“I Am The Source Of Time”
Do you remember your future? SUNDAY PLANNING - WOW…
…this is critical. I almost forgot how much it matters. And as one of my clients said last week, absolutely blowing my mind on a call to talk about synthesizing a brand messaging strategy for a billion dollar company with a bunch of wildly different businesses inside it - an overwhelming task at times -
“I AM THE SOURCE OF TIME”.
How is anyone the “Source of Time”?
There’s a spiritual answer and a technical answer. Let’s do the technical answer first:
When you’re planning your time on a Monday morning, you’re already IN the week. Imagine an airplane pilot making a flight plan AS THE PLANE IS TAKING OFF - not a good idea, right?
But if you try to plan the next week on a Friday, you’re probably “over it” and ready to just unplug. Not as sharp.
The fact is, your unconscious needs a little rest to do all the hard work FOR you - trust me, it’s smarter than you.
My first two careers before I jumped into branding were music and music teaching so I know this is right: Sunday planning is like making a setlist before the gig - so that when you walk out on stage, you already know what songs you’re going to play in what order. You already have it rehearsed - and when you go to sleep, it’s all percolating in the subconscious.
You wake up the next day READY - and run the setlist.
So I just did a test - to see if not doing Sunday planning for a few weeks would had an effect - and the results are in, it took almost a week for my rhythm to recover after Thanksgiving.
It was actually a slow slide down into not getting up early enough, going to sleep later, and suddenly realizing I was feeling “off” in a subtle way -
wait -
I hadn’t worked out in a week!
I wasn’t meditating!
I was getting busy all of a sudden!
The time margin was gone!
That’s not normal!
It wasn’t about Turkey or tryptophan.
It wasn’t about travel.
It wasn’t about motivation either. I love what I get to do for a living.
It was actually more about WHEN I did the planning. I was planning day of, in the mornings. OOPS.
Now for the spiritual part:
The more I’ve optimized the mental-physical-emotional-spiritual spaceship called “Ernest”, the more leveraged my outcomes become - bad or good.
My inner state / vibe works in a subtle, but highly out of proportion, kind of way. “Out of proportion” in the sense that minor shifts in approach here have MAJOR effects.
Including “time compression.”
Let me tell you about a wonderful dream I had 20 years ago that taught me how to play fast music phrasing. It’s the same idea.
I was walking through a forest, and I looked down and saw the floor of the forest was made of an interlaced grid of snakes, like graph paper.
They held the world together. The speed of their movement was a type of clock.
A friend from high school, William, was sitting on a tree stump like the ghost of the flute player in Zelda 3 (sorry, Super Nintendo junkie here)… and he was SHREDDING on guitar.
He looked up and I asked him “how are you playing that so fast?” And he said “It’s simple - just slow time down.”
And the snakes all started moving in slow motion - but William and I kept having a normal conversation.
I realized that from the point of view of the world, we had actually sped up. So the secret was to become the Source of Time - and then just operate at what still feels like a normal speed while the world slowed down around you.
How is this possible?
Well that’s beyond my pay grade. Ask Deepak Chopra…
And whether you realize it or not, You are the Source of Time.
Have a fantastic week! And remember that it already happened and it kicked ass
