One in the morning, they're like why are you waking me up? Grabs a blanket, walks them out to the hill near by their house, they lay down the blanket, they look up and they see this amazing light show for this pretty rural area. And for five or 10 minutes they watch this meteor shower, which neither kids had ever seen before. They didn't say really anything, walked them back to his bed, got the second son, did the same thing. A moment they'll never forget, totally free. The best thing about event horizon moments is you can give them. You can give them to others, and sometimes, it's just the gift of your words or the gift of your time. But first let's get into how this sort of works, 'cause as an ex consultant, so I can't get through this without a two by two. So here is the time investment portfolio. So you know where your money is right, you all have money saved somewhere. Is it all just in CDs? No, it is all in high risk investments, no. To get a reasonable rate of return, you have to have some risky stuff and some less risky stuff. Here's what you don't really want, you don't want, and by the way, the Y axis is your returns, your time investment value, and this is literally just time invested, so think of this as chronological time and think of this as human time, so it's chronos and kairos. You want, ultimately, low linear time investment, high returns. Those are event horizons. Those can happen in a second, in a minute, maybe in an hour. For those of those incredibly high returns for small investments of linear time. Can't have those every day and frankly, the way this all works and builds together is, event horizons are almost always super intense, stressful. The stress leads to the amygdala driven memories which leads to those memories that happened before and after and that's where resiliency is so important to be able to design these into your life. Running with the bulls in Pamplona requires some resiliency. Right? The haystack moment required some resiliency and so having that inward capacity to take on the kind of stress, to take the big risks through the big rewards is essential for event horizon moments. If you are living a safe, quiet, comfortable life, you'll have very few of these except for the ones that were sort of pawned off on you, like having a baby, that's always gonna be event horizon moment probably. It's painful, it's hard and it's amazing, right, so you'll get those, but you won't necessarily design ones that don't come naturally. So what you don't wanna do is have low investment of time and low returns, that's your routine stuff, these little things we do throughout the day. Some of it's part of life and that's just the way it goes. Sometimes we have high linear investment with low returns and sometimes that's required. Let's assume that your background and education allowed for you to be only a toll booth collector. Now that to me sounds like one of the most boring jobs known to man and maybe it is. But if that's what you have, it's okay. I mean there's 137 hours in a week, so if you're working 40, that leaves a lot of time to do some of this other stuff. So maybe that's your investment time, that's where you're developing the capacity, the financial resources, the safety net to take some of the risks and do some of these other things. But the more you can minimize that and stabilize it, the better off you are. If you find a way to invest high amounts of linear time and high return, that's kinda the slow states, you get the job of your dreams, which I'm fortunate enough to have. I spend lots of time doing this and I love it, 'cause I have high return. There's always great memories, I experience a lot of time in flow, so that's a great place to spend the vast majority of your linear time. But you do want to find ways to design some of these or gift them to somebody. 'Cause you can totally do that. Gifting one of those moments is probably to me one of the most profound things you can do and I'm gonna share it to close, a story how somebody in about 15 to 20 seconds changed the entire trajectory of my life. Whole reason I'm standing here right now. But first I'm gonna play a short video, a short version of a video I worked on for two years. This is like a macro of the micro, but, this is a video about time that we built in 100th of a second increments. So we think sliced in two time in order to lay down sound, music, imagery about time, and then we zoomed back out so we can see it in its full perpetuity. This is the two and a half minute version of the seven minute version that we won't belabor you with because of the online audience, but you can find it online as well so I'm gonna play this. (soft music) How long did summers last as a kid? Splashing into the lake, riding bikes across busy streets, crushes, broken hearts, bruises 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 they last in this world so mundane? I don't know about you, but I ache to live endless summers again. (water splashing) This thing here, it's a lie. We've been lied to, sidetracked, distracted, manipulated. This ticking, this tocking, this terrible terminal tracking and ticking of time teaching us trivial untruths. It taught us that each second is exactly the same, that each minute, each hour, each day progresses in a linear way. (clock ticks) (glass shatters) What about your life? Is time speeding up, or slowing down? 98% of adults feel that life is accelerating. I don't know about you but that makes me frown. How is that okay? Who ordered the code red and who let Tom Cruise in this monologue, he's too short just like your life. You want the truth, you can't handle the truth. Here's your code red, here's the truth. Experiential time, absent aggressive action to reverse it will keep speeding up. (sharp beeping) Watch lots of TV, sit on the couch, eat the same foods, develop a pouch, meet no new friends, become a stay at home grouch, do the same damn thing every single day, walk with a slouch, your arm chair, the (mumbles) of Advil and air conditioning, your stayed routines and complacent pace? These things are the warp drive to temporal hyperspace. It is time. It is time to create moments of such gravity that meaning supersedes all. It is time to create event horizons, where the clock ceases to exist at all. For the people we truly love, this one sacred gift we can give, the gift back of time. It is time to really live. (dramatic swelling music)
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Ratings and Reviews
Susan Burks
This is an important class. John reminds us of the incalculable value of filling our lives and those of people we care about with what is truly important - the gift of meaningful time. I loved reflecting on experiences that have truly changed the course of my life. John's stories and the science behind them was so inspiring.
Anastasia Shatalina
Very interesting and inspiring. Thank you.
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