The measure of time and success

Have you ever stopped to consider the concept of time? When used as a reference, the concept becomes quite subjective. Sure, one minute is a single second hand rotation of the clock. Sixty minutes is 60 rotations. And a 24-hour day is measured by 1,440 rotations. But what you and I call a day can be vastly different than a 24-hour time period.

Time has been used as a measure for many things. In addition to the length of a day, it’s used to measure travel, speed, and even success.

I just did a search for “how long does it take to get from New York to Los Angeles.” According to the first result, it takes 6 hours and 13 minutes to travel from New York to Los Angeles by plane. That is 373 minutes. However, that only includes total flight time. What about the time it takes to get to the airport, check your bag, go through security, and file down the jetway to your seat? That doesn’t even take weather patterns into account. A strong headwind can add an additional hour to your in-air travel time.

Now what if you were to ask the same previously asked question and consider traveling by car? Or what about by boat? Or even by foot?

You quickly see how time becomes an arbitrary reference. Thanks to Malcom Gladwell’s 2008 best seller, Outliers, we now have the time measurement of greatness: 10,000 hours (or 600,000 minutes).

Rarely if ever is a child, adolescent, or teen described as great. And for good reason. The wisdom, understanding, and discipline required of such a term demands a certain level of time. And according to Gladwell, it’s 10,000 hours.

But even on a more granular level, we use the same assumption for any level of greatness or even success. A typical workday is 8 hours – not 6 hours, not 5 hours… 8 hours. We assume that any measure of success that comes in a day requires 8 hours.

What about the time you forgot about your term paper only the night before it was due, spent the night pounding the keyboard, only to turn in an A-level paper? Would such a performance, such a thing of greatness have been created if you had used the entire two week time period (or 20,160 minutes)?

There are plenty of examples of greatness without great lengths of time. I believe Parkinson's Law allows greatness to be acquired in spite of time. A one hour workout doesn’t equate a great exercise routine no more than age equals greatness. Sure, one often follows the other but not always.

We can easily argue, time is an arbitrary measure. Certainly an inadequate benchmark of success.