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The Time Paradox:
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Dr. Zimbardo talks about The Time Paradox at the New York Academy of
Sciences
The Time Paradox: The New Psychology of Time That Will
Change Your Life, by Philip Zimbardo, PhD, and
John Boyd, PhD, makes the intriguing case that each of us has a unique time
personality. Some people tend to live hedonistically in the moment; others
are fixated on past sorrows or future agendas. The book contains a quiz to
determine your own time zone and suggestions for exploring its benefits and
pitfalls—the goal being to help you make the most of the time you have.
Boyd and Zimbardo have set the new gold standard for books
about time. The Time Paradox is a provocative, informative treatise
that combines cutting edge research with practical, hands-on guidance for
self-change. In the hands of these two experienced scholars, time
’Time is our most valuable possession’: we are obsessed with
schedules and multitasking to save time, say the authors of this insightful
study of the importance of time in our lives. Yet people spend time less
wisely than money. Zimbardo (The Lucifer Effect), professor
emeritus of psychology at Stanford, and Boyd, research director for Yahoo!,
draw on their two decades of research to explain why people devalue time.
They blend scientific results into a straightforward narrative exploring
various past-, present- and future-oriented ways of perceiving time and
argue against becoming imprisoned or obsessed by any one of these. Zimbardo
and Boyd have cogent insight into all of time’s elements and show how they
can be used for success, better health and greater fulfillment. For
instance, understanding the role of time in investment can lead to wiser
financial decisions, and a relationship will not work if one partner is
focused on today’s pleasure while the other wants to plan for the future.
This is a compelling and practical primer (filled with quizzes and tests) on
making every moment count.
Time is to humans as water is to fish: Pervasive, essential
and almost entirely overlooked. In this important book, Zimbardo and Boyd
call our attention to this invisible force shaping our lives. They explain
the profound effect that our attitude toward time has on our habits, our
happiness, our likelihood of success … and offer key advice on shifting
perspectives. It’s one of those rare and illuminating books that can change
the way you think. And quite possibly the way you live. The Time Paradox reveals how to
better use your most irreplaceable resource, based on solid science and
timeless wisdom. Phil Zimbardo, a master at making complex
ideas and discoveries in psychology, including his own, not only
intelligible but fun and personally relevant for non-specialists, has done
it again, this time with the fascinating topic of time perspective. Bravo!
CONTENTS
The New Science of Time: How Time Works
CHAPTER NOTES WHY TIME MATTERS In the eighteenth century, a secretive sect of men created a gruesome
memorial to the importance of time in the dim, dusty basement of Santa Maria
della Concezione, a nondescript church at the top of the Spanish Steps in
Rome. Like the great St. Peter's, which towers nearby, the cramped walls of
Santa Maria della Concezione are covered with individual tessera from which
transcendent mosaics emerge. Unlike those in St. Peter's, the decorative
tessera adorning the narrow confines of Santa Maria della Concezione are
made not of colored glass but of discolored human bone. Hundreds of stacked
skulls form Roman arches. Thousands of individual vertebrae create intricate
mandalas. Smaller bones, perhaps from hands and feet, form chandeliers
replete with light bulbs. The complete skeleton of a small boy dangles from
the ceiling holding the scales of justice in its bony hands. And fully
dressed monks with withered skin still intact wait in reflective poses for
eternity. The sheer spectacle is at once terrifying and enthralling. Capuchin monks, better known for giving the name of their distinctive
hats to coffee topped with foam, or cappuccino, reinterred four thousand of
their deceased brethren in this basement because their earlier "final
resting place" had become the site of new construction. Despite its solemn
content, the almost surreal Crypt of the Capuchin Monks with its posed
corpses has the feel of a Hollywood movie set or an exceptionally well-done
Halloween display. For most visitors, the crypt is a sight to be seen, not a
site for serious contemplation, and tourists shuffle through it each year
paying less homage to the dead before them than they do to works of art in
the nearby Vatican museum. To someone who is not eager to rush off to the next wonder on his
itinerary, a deeper message reveals itself. For instance, when one of your
authors, John Boyd, had an unexpected free afternoon to visit the Crypt of
the Capuchin Monks, he noticed an inscription written on the floor at the
foot of a pile of bones: What you are, they once were. As he read that flowing script of twelve simple words, the past and
future burst upon the present. In an instant, the skeletons ceased to be
historical curiosities and became fellow travelers on life's fateful
journey—our peers. Four hundred years of sunrises and sunsets, fifteen
thousand days of feasts, famines, wars, and peace no longer separate us,
becoming as inconsequential as the color of the monks' dried skin and
ivoried bones, the medieval Latin they spoke, or the style of their robes.
The inscription strips us of our well-honed psychological ability to
ignore—even to deny—the inevitable: Our time on earth is limited. In the
mere blink of the cosmic eye, we will join the billions of our ancestors who
have lived, died, and become indistinguishable from the piles of bones in
front of us. The crypt is a solemn reminder to the living of our ultimate destiny.
While Rome's other attractions display the life's work of some of the
world's greatest artists, this crypt stores remnants of the lives
themselves. If the bones could talk, they would tell stories of thousands of
aspiring Leonardos, Michelangelos, and Raphaels lying there. Yet the crypt's
silent message is not an admonition that we prepare for death but an
impassioned plea that we live meaningfully and fully the lives we are living
right now. That is the subject of this book—time and your life: how you can
strengthen, deepen, and even reinvent your relationship to it by using the
exciting new discoveries we have made in our thirty-plus years of research
on time. We want to share with you a new science and psychology of time that
we developed based on personal, scholarly, and experimental investigations.
Your personal attitudes toward time and those that you share with people
around you have a powerful effect on all of human nature, yet their
importance is underappreciated by most people, academics and laypeople
alike. This is the first paradox of time: Your attitudes toward time have a
profound impact on your life and your world, yet you seldom recognize it. In the course of our work, we have identified six major attitudes toward
time, or time perspectives. We will first help you to identify your personal
time perspectives and then we will offer exercises designed to expand your
time orientation and to help you make the most of your precious time. If our
project succeeds, you will learn how to transform negative experiences into
positive ones and how to capitalize on the positives in the present and the
future without succumbing to blind devotion to either. Therein lies a second
key paradox of time: Moderate attitudes toward the past, the present, and
the future are indicative of health, while extreme attitudes are indicative
of biases that lead predictably to unhealthy patterns of living. Our goal is
to help you reclaim yesterday, enjoy today, and master tomorrow. To do so,
we'll give you new ways of seeing and working with your past, present, and
future. Over three decades, we have given our questionnaires to more than ten
thousand people. Colleagues of ours in more than fifteen countries around
the world have used it with several more thousands. It's been rewarding to
see individuals take this inventory and realize that they parcel their flow
of personal experiences into mental categories or time zones. After we
present the broad strokes of our discoveries in Part One, we'll get into how
to use these perspectives for better health, more profitable investments, a
more successful career and business, and more enjoyment of your personal
relationships. We hope that our discoveries will allow you to find better, different
ways of living, freeing you from burdensome, outdated, or tired thoughts and
actions to which your old perspective tied you. It's like the classic joke: A guy from the city is walking down a country road past a farm when he
sees a farmer feeding pigs in a highly unusual manner. The farmer is
standing under an apple tree, holding up an enormous pig so that the pig
can eat as many apples as it wants. The farmer moves the pig from one
apple to another until the pig is satisfied, then the farmer starts again
with another pig. The city man watches the farmer feed his pigs in this
way for some time. Finally, he can't resist asking the farmer, "Excuse me.
I can't help notice how hard it is for you to lift and carry and feed
these pigs one by one at the apple tree. Wouldn't it save time if you just
shook the tree and let the pigs eat what falls on the ground?" The farmer
looks at the city guy with a puzzled expression and asks, "But what's time
to a pig?" What pigs are you carrying around that you need to let go of? Read The
Time Paradox and find out...
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