Counterclockwise: How to Design Endless Summers with John K. Coyle

0:01Light that spark fire nation JLD here and welcome to entrepreneurs on fire brought to you by high level, the all-in-one sales and marketing platform. Today, we'll be breaking down counterclockwise, how to design endless summers. To drop these value bombs, I brought John K. Coyle into EO Fire Studios. John specializes in the neuroscience and psychology of time perception, how to design endless summers in Fire Nation. We'll talk about why life is 90 % over at the age of 40, how to expand time, and why does time seem to speed up as we get older and oh, so much more. And the big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to John and our sponsors.

0:38Are you ready for the ultimate all-in-one platform for entrepreneurs, marketers, coaches, and agencies? Build funnels, automate follow-ups, manage clients, and even white-label your own software. Say hello to our featured partner, High Level, and visit highlevelfire.com to start your free trial today. Whether your company earns millions or even hundreds of millions, NetSuite helps you stay ahead of the pack. Right now, get the business guide, Demystifying AI, free at netsuite.com slash fire. The guide is free to you at netsuite.com slash fire. John, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with.

1:26Hello, Fire Nation, and thank you for having me, John Lee. I think that one thing that most people assume about successful people is that they're self-made. And I will tell you that my greatest asset probably is I'm willing to ask for help, which sounds vulnerable and weak. But the reality is when you ask for help, you usually get it. Fire Nation, one of the reasons why you listen to this podcast, because it's a way to learn from those who have the knowledge to assist. And that's why we're talking about counterclockwise today, how to design endless summers, because who doesn't want to know and to learn how to design an endless summer?

2:06Now, one thing that I will tell you has become even more prevalent in my life, John, now that I've become a father of a 19 month old, is everybody you meet just says, oh my goodness, time goes by so fast. You're going to blink. They're going to be out of the house. Time is so precious. Like enjoy every moment. You hear that every time, a million times a day. Yes. So why is that? Why does it seem to speed up? And by that, I mean time. Why does time seem to speed up as we get older, as things like having kids happen? Why does it speed up? Well, I think it's because the brain is lazy. Let's start there.

2:43I think and I think there's ample evidence that our sense of time, which, by the way, doesn't exist in the present. And analyzing how you feel about how something takes place, how long it takes place in the present is it's not a very useful thing, because when we think about time, we're really thinking about the past. And what do we remember? What don't we? How long did something feel? Did a week feel like a month? Did a month feel like a week? Did a day feel like a year? Did a year feel like a day? Like those things are all about memory. And what happens is when we're eight, our brains are on fire to use your own metaphor.

3:17They are so focused on capturing and storing and recalling memories because everything is new. Everything is exciting. Everything's dangerous or unique or beautiful, all these things. And so an eight year old's brain is constantly writing, storing and recalling memories. and all three of those are important by the way so write store and call as we get older what happens is the brain gets lazy and it's you know it's three percent of your mass and 28 percent of your calorie burn and the hardest thing it does is write memories and so when it looks around and says everything's the same it says nothing new to do here and so it doesn't write it down if you ever got to your parking garage and you don't know how you got there well that's because the brain said nothing new here to write down that's writing the other thing that happens is it'll write it down and then it can't find it like i know i went there i can't you're scratching your head that kind of moment that's it was written but hard to recall and so the most important memories are written stored and recalled when you're eight well the brain is always writing story and recalling because it really writes stores and recalls for two reasons never do that again don't die and always do that again.

4:32Ask the girl out, you know, say I love you, right? And so this is the way the brain is sort of wired is it wakes up for don't die or always do that again, procreate, honestly. Don't die, procreate. So let's take a step back maybe because you just have a lot of knowledge, obviously on this topic. And I really would love to maybe know a little more core wise on how exactly the brain constructs time out of memories. Like how exactly does that work? So think about it this way. Your brain and my brain right now are sweeping short-term memory to long-term memory about every two to three seconds. Think of it as like a Polaroid or a photo, but it's also got sight, sense, smell, and emotions attached to it.

5:21But it is 70 % visual. By and large, memories are highly visual. So you get this stack of photos that it's creating about every two to three seconds. Now, where things get a bit interesting. And so that, by the way, that stack of photos is the you that you are. John Lee Dumas is the sum of all his memories, except for your DNA. The you that you become, the decisions you'll make tomorrow, whether you decided to have that kid or not, whether you asked her out or not. All those things came from the sum of your experiences and memories. and so that stack the thicker deeper and more highly recallable it is means you've just been alive longer so the more memories you wrote stored and can recall so the hippocampus is the memory writer it's at the top of your uh your spinal column next to the basal ganglia and the amygdala so it's doing this every two to three seconds until something exciting happens the amygdala sits next to the hippocampus and when the amygdala wakes up it tells the hippocampus write faster write 50 to 60 times faster make sure we never forget this and so this is why things seem to slow down like in a car crash or asking that first girl out because the amygdala wakes up your frame rate goes up your sense of time slows down and amygdala driven memories are much more highly recallable.

6:44We store more data, it's more highly recallable, and hence they're more available. And so eight-year-olds have all kinds of available recently stored or even longer stored memories. And as we get older, we try to create safe, comfortable lives where the amygdala isn't awake all the time. And sadly, this is the death of time for adults. There is the reason that this phrase, there's meaning that the the that life begins at the edge of your comfort zone that's why this is really fascinating stuff and i'm actually right now watching for the first time ever by the way i've never seen this show before but it was raved about by a lot of people um but the movie the disney movie inside out and it's just really interesting how they show you what's kind of happening behind the scenes of course in the disney way of the short-term memories the long-term memories, the core memories, all these different things.

7:39And like, I'm just like, wow, this is actually a pretty deep movie that I, as an adult, I'm really enjoying. And my son's just kind of like pointing at all, you know, the cartoons and the bright lights, cause he's 19 months old, but I'm like, I'm actually kind of enjoying this, which is pretty cool. And I will say this next thing, John, I mean, it kind of bothered me when I read it and I think it's going to bother potentially not bothers maybe the right world, but maybe it was a wake up call. Um, you know, for myself and a lot of the listeners is that 90 % of life is over at the age of 40. So I'm 45 years old.

8:16Why is 90 % of life over at the age of 40? Well, let's first caveat that with that's for most people. Okay. Hopefully not for you and me, but what happens is, and that, you know, this is 98 % of adults feel that time accelerates the older they get. And so when you start plotting experiential time, which will sort of separate from chronos time or chronological time, clock time, the way we actually experience time starts to accelerate the older we get. And so when you sort of plot that algorithm, and it depends what, you know, divider or numerator you use in this equation, But roughly speaking, we have stored half of our highly recallable memories by 18.

9:01And by age 43, we're at 92 % of highly recallable stored memories for your average person. And so that means by age 43, you only get 8 % left. Like the fat lady is singing, the bell is tolling. We are at the end. You should be horrified. And I am and I was. But there are ways to reverse this, which is to design your life to have the kinds of experiences where the amygdala wakes up, where your memory writing system speeds up its frame rate, and where you store more highly recallable memories in such a way that your stack of photos sitting next to you grows exponentially. And so when you do that, you're not half done at 43.

9:37You actually, you can live 400, 500 experiential years. And that's, you know, that's really the platform that I'm sitting on now is how to teach people how to do that. And we can talk about how to do that when you ask the next question. Well, I am going to absolutely get there because that's going to be something that I think Fire Nation will be fired up about when we get back from thanking our sponsors. AI is a hot topic right now. and for good reason. As a business owner, you should be asking yourself, how can I make AI work for my business? The possibilities are endless and guessing is a risky game.

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10:40Whether your company earns millions or even hundreds of millions, NetSuite helps you stay ahead of the pack. And right now you can get the business guide, Demystifying AI, free at netsuite.com slash fire. The guide is free to you at netsuite.com slash fire, netsuite.com slash fire. Okay, let's talk about a platform that's completely changing how entrepreneurs are running their business. And they are also our featured partner, HighLevel. If you're an entrepreneur, coach, agency, or course creator looking to grow faster and smarter, HighLevel is the all-in-one platform that replaces your entire tech stack.

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12:32So let's talk about how to expand time, part one. Yeah, the first way, which is kind of logical and is sort of obvious to everyone, and it's the least important, but it's the most understandable is this notion that time, you know, as we said, speeds up the older you get. And the metaphor I'll make here for why this is happening is like a fixed flow of water through a garden hose. So time passing through your brain and my brain is much like a fixed flow of water through garden hose. And when you squeeze the aperture of the end of that garden hose by putting a nozzle on it, putting your thumb over it, what happens to the speed of the water?

13:10Well, it speeds up, right? That's how we spray the farther parts of our garden. I think our brains are squeezing time in much the same way. But in this case, the aperture for time, base times height for an aperture, the base of this or the X axis is our breadth of experiences. And the Y axis, the one that people forget, is our emotional depth of experiences. and so if that's the aperture for time which i think is a really great metaphor breadth of experiences uniqueness and depth of experiences emotional intensity or risk and uncertainty well eight-year-olds have it in spades right like everything is new they go the first time the mountains first time's a disney world first game first win first loss right uh first crush first breakup first kiss you know like everything's new and exciting and also you know they cry a lot And so the aperture for time for an eight-year-old's brain is wide open and time trickles through and summers last forever.

14:07So that's the first metaphorical law for how we experience time and one that I think is pretty easy to grasp. They get more important and less intuitive as we move forward. And I will say, I have such clear memories. I can just picture my elementary school right now when I was like seven, eight, nine years old. and each grade when I was graduating and going into the next grade, but you know, of course summer was starting, I would be walking out in June and my parents, we had a lake house. So we always moved from our regular house to our lake house for the summer, which was probably two months, you know, right around that timeframe.

14:41But when I was walking out as a kid, to me, I was just about to embark on a lifetime of summer. Like it literally, like the word is endless summer here. Like I really felt like I had an endless summer stretching before me because I was remembering past summers that felt like they lasted forever in a good way because I loved them. They were great on the lakes, blah, blah, blah. It really felt that way to me because I wasn't just like, okay, 60 day countdown. I was just like, oh, summer started. I don't really have a concept of when it ends and I'm just going into it. It's going to last forever.

15:13Now let's talk about how to expand time part two, AKA inversion. So this is the one that like everybody gets wrong. You can Google everything anywhere. I think I'm the only person still, the only person talking about this, a lot of experience around time. And we can quote, you know, David Eagleman to Moran surf to Phil Kotler to, you know, all the greats. They talk about the way you experience time in the present and how the rain gets things wrong and how the, you know, three seconds can feel like a minute and a minute can feel like three seconds. These are all fine, fun experiments. I don't think they matter.

15:49I I think that all that really matters is what you remember. Was it written? Was it stored and recalled? And so when we think about that and when we ignore the fact that the way you experience in the temporal present is all over the place, then we can start to get to the heart of the matter. And the reality is for a lot of things, the way we experience time in the present, in the now, is inversely proportional to how we'll remember it. So let me say that again. The way we experience time in the now is often inversely proportional to the way we remember it. And I'll give you two quick examples.

16:21Long, boring day at work. I'll give you a job of mine. My job was to sit in a cubicle for 10 hours and type letters, numbers, and digits into the green screen of a computer. I had to type periodical codes from new periodicals into Stanford's Green Library when I was in college on Saturdays for 10 hours. I can tell you that day lasted forever in the present. It was so mind-bogglingly boring and tedious. I thought that day would never end. I did that every Saturday for two years. I have just described in my entire memory bank, my entire stack of photos of that job. There's nothing else to recall.

16:54Because as long as it seemed in the present, it disappears in memory. Inversely proportional, first day of vacation. You go to the office, you're going to be gone for a week. You go in early on a Friday at 7 a.m. You work through your task list, you're making calls, you're checking off stuff. and then you're going to run to the airplane and go to a new destination, take the Uber to the beach and have a walk and see the sunset and have a nice dinner. And the whole day is gone in a flash. But this is what gets interesting. In memory, they invert. The long, tedious, boring days disappear to nothing.

17:24And the first day of vacation expands. It's lights, color, action. You can zoom in, recall all kinds of details from that sunset, the starfish you saw, the food you had for dinner, or the conversation you had with your wife, your time at the beach with your kid. Like you store so much data in that. And so that's the second law is the way you experience time in the now, in the present, is inversely proportional to how you remember it. And, you know, the metaphor here is of just like the garden house before, the metaphor here is that long, boring days are like a surveillance camera, slow frame rate, gray, black and white, grainy, no sound, nothing to remember.

18:03first day of vacations, like an HD camera, 8K camera, you're storing so much information in the present that you're almost like chasing your mental hard drive, catching up, storing all this information to be pulled out later. But in memory, you have a huge data bank. So by and large, when things feel like they're going fast in the present, that's probably a great sign that you're storing lots of information. Wow. That was cool. I could definitely put myself in a lot of those scenarios for sure. Let's move into how to expand time part three, which is expansion. This is the least intuitive. And the metaphor here is that time itself is completely relative, as we know from the physics of time and relativity in general, and the general theory of relativity is proposed by Einstein.

18:45But the notion of the third law is you can sort of create time out of nothing, that you can create moments in literally seconds or a few minutes that are worth a year or longer. You can also have years that are worth just moments. and when I speak to audiences I'll often ask you know does anybody have a important day in their life that they would trade away a boring month to keep and everybody raises their hand and then I say all right is there a minute a moment of such scintillating gravity of such importance that you would trade away an entire year of mundane days to keep and people sort of shrug and look around I'm like let's invert that what if you could create moments in your life that are worth a year what if you could create such deep memories in just moments that if you do five a year or ten if you do ten a year you don't live 50 more years you live 500 and the metaphor works here there's a guy that did exactly that his name is eugenio kelly in uh nine 2006 he was the ceo of kpmg he was given uh 90 days to live because he got brain cancer and in his next 90 days, he lived like 400 years.

19:53He created the kinds of experiences with all the people that he loved that would have taken him multiple lifetimes in a normal circumstance to do. And in so doing, he created so many memories that he felt like he lived 90 more years, not 90 more days. And we can do the same. The chief instigators here, and we can go through them in depth if you'd like after, but are, is it risky and uncertain? Unfortunately, that's the thing that wakes up the brain the most is I don't know what's going to happen. And people shy away from that, but that's what entrepreneurs do. And so entrepreneurs live a lot longer than other people.

20:27Is it unique? Is it different? Will the brain recall it? Is it beautiful? Trauma also works, but let's go with beautiful because we'll remember both. Is it physically intense? Not always important, but usually. And is it emotionally intense? And then finally, can I get into the flow state, my peak performance zone? When you can stack all six of those, risk, uniqueness, beauty, physical intensity, emotional intensity, and flow state. Those are the moments that in 10 seconds become the lifetime memory that there's a before and after in your mental yardstick. Man, John, I just lived a lifetime of memories in this conversation.

21:05So thank you for breaking those down. Of all the things we talked about, there's a lot, but what would you want our listeners to walk away with? If there's one key point from everything, what would that one thing be? I would like to share that. And I would like to tell you a closing story, which you can keep or not, but I'm going to give you an example of a six segment memory. But my, honestly, this is, I know that your audience is successful entrepreneurs. And I know that for probably decades, for most of them, they have been trading their time for money and time and money are fungible. And they absolutely should.

21:41That's what we're doing it, right? You're building a business, you're building a future, but there comes a point, John, where it's important to start trading your money for time. And I feel like so many people fail to do this. Like you, you've got there, you are there, you are successful. You have assets in the financial realm that are substantial. And now it's time to build temporal assets, time capital assets. And most people have no idea how to invest their time for high returns. And I can guarantee you this, it is never that you're going to get low returns from low risk. So that's my advice to your audience is you're going to have to take some risks with your time in order to get the kinds of returns you want.

22:22If I may, I'll tell you a closing story of my sort of ultimate time. Please do. So, you know, I think you know this, but I, you know, I went to the Olympics and I was a speed skater and I won a silver medal and that all sounds great. But in my head, I was a one timer first loser. I went to one Olympics only and finished second. And so for a decade, that was my identity. One time or first loser, one time or first loser. I had nothing to do with the sport for a decade. I didn't talk about it, didn't watch it, never spoke about it. And then I was invited to be the analyst for NBC for the Olympics eight years later after I retired.

22:59And my job was to interview the parents, coaches, and skaters and get the backstories. And so I was warmly welcomed back. Everybody knew me. I knew mostly everybody. but on the 16th of 17 days of the winter olympics a parent of one of the skaters created a moment in about 10 15 seconds that literally changed the entire trajectory of my life so we're at dinner and i'm still a one-timer first loser and he says i need to tell you something can we walk away from the table and he looked nervous he was making me nervous so we walk away from the table he said john i just want you to know that we wouldn't be here right now if it wasn't for you And I said, I don't know what you mean.

23:33He said, you won't recall, but 12 years ago after you won your silver medal, you brought it to a little reception at Bay City, Michigan. I brought my son, Alex. He was 11 years old at the time. He never skated before. You put your medal around his neck. You sign an autograph. The next day, he decided to join the Bay City Speed Skating Club. And tomorrow, he is skating in the gold medal final. And just like that, everything in my life changed. That's the kind of moments we're talking about. Fire Nation, that is a mic drop moment. And John, if Fire Nation wants to learn more from what you have going on, wants to connect with you, what is your call to action for our listeners today?

24:10Super easy. I'm johnkcoyle.com. I have blogs. I have a new YouTube page all about time expansions called the Time Expansion Project. You can find the link there. And I'm working on the book Counterclockwise. It should be out sometime next year. Counterclockwise, how to design endless summers. Fire Nation, you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with. You've been hanging out with JKC and JLD today, so keep up the heat. And for links to everything we talked about, visit eofire.com. Type John in the search bar and the show notes page will pop right up. And John, thank you for sharing your truth, your knowledge, your value with Fire Nation today.

24:47For that, we salute you and we will catch you on the flip side. Thanks, JLD. Hey, Fire Nation, a huge thank you to our sponsors and John for sponsoring today's episode and Fire Nation. What can 4 ,000 of the world's most successful entrepreneurs teach you? How about how to achieve financial freedom and fulfillment? My first traditionally published book, The Common Path to Uncommon Success, is a revolutionary 17-step roadmap that will lead you to the lifestyle you've been dreaming about. This book took me 10 years of accumulating the genius of the world's top entrepreneurs, and you can get it all in one place when you visit UncommonSuccessBook.com.

25:25I'll catch you there or on the flip side. Are you ready for the ultimate all-in-one platform for entrepreneurs, marketers, coaches, and agencies? Build funnels, automate follow-ups, manage clients, and even white-label your own software. Say hello to our featured partner, High Level, and visit highlevelfire.com to start your free trial today. Whether your company earns millions or even hundreds of millions, NetSuite helps you stay ahead of the pack. Right now, get the business guide, Demystifying AI, free at netsuite.com slash fire. The guide is free to you at netsuite.com slash fire.