Why Everything Is Urgent

If it matters: it can't wait.

When you’re five years old, one year is 20% of your whole life¹. By the time you turn fifteen, a year is 5% of your life. At fifty, it’s barely 2%.

As our minds accumulate experiences and knowledge, our perception of time accelerates. It moves fastest when we do repetitive, mindless tasks, like social media scrolling or youtube hopping.

Focus slows time.

You only need focus when you’re doing something worthy of your time. But our brains crave rest and the easy dopamine of candy and routine. Thinking hard about interesting problems or ideas feels like a waste of calories.

Boredom, at the beginning, also slows time.

The first few minutes of boredom can be painful and unbearable. You don’t even realize how little you think about the muscles your hand uses to open instagram or scroll twitter. You need something, anything, to fill the time.

Yet boredom, unlike focus or routine, offers magic if you let it.

When you resist and let boredom in, time fades away. Your overstimulated mind finally exhales. It stop clinging to half-formed thoughts and expands. Random ideas connect. Old memories resurface. And if you let boredom stay, it’ll help your brain imagine your next big project.

Projects are worthless unless you execute them.

Execution has only one true definition: releasing the project into the world.
To be a writer, you need readers.
To be an artist, you need an audience.
To be an entrepreneur, you need customers.

Every day, every hour, every second you keep your project to yourself, you lose an opportunity to learn. Projects are never perfect, and you have no idea how good (or bad) an idea is until its intended audience sees it. Only by launching your ideas do you discover how to make them better, and better, and better.

So every second you wait to release it is a wasted opportunity to learn something new.

That’s why everything is urgent.

1. If you get to live to 100, I believe in you.