The Dr. Chris Griffin Show – Season 1 Episode 3

“Time is Money”. Now who said that? Let me give you guys a little hint here. The same guy also said, “You may delay but time will not.” I bet you know who this guy is. In fact, I bet you got his picture on your purse on right now. Think about it.

Welcome to the Dr. Chris Griffin Show. Your resource for leveraging systems and technology to easier workload, increase productivity and provide you with the time off you deserve to live the life of your dreams. It’s time to practice productivity in the passionate pursuit of a better life with your host, Dr. Chris Griffin. The doctor is in.

Yes, yes, yes, if you haven’t figured it out yet, I bet you have. Or at least you had time to Google it right but the guy who said those quotes “Time is Money” and the other one was none other than Benjamin Franklin. Benjamin Franklin who, I mean who’s famous for so much, there’s really no reason to go into it. Everyone knows Ben Franklin was the first great American; one of the founding fathers, US ambassador to France. Just Google him, go to Wikipedia and you’ll find accomplishment over accomplishment. The reason we’re talking about it today is I don’t know is that anyone in history has gotten more done with what they had available to them as far as tools and stuff like that than Benjamin Franklin. So yeah, time is money and he’s the guy that you want to think about if you’re trying to perfect the way that you look at time. So today, we’re going to talk about that is absolutely near and dear to my heart. And that is the subject of time.

Now why do you think that that’s so important to me? Well, it seems that awhile back, I was thinking really hard and long about the goals that I wanted to accomplish in my life. And I want to accomplish in my practice and stuff like that. And you know, a lot of people think that almost all your goals should be based around money. And to a certain degree, it is true. That’s certainly and absolutely true. But if you really get to the heart of it, I think that you will find that most things in life that are really valuable have at least as much of an importance placed on the time that’s involved as the money that’s involved. In fact, I would propose to you that time is really the most valuable commodity in the world. Time, not only it is the most valuable commodity; it’s only the real currency that matters because you cannot buy time with money. I think we all know that. There’s only so much time in the day, you only have so much time in your life to live right? You can’t buy more than that, no matter how much you try to spend on it. Sure you might can afford a surgery here or there but the truth is, time, especially when you’re healthy and happy and wise, you know. Time; that has no price tag okay? And furthermore, you can’t stock pile time right? There are no time billionaires. Everyone has a certain amount of time and we don’t know how much that is. Right? We know how much we have in a given day or something like that. But we don’t know how much time we have on this planet. So you cannot stock pile time.

There’s a really cool movie out not too long ago where, you know, the main characters, that’s how they judge wealth in the future because everyone had a counter on their arm and it listed how many seconds or minutes they had left in their life. And when those hit zero, no matter how healthy you were, you were killed. You know, that was their future. So in that case there were time billionaires. But in the real world, they would live in the day. There’s no such thing. There is no compound interest effect for time. Okay? You cannot store it up and let it compound like you would store money in the bank. Time can buy pretty much any goods and services if you think about it that way. Okay? There are also time addicts. Okay, there’s a time addiction that’s running through our culture right now. I don’t know if you paid attention to it but there was a time guys, let’s think back to it now. I’m 42 and when I was in college, at Mississippi State, there was the burgeoning effect of a little thing called the internet. We had a room in our dorm and it had about 10 workstations and you were allowed to go in there and get on this “internet”. But there were very few sites and it was not, you know, we really don’t know what it was, I mean, I certainly I missed the boat on this one. I wish I could go back in time and learn more about that and buy stocking companies like Amazon. And things like that. But I didn’t, I didn’t. I mean I saw the value of it but I had no idea that it would just surround our lives the way that it has.

But yes, there are time addicts because think about it, people get angry now. Some people get angry. If you actually call a person, now this is the way we used to communicate in the good old days. Actually when I was a kid, some of you young people are going to, I’m just giving you history lesson here. The phones had a rotary dial on them. And a cord that attached them to the wall and if you wanted to talk to someone you got to call them. But it was a pretty big deal when someone called you. You stop what you were doing, you answer the phone. That’s just the way it worked. But now, think about texting. Most people prefer text over phone calls. In fact, there’s a growing percentage of people in the United States that gets angry at someone if they call them instead of texting them because in their mind now, they view the person has called in and say “Hey, my time is more valuable than your time. And how am I going to call you and expect to speak to you right now?” Instead of just texting them and so they can answer at their leisure when they have a chance. Now as you probably noticed, a lot of people just text right back and forth right away, right? And there’s a whole fluidity to that. But yeah, time is way too important that it used to be for everyone. There look at, look at when you have a slow internet connection; when you don’t have LTE as something that didn’t exist a few years ago. My kids, if they don’t have any LTE connection on the road, they get upset. Road rage, people get mad all the time driving down the highway. People drive way too fast most of the time, but, yeah people get road rage if they need to get somewhere and they can’t get there as fast as they’d like. It’s not even that they are being blocked from not getting where they’d like to go. It’s as if they, if they are slowed down they’d get angry. Okay?

Let’s look at the way that time saving addiction has entered into the business world lately; or not even necessarily lately. Let’s go back in history a few years. McDonald’s, they sort of pioneered fast food. There’s a, you know, an argument to be made as to who was the better entrepreneur, the McDonald’s brothers or Croc but no question about it. McDonald’s is the name that you think of when you think of saving time getting your food. It’s not how good the food is, I’m saying, you saved time. Another company just recently that’s saving lots of time in making billions out of it. Has anyone used Uber? Now I have to admit I have not yet had the pleasure of using Uber but I hear it’s really cool. So if you’re in the city, of course I’m not in the city, that’s why I haven’t used it. But if you’re in a city, you can use your phone to call an Uber driver with the app or whatever and they will show up and pick you up. You don’t have to fight with taxis and all that stuff. But Uber is actually tapped into that addiction of time that we’re all feeling here in America. Okay?

Let’s think now about some of the things that time can buy. I would propose to you that time can actually buy money. Okay? Yeah, they said that money can’t buy time but time can buy money. Because if you think about it, whatever you choose to do with your time, especially business wise, you’re going to get paid a proportionate amount of money to the value provided by the time that you’ve given. Now sure, you could just you could say “Oh, I’d like to be paid for my time and I’m just going to sit here on this stool” And your time is not worth that much. But if you make yourself, make your time worth something, then you can trade time for money. Now I would also say that that is one of the least liked business models for entrepreneurs everywhere is the model of trading time for dollars. But it’s a very valid point that you can trade is time for money. I would also say that financial freedom, okay? Is you think about money being the more powerful thing between money and time. Financial freedom really focuses on money right? But I think that is a hugely inaccurate idea. The fact that you can have so much money that you’re financially free, there’s always going to be a bigger entity. Even if you’re a billionaire, the entity would then be a government that could come and take your money. You can set yourself up and become as protected as possible but there’s always someone who could take your money. However, if you have time, and you spend your time right now to buy something, they can’t take that away from you; your memories or whatever. Like let’s say you would like to buy an experience. Okay? A little concept that I would call present autonomy; you have the right to do whatever you would like to do at this particular time, you have freedom from external control or influence. Okay? That’s present autonomy and you can buy that with time. Okay? Once that has happened, you can’t take that away; nobody can. I mean I guess someone can kill you but you can’t take away the time that was actually spent experiencing something on that earth. Okay? And that sort of delves into the spiritual round. You can use time to grow spiritually. You can use your time to make yourself in better physical shape so that you have a better chance to enjoy other experiences you buy with your time.

So the whole point of all this is time is actually the commodity you should be using to passionately pursue your better life and that’s where it all starts and it ends; is the commodity of time. So I have throughout my life, ever since, I guess ever since I’ve been on my own in my practice. I have to admit, I kind of feel like I was lazy until the day that I started my own dental practice because, you know, things had come kind of easily for me and I’m not proud of that but it just, I was lazy and soft, if you look at it that way. And there were things I knew that I wanted to accomplish in my life and the day that I was sitting on my kitchen floor trying to decide, you know, with my wife pregnant with my first child, my son, and had no job, had no prospects of a job, and I didn’t know if I was going to have to take my wife and offer her back to my home town and take her back to a big city, you know, and work for the man or work for someone up there. Or if I was going to have the guts to stick it out in my hometown and build my own practice from scratch. That is the day that changed everything for me as far as being lazy. One of the things that I was being lazy about was I just was not being as productive as I could be. Okay? I wasn’t taking time to plan things out. I was sort of haphazardly going through life. Sort of living off whatever abilities the Lord had given me and I wasn’t maximizing my time. I think that a very good phraseology is a quote that I heard one time. I think Peter Drucker said it and I hate to quote that because I’m just on top of my head right now. But you look at efficiency versus effectiveness. Now you know, I might have been doing some stuff, but I wasn’t very effective at accomplishing any of my goals; whether they be personal or professional. And so after that day on the floor of my kitchen, at a soul searching night that I had and came out the next day with the resolve to work 14 to 20 hour days until I built my practice up to a certain level. I would say that I was a lazy, ineffective person. But after that experience, I became very hyper productive and after today’s show, I want you to know exactly how that I approach the art and the science of setting and achieving goals and the ultimate objective of saving and redistributing time to work for you. Okay? Because that’s what I had done ever since back in 1999. Now once you learned the most effective system for obtaining new productive goals. This is like magic guys, you can use this system over and over and over again to build the life that you want and if I’m not being too presumptuous, I would love to be the person who spearheads the movement for us as a society to value time over money or being one of the people, I mean there are a lot of people out there already doing this but I would love to influence you if I have any influence at all over your thinking right now. To value time over money more than you have. Okay? Because you, let’s think about the Psalm 42, okay? Now I have a lot of 40 to 50 year old friends and they, for the most part, a lot of them that are very successful, I have some very successful friends but a lot of the ones that are very successful in my mind, they do try to weigh a lot of their very valuable 40 to 50 year old time for money that’s future money right? Now there very well come a day for some, some of them become very well-off. But there may come a day when sure, they’ve got so much money that they can do exactly what they want. But I would be the person to tell you, man, if you feel good right now; well I’m 42, if I feel good right now, what would I pay if I had to do something fun? If I want to go fishing for 6 hours, you know, when I’m 47 I’d feel great. I’d have a wonderful time. What would I paid for that if I were 55 and I were super wealthy? What would I pay at 55 to feel great and go fishing for 6 hours, you know. Maybe you can’t even feel great whether how much you had paid for it.

So I’m a big proponent of spending your time now to really maximize your experience here on earth or whatever you’d like to do and also accomplishing goals. You’re never going to feel better probably than you do in your youth. So even though I’m a true believer that when you have a clear goal in mind, working very productively toward that goal is very important. I also think that you should take time and spend that time wisely while you’re young and feel good and you know, it would also be nice to spend some of that time when you’re younger to create a mechanism. So maybe your earning power doesn’t completely go to zero when you hit 65, right? If you have a system in place that will allow you to earn money, you know, up to the point of you pretty much not caring at all when you’re, whatever that age is, then that’s great. You may spend some of your time now developing that system.

So let’s dive into this, the Time Genius System that I’ve written about. I guess I’ve published my book in 2010. I think I wrote it pretty much most of 2009 but the system that I wrote about that was, is really personalized in my system. The system overall has really been tried and proven over time. Over the last decade, I’ve really tried to work on the Time Genius System that I created for me and I’ve really gotten it down to a science as much as I think I can. But the principles of being productive and effective and saving time had been around for pretty much forever. It’s just that not many people subscribe to them the way I think they should.

So let’s dive right in. the first, if you’ve gotten my book, I would, Hey listen, if you buy my book on Amazon, what am I getting? I don’t know, 30 cents. I don’t know what it is, 20 cents. I don’t know, it’s not much, but if you look in that book, if you have it, if you want to grab it off Amazon. I’ll put a link in the show notes. One of the first chapters is called “Goals are worthless”. Okay? Goals are worthless. Now I’ve just spent a lot of time telling you that I’m big on setting goals and achieving them, right? Achiever is probably a good classification for the way that I feel about my life. However, most people are on the wrong track when they’re trying to set their goals. They just have an idea, “Hey, I’d like to lose weight.” “Hey, I’d like a million dollar business.” “Hey, I’d like to have 5 million in the bank.” Okay? That’s well and good. But can you really say for sure how you’re going to get there. Because the truth is, if you don’t have what I call a definite ideal goal in mind, something very, very specific, and a way you can work backwards from that. It’s very unlikely you’re going to ever achieve that instead you’ll be just in this perpetual state of trying to clothe them out and achieve this unattainable goal. It’s not attainable because you’re never really broken down the steps to get there. Okay? So in my book, I have also got a tagline in the book called “Design, Implement, and Achieve”. Now the editor they said, “Hey Chris, I don’t know if this makes sense ‘Design, Implement, Achieve’ was just typo. Shouldn’t that be ‘Design, Achieve, Implement’? And you know, looking back, could I have worded this a little easier to understand and made it more clear. I was trying to be concise but at the same time get my point across. And I don’t know, maybe some of it did, some of it failed, I don’t know. But what really, let me explain ‘design, implement, achieve’ to you. So you have to design this ideal goal. And you have to design a way to get there. Okay? That’s step 1. Now in my mind, step 2 needs to be proof of concept. Okay? Because if you’re not sure that you’re going to be able to achieve this goal that you’ve set up, you’re going to get bogged down, you’re going to get confused, you’re going to get lost, you’re going to go off on tangents.

So one of the first things out of the gate that I believe you need to do is you need to just go for the gusto, guns blazing. You need to achieve, I know, I’m sort of confusing myself right? Design, I mean, anyway, you have to achieve this once. So you have to implement it. Implement your system, your systematic approach for achieving this definite ideal goal. You have to achieve it once. Right? And to do that, you have to implement all the steps but you’re just going gang busters. And once you’ve achieved it once, then there’s a whole process for making it permanent in your life. Because I don’t think it’s great to achieve a...