The Honest Truth Is: You Don’t Need More Self-Help, You Need More Time
Maybe what you really need is more time to digest the world around you.
In 1876, William Orten wrote this about what we know today as the telephone:
“After careful consideration of your invention, while it is a very interesting novelty, we have come to the conclusion that it has no commercial possibilities,” Orten wrote Bell. “What use could this company make of an electrical toy?”
Today telecommunication is a trillion-dollar market.
100 years later Ron Wayne joined Apple at its inception and owned a 10% stake. 12 days later he sold it for $800. With a market cap of over $2 trillion today, Wayne would have stock sitting in the region of $200 billion. Arguably the worst estimation of value in history.
Time is Money — Spend Your Hours Wisely
The theme here is understanding value. If you can understand the value of an item you can trade high-value items for high rewards. Money can buy us stuff that we need or want: food, shelter, clothing and the of course items like a new shiny BMW to impress your neighbour.
Learning the value of the ‘things’ we own or aspire to own is important. It’s important to know what you want to exchange your money for. It’s important because that money represents your time. Accumulation of wealth happens over time and thus the money sitting in your bank account right now is a representation of your effort of time. For all of us, that amount of effort and time is different but that doesn’t matter.
Money equals time spent.
So when you exchange your money for something else, you are exchanging, in a sense, your effort already expended. A chocolate bar might be 0.05hrs of effort. A new car could be 10,000 hours of effort. When you start to think of money as effort spent the perspective gets shifted.
But it’s Not That Kind of Time You Should Be Interested In
Time is money, that is true but time is also the space that you and I learn in. Over time you and I learn the value of money, the value of effort and the value of things in the world around us.
At the same time, we start to understand how other people view ‘things’, where they place value, what they would consider a worthwhile investment and what they would not. Time, in this sense, allows us to try, fail and try again. Or another word for it, learning.
Time gives us the space to learn by trial and error.
Animals Learn Over Time to Become Incredible Traders
The Uluwatu Temple in Bali, Indonesia, provided the perfect playground for this idea. There exists a large free-ranging population of long-tailed macaques and fascinatingly these monkeys often engage with token-mediated bartering interactions with humans. In a hilarious power-play by these monkeys they steal non-edible objects from temple visitors and only will they return the objects back to their owners once a sizeable and acceptable reward is offered by the temple staff.
The experimenters broke down the activities into two phases — the stealing and the bartering. The study observed 333 monkeys who fell into different age categories (juveniles, subadults, and adults). This evidence suggests that there is a learnt element to this behaviour. In conclusion, the study noted three notable findings:
- These behaviours need to be learned throughout juvenescence (i.e. until up to 4 years in this species) to be successfully performed.
- Older monkeys preferentially selected tokens that were more valued by humans.
- These more skilful and selective individuals appeared to make economic decisions, as evidenced by clear behavioural associations between value-based token possession and quantity or quality of food rewards rejected and accepted.
Maybe You Don’t Need More Self-Help, Maybe You Need More Time
The monkey brain is very similar to the human brain, so much so that it’s studied to draw parallels between it and us. If these monkeys took years to learn that stealing a pair of sunglasses is better than stealing a hat then why is it that we think we can learn how to be happy by reading 1 book, or 5 books or 17 books.
The monkey brain took several years to figure out which item is more valuable to the temple visitors. A complex but fairly simply endeavour compared to what we’re asking of our brains.
We’re saying: “I want to learn what makes me happy, gives me value and makes my life feel worthwhile.”
Which, by anybody’s standards, is a tall order.
And what comes with that is a need to be patient, gain perspective and be fair. Added to the complexity of that statement above is the moving parts of life, what makes you happy today might not make you happy tomorrow. What you think is worthwhile today might feel meaningless tomorrow. That’s the joy of the sheer complexities of your brain.
If it were easy though, then everyone would do it.
To Conclude: It’s All About Timing
Time is the secret weapon. Given more time and more experience, maybe Ron Wayne wouldn’t haven’t given his shares back 12 days later to one of the most successful companies in the world. Given more time maybe William Orten might have seen the value in the telecommunication system he was holding in his hands.
The point is that time is often a factor missed out. We see ‘overnight’ successes and forget the time that went into building the successful formula that you see in front of you. It’s not by accident that success happens.
It’s trial and error. It’s learning over time what works and what doesn’t. So what this really means is that you don’t need more self-help. Maybe you pick up a book, read it, nod with agreeance but find your life doesn’t change much, so you pick up another one. The point here is that you won’t find it in self-help, you’ll find it over time.
It’s hard to be patient and it’s difficult to give in to not feeling like you are a success today but the truth is, you are, wherever you are, on your way.