Entrepreneurs: time is a lateral thing!

We have all grown up with a linear understanding of time!

No this is not physics, astrophysics, or a brief history of time in the Stephen Hawking tradition. It's about our view of time.

We think of time as if we were walking on a tight rope, too afraid to fall on the either side - or right, smack-in-the-center, on our poor crotch. This rope (of time) has a place where we are "now." We are warned by everyone to not look "down", or we are certain to fall down. Or to look "back" - like why the hell would you dare look back - that's history, done with, finished, move on, will you! We are told to just focus on the job ahead, the "future"! (Reminds me of my childhood place Lahore where we still had horse-driven carriages in those days called tongas to transport people from one place to another and all these horses had great looking spectacles that would just make them look ahead, all the time!)

Coming back to the world of driver-less cars, I started by saying we see time as a line that extends from back to the front. We do not think of it as something that has a lateral dimension too. As an entrepreneur, it is critical to have a lateral view of time. So if you are standing at the point "now" - what can you do sideways? Yes, you can devote your entire day to one thing, but what if you could devote it to say 5 or 10? Projects, networking, me-times, thinking-naps, extreme-execution-drills, planning, helping ... Now think beyond a day: months, years, lifetime.

Have you ever been to gym? I go there everyday and walk right past the entrance door. Trust me, that's one big exercise. Anyway, in a gym, you could do a treadmill for an hour, or have a schedule to do 10 different things in that hour. My not-so-extensive gym experience tells me that in that way you burn more fat and you enjoy it more. Copy-paste in your entrepreneur life!  

Start taking time as a lateral thing! Push yourself more.

My mother used to say that work creates its own pace. If you have no work, there will be no pace, and the worst time is the time spent idle.

So pack more stuff in your time. Hop from one project to the other. Do leg crunches and then run a little bit. You will be surprised by your capacity to work and deliver.

You will never know your true potential until your are not doing at least 4 times more than what you are doing.

Time is lateral - start exploring it.

Naimul Abd is a strategist and a corporate consultant who has advised more than 20 multinationals. Now as an entrepreneur, he is involved in a number of innovation startups and is changing the rules of entrepreneurship.