The Value of a Billion Seconds

I came across a gem of an episode from The Tim Ferris Show this week on a podcast he did with Graham Duncan in 2019 from this tweet from Blake Robbins.

In the conversation that he has with Tim, Graham Duncan talks about the concept of Time Billionaires. In a larger point about the difference between millionaires and billionaires, he says that most people don't appreciate the difference between a million and a billion seconds.

He goes on to quantify this difference between a million and a billion seconds: A million seconds is about 12 days. A billion seconds, on the other hand, is a whopping 32 years.

This concept is one of those things that blows your mind when you take the time to quantify and think about what the results mean.

Duncan then goes on to really speak out specifically to young people and 20-year-olds:

"When I see 20-year-olds – the thought I had was they probably have two billion seconds left. But they aren’t relating to themselves as time billionaires."

This was quite an eye-opener for me. As a 20-year-old, it's easy to be down on ourselves because we do not have too many material resources. We have no money, young relationships, and many of us don't even have a separate conditioner and shampoo.

However, while we lack a lot of material resources, we are extremely blessed with a wealth of time: a couple of billion seconds as we can expect to live past our eighties in our old age.

We often hear that old adage that time is the most valuable resource, therefore it's criminal to waste it, therefore don't throw away the tens of thousands of other seconds in the day because someone was a jerk to you for 10 seconds. As much as our mothers tell us not to waste time, I at least seem to not take it to heart.

However, stumbling upon this concept that all the 20-year-olds on the planet have actually been secret time billionaires is a pretty enlightening concept to me. Time, as it's said, is the great equalizer after all.

We all have an abundance of time ahead of us, billions of seconds that Jeff Bezos would part with a large portion of his billions of cash to acquire from us. Just buying a couple of million seconds of my time, would give him 6 more years to live his life. A lot can be achieved in 6 years. Realizing this puts the onus on me to make the most of these seconds and stop wasting them.

It's all about using that time effectively and comes down to one question:

What am I doing with my most important resource?