Rethinking Time

Welcome inside the vault. This is a collection of previously unreleased lessons from eight-figure entrepreneurial mastermind RJon Robins. And in case you didn’t see the warning label - this content can be explicit and it is for serious entrepreneurs only.

In this lesson, RJon takes us on a journey through the history of modern timekeeping, and how these seemingly arbitrary constructs have shaped our perception of time. He demonstrates how entrepreneurs can use this knowledge to unlock more of their full potential.

Let's go to the vault!

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Narrator: 0:00

Welcome inside the vault. This is a collection of previously unreleased lessons from eight figure entrepreneurial mastermind RJon Robins. And in case you didn't see the warning label, this content can be explicit, and it is for serious entrepreneurs only. Listen in as RJon peels back the truth about time at the 2014 Live Quarterly Meeting in Marina del Rey with members of How To MANAGE a Small Law Firm. Let's go to the vault.

Testimonies: 0:39

Working with RJon is like having a shortcut to future you. Every time I can have an opportunity to spend time with RJon, I try to take it and be a sponge. I thought everyone was perfect. You know, they were running to the front of the stage to see this person. RJon's wearing his crazy shirt. You know, he drinks tiger blood in the morning just for fun and he's like breathing down my throat. Sometimes it's terrifying to look with him. It's like he's looking into your soul. But it's, it's growth the whole way.

RJon Robins: 1:19

So, what is time and how to use it as a profit-generating tool? Benjamin Franklin is one of my heroes. I think everyone should have a hero, and I think you could do a lot worse than having Benjamin Franklin as your hero too. Seriously. Benjamin Franklin was the first American rockstar entrepreneur. He was the Bill Gates, he was the Steve Jobs, he was the Mark Cuban, he was the Jeff Bezos of his day. Before we had computers. Before we had internet. Before we had cell phones. Before we had any of the things that we all use as excuses not to be effective, Benjamin Franklin learned how to run a printing press and then created policies and systems and procedures, a lot like this, for how to run a printing press. And learned how to get people to run the printing press for him and then actually began to franchise his printing press and license his processes and systems and procedures up and down the East Coast and became, the equivalent of today, a billionaire and retired when he was like in his early 40s. I love that story. We all think of Benjamin Franklin as the old statesman on the hundred dollar bill, but he wouldn't have been able to become the statesman. He wouldn't have had the time and the resources and the freedom to be who we all know today as Benjamin Franklin if he hadn't built a successful business to give him freedom to use his time as he wanted to. One of my favorite quotes is,"Failing to plan is the same thing as planning to fail." And it's true. If you walk out of here and you don't have your calendar planned, you've just planned to basically wing it for the rest of the year. And your year probably won't work out much better for you than the last 10 years did. Concept of profit. Profit is any time you exchange something of a lower value for something of a higher value. You know, everyone wants to be like Fred Flintstone in this picture. You know, laying around in the hammock, sleeping, relaxing, doing nothing. Actually, that's not true. That's not the natural state of a human being. But a lot of people think that's what they would want. And a lot of you right now are giving up time to be somewhere else, to do something else that's of a lower value, so that you can be here doing something of a higher value. The picture on the right is ancient Egyptians with ancient farming mechanisms. Right? Now they could have been sitting around doing nothing, but instead they went out in the field, and they dug trenches, and they planted seeds, and they tended those seeds, and they learned to farm so that they could have a better life and create nutrition. And stop being hunter gatherers and create a civilization. The ancient calendar was really designed as a tool to help maximize farm crop yields. Farming is a profit generating business. You trade a little bit of resources, some water, some crops, some physical energy, and you produce a steady stream, a steady source of reliable nutrition. So that people can focus on developing skills and developing expertise and creating culture and creating a community. As opposed to hunter gatherers who always have to be on the run. Make sense? The calendar, you couldn't be a farmer, you couldn't grow crops if you didn't have a way to predict when's the right time to put the crop in the ground. When's the right time to put more water on the crop. When's the right time to take the crop out of the ground from year-to-year and season to season. That's what the calendar was originally invented to do. It was invented to help make more profit for the farmer. By planning when they were going to focus on doing what? By planning when they were going to put into action which causes so that months later, at the end of the season, they could produce the effect they desire which is a bountiful crop. This is exactly how you build a million dollar law firm. It's exactly how you do it. We're going to show you how to use your calendar today to put into action the causes that will work and work and work and work and work for you so that you wake up in a year, two years, three years, five years from now with a completely different life than you have today. A better life than you have today because you'll have a business working for you that gives you the ability to leverage your natural talents. And that's a great thing. The law of falling objects. We all studied the case in law school. Byrne versus Boadle. That was the case where the barrel rolled out of the second story of the warehouse, clocked the guy in the head. The plaintiff sued the warehouse man for negligence. And the warehouse man's defense was, essentially, you have to prove the negligence. And the court, this was an English court in the 1800s, basically said, "Bullshit". The court basically said, 'In the universe that we live in, causes lead to effects.' 'Effects don't proceed causes and effects certainly don't pop into existence by themselves.' 'And if a barrel rolls out of a window and hits someone on the head, that is an effect.''And because we know that barrels rolling outta windows are usually caused by negligence, we can presume negligence.' If a law firm is profitable, that's an effect. If a law firm is efficient, that is an effect. If your staff is effective and does a good job, that is an effect. If you've got a steady stream of client, of prospective clients coming to you, that is an effect of a marketing system. If you're able to convert those prospective clients reliably and consistently at a good ratio, with good fees, that is an effect of a good sales system. If the work gets done efficiently, so that you can have time to spend with your family, and have free time to enjoy your life and the fruits of your labor, and have predictable, consistent work getting done by your firm, and you're able to be on vacation with no cell phone, and no computer, and emergency access only, because your factory is running well, that is an effect. When the metrics show up in a favorable way, that is an effect. These are all effects. And what we're going to be doing this weekend is showing you how to plan the causes for the next 12 months. Okay. I got to break your concept of time. This whole idea that we all take for granted, Eastern Standard Time, Pacific Standard Time, and you think there's some sort of natural law that dictates that we have to have time zones. Time zones are entirely artificial, made up concepts. All right? November 18th, 1883. Write that date down. November 18th, 1883. Railroads created the first time zones. The need for continental time zones stemmed directly from the problems of moving passengers and freight over thousands of miles of rail line that covered North America by the 1800s. Since human beings had first begun keeping track of time, they set their clocks to the local movements of the sun. Even as late as the 1800s, most towns in the U. S. had their own local time, generally based on high noon, or the time when the sun was at its highest point in the sky. As railroads began to shrink the travel time between cities from days or months to mere hours. These local time zones became a scheduling nightmare. Railroad timetables in major cities listed dozens of different arrival and departure times from the same train, each linked to a different local time zone. Efficient rail transportation demanded a more uniform timekeeping system rather than turning to the federal government of the United States and Canada to create a North American time zone systems, the powerful railroad companies took it upon themselves to create a new time code system. The companies agreed to divide the continent into four time zones. The dividing lines adopted were very close to the ones we still use today. Most Americans and Canadians quickly embraced the new time zones, since railroads were often their lifeblood and main link to the rest of the world. However, it was not until 1918 that Congress officially adopted railroad time zones and put them under the supervision of the Interstate Commerce Commission. Time zones. Where do time zones exist? They're policies. They're internal policies that the railroads created. Which the railroads were powerful enough that they actually imposed them, and time zones became external policies. Do you understand what I'm talking about here? We all grow up thinking Eastern Time Zone, you know, 'Oh that must be handed down from God Almighty!' No, it was a railroad executive who said 'We need to fix this problem, so we need to create an internal policy.' And their policy became so powerful that they were actually able to impose their internal policy and turn it into an external policy to the point where they got the United States government and now the entire world to adopt their policy. Some guy who sat on a toilet, just like each of you do every day, thought of this! That's what you've got to get. It's completely man made. You can make whatever you want to make of your life. You can make whatever you want to make of your law firm. All by thinking about how you want to live. Make internal policies. Make external policies. Learn how to create procedures. You can make this happen for yourself too.

Narrator: 10:54

If this episode is resonating with you, click the link in the show notes below to learn more about the upcoming five week business plan boot camp. Yes, this is a free virtual bootcamp, which means seats are limited in order to provide personal attention and laser coaching. Click the link below and turn this podcast episode into an actionable business plan to grow your law firm. And now, back to the show.

RJon Robins: 11:22

The first reliable timekeeping device wasn't invented until the 1700s. So, when you were on a ship at sea, here's the old world, here's the new world. This is the big scary ocean in between, right? This is called latitude, and you can measure latitude by the angle of the sun using a little device called a sextant. You're standing on a ship, and you kind of, first thing in the morning, you can kind of like measure the angle of the sun using this sextant, and you can know how far north or south you are. And as long as you keep yourself on the right latitude line, you can basically follow this latitude from the old world to a new world, and pretty much arrive where you're supposed to arrive. So what you would do, is you would sail north or south in the old world until you get the right latitude line, And then you would literally just follow it across to the new world, and then go north or south to come back. So far so good? Problem is, how do you ration your supplies? How do you ration your water and your food? Because this doesn't tell you how far along you are on the journey. To know how far along you are on the journey, you need to know longitude. The angle of the sun doesn't tell you how far you are along on this line, going east to west. The way you know how far you are along this line, east to west, is measuring how long you've been traveling at what speed. Now on a sailing ship, you can tell how fast you're going by dropping out a rope with a knot. And you drop out a rope with a knot, you drop it out of the front of the ship, And you pick it up at the back of the ship, and you know how long the rope is, and you know how long the ship is, you know how fast you're going. If you've got a hundred foot rope, and you've got a hundred foot ship, and you drop the rope out at the beginning with a knot on it, and you follow the knot as the ship is moving, and it takes a minute to get to the back of the ship, you're going a hundred feet in a minute if you're in a hundred foot ship. A hundred feet in a minute translates to however many miles per hour, or whatever, and that's how you can tell how fast you're going. The problem is, if you don't know that you're going 10 miles an hour, or 5 miles an hour, for an hour, a day, a week, 6 hours, or whatever, then you don't know how far east or west you are, and you end up over here when you guessed that you were actually over here, and the rest of the trip really sucks because you've run out of water. You get the problem here? So the point I'm making is it wasn't even until the 1700s that we had a reliable way of keeping track of the hours of the day. So all this stuff about the billable hour. Bullshit. No one even knew how long an hour was. No one even knew what day it was. No one even knew what time zone they were in. This is all artificial, modern, made up stuff. Human beings have been on the planet for thousands of years. We've been evolving intellectually, evolving physiologically. We're not that much different than we were a thousand years ago. You've got to let go of all this stuff and learn that your calendar is not something natural. Your calendar is a tool. It's a business management tool that was invented to help you make a profit.

Narrator: 14:46

Thanks for listening. Tune in next week for more lessons From The Vault.