Issue #131 Have We Become Efficient At Everything Except Living?

A few nights ago, Kelly and I climbed onto a small boat in the canals of Amsterdam with a handful of close friends and proceeded to have one of the most memorable meals of my life.

Our captain eased us quietly into the waterway while our host poured the first glass of French wine. For the next three hours, we drifted through the canals at little more than a walking pace; gliding beneath centuries-old bridges, past narrow canal houses leaning gently toward the water, while our guide shared the hidden stories woven into a city layered with history.

The boat would occasionally pull alongside a dock to collect the next course from some of Amsterdam’s celebrated restaurants. Dish after dish arrived at the table unhurried and deliberate, the way a great meal is meant to unfold.

The wine kept flowing, the conversation kept deepening, and laughter filled the small galley as the evening slowly drifted by around us. For a few rare hours, surrounded by people I love, it felt as though the rest of the world had fallen completely away.

At some point, I looked around at the faces gathered at that table and realized I had not checked my phone in hours. It struck me that I had become so fully immersed in the evening -  the conversation, the laughter, the simple joy of being together - that for a little while I had completely lost track of time.

And that is the irony of time: the moments that stay with us forever are often the ones where, for a brief period, we stop measuring time altogether and simply allow ourselves to be fully immersed inside of it.

Time’s Fickle Nature

When I was young, my father used to tell me not to blink too often because life would race by. I never paid much attention to the warning. At that age, time felt endless and I had all the energy in the world with which to spend it.

Then something happened.

I blinked.

My father understood something about time that most of us only appreciate far too late. When we are young, life feels like it moves almost painfully slowly. We spend our childhood leaning toward the next milestone; waiting to get to high school, counting down the days until we can drive, anticipating graduation, convinced that real life exists somewhere just beyond the season we are currently in.

As a kid growing up on the prairies, time seemed to move like the freight trains that stretched across the horizon near my grandparents’ farm; long, slow, and taking forever to pass by.

But somewhere in the busy years of building careers, raising families, and chasing opportunities, something shifts quietly and without announcement.

One day we catch a glimpse of grey in the mirror or look at our children and cannot fully account for the distance between the toddler and the teenager standing in front of us. We realize time is no longer moving like that long prairie freight train from childhood. Somewhere along the way it became a bullet train, accelerating so gradually that we barely noticed the speed until entire seasons of life were already behind us.

We have all been given an hourglass at birth filled with something of immeasurable value:

Time.

When we are young, the hourglass appears impossibly full. The sand feels endless, so we spend it carelessly because we cannot imagine it ever running out. But as the years pass, we become increasingly aware of the grains slipping steadily through the narrow centre. Stranger still, it begins to feel as though the sand is falling faster than it once did.

The finish lines behind us begin to outnumber the ones still ahead.

And eventually we come to understand something both obvious and deeply unsettling: once a grain of sand falls through the glass, it cannot be returned to the top. 

A moment is not stored somewhere for later retrieval…it  is simply gone.

What makes this harder is that the hourglass never announces how much remains. It just quietly keeps pouring whether we are paying attention or not; whether we are fully alive inside the moment or simply moving distractedly through it on the way to something else.

The Thing We Have Quietly Optimized Away

A while back, I heard Scott Galloway make the observation that the best place to make money is America, but the best place to spend it is Europe. 

His comment has stayed with me, and after a few days into this trip I think he may have been pointing toward something much deeper than just economics.

Most founders I know are not struggling with laziness. If anything, the opposite is true. We have become exceptionally good at building, producing, optimizing, and moving forward. 

But somewhere in all that motion, many of us have quietly forgotten how to simply sit inside our own lives long enough to fully experience them. We have turned rest into recovery, leisure into optimization, and weekends into preparation for the week ahead. Somewhere in that process, we stopped noticing that the sand was still pouring through the hourglass while we were busy trying to maximize every grain of it.

What I have observed while travelling here in Europe feels genuinely different. A stroll down a cobblestone street without a destination. A lunch on a sun-drenched terrace that nobody seems eager to finish.

An entire culture that appears to have made a quiet collective decision that ordinary moments are not obstacles to get through, but experiences worth fully savouring.

Efficiency, it turns out, is a terrible substitute for experience.  And I say that as someone whose majority of life has been shaped by ambition, productivity, and the pursuit of financial  results. 

The irony is that the very drive that created the freedom for me to enjoy moments like this also became, at times, the thing pulling me away from them. Somewhere along the way, producing stopped being simply what I did and quietly became part of who I was. Achievement became intertwined with identity and productivity became a way of validating my worth.

And without fully realizing it, I got pulled into the vortex so many high performers eventually find themselves in; becoming incredibly efficient and effective at managing life while simultaneously becoming less present inside of it.

The Bank That Actually Matters

I have spent a significant portion of my life making financial deposits, and I want to be clear: those deposits are important. They have provided security, freedom, and the means for me to live and express my life in a very real way.

But I have come to learn that the most valuable deposits I will ever make are not into a financial bank; they are into my memory bank.

And the memory bank does not grow through discipline and strategy alone. It grows through presence, through novelty, and through the willingness to slow down long enough for an experience to actually reach you.

Our brains are built for efficiency. Habit and routine allow us to move through a familiar day without much conscious effort, which is useful. It is also why so many days disappear without a trace. When everything is familiar, the brain stops registering it as worth remembering; routine compresses time, and we blink and a month is gone.

Novelty does the opposite. A new street, an unfamiliar flavour, a conversation that goes somewhere unexpected; these things demand attention. And attention is the raw material of making memories.

There is something worth noticing in the way Europeans seem to understand this instinctively. A long lunch is not laziness; it is an investment. The slow walk is not inefficiency; it is attention being paid to the texture of a life. What looks from the outside like an unwillingness to hurry is actually something more intentional than most of us have been willing to practice; it is the daily choice to make a deposit into the bank that actually compounds into what ultimately will be of the highest value to us.

What I Am Carrying Home

As the finish lines behind us begin to outnumber the ones still ahead, the question worth sitting with is not whether we have been productive enough. It is whether we have been present enough.  Whether the endless stream of sand pouring through the bottom of the hour glass, is landing somewhere meaningful, or quietly disappearing into another efficient, well-managed day.

I am not suggesting we abandon the drive that built our businesses. That drive is real and it has produced things worth being proud of. But I am beginning to believe there is a version of our days, not reserved for vacations, that looks a little more like a slow boat on a canal; more sensory, more curious, more willing to let a meal be a meal and a conversation be a conversation.

Time is our most valuable asset, not simply because there is so little of it, but because of how we choose to experience it while it is still ours. Every moment we move through on autopilot is a deposit we never made; a memory that never formed, a conversation that never quite landed, an experience that passed through us rather than into us.

Most regrets in life are rarely tied to the things we did, but rather the things we talked ourselves out of doing. Regret is  connected to how we mis-used our time. The conversations we never had. The risks we were too afraid to take. The places we never explored. The relationships we assumed we would one day get to. .

The financial deposits matter, and they create opportunities, security, and freedom. But when our falling sands begin to dwindle and we look back on the life we have lived, it is the memory deposits that will matter most.  The moments we were fully present for, the people we deeply connected with, and the experiences that made us feel truly alive while we were living them.

So this week, I want to ask you:

Where in your life have you let efficiency quietly replace presence?

What would it look like to approach one ordinary moment this week with the curiosity that would allow you to experience it more deeply?

And what would you remember differently if you simply slowed down long enough to actually notice it?

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