Episode #86
Why Time Is the Ingredient You Keep Skipping
Passion is born out of effort times time. Remove time from the equation and you lose depth, richness, and the ability to build real meaning.
17 min
Key takeaways
- Inject time deliberately into experiences because modern speed keeps pulling it out automatically. Effort plus time equals passion, and you cannot shortcut that.
- Use books as workbooks rather than summaries. When you work for an insight, you remember it and integrate it. A list of 10 AI-generated lessons from a book rarely sticks.
- Rename mindfulness if the word stops you. Paul calls it tactical thinking. The practice is the same: slow the moment down, use your senses, and stay in it longer than feels comfortable.
- Delayed gratification is a skill you can teach yourself and your children through small, repeatable moments. The ice cream is still coming at 4pm. Wait for it.
- The gap between moving fast and slowing all the way down is where richness lives. The contrast is the point, not the slowness by itself.
Timestamps
00:00Brussels and real IMAX: why Paul drove there
00:43Time as the secret ingredient in every experience
04:52Delayed gratification inside a single scene
05:46Vinyl records versus Spotify: the ritual matters
08:49Where time is already built in (and where it is not)
10:07Passion is born out of effort times time
12:56Reading books slowly as a deliberate practice
14:25Practical examples: bedroom, coffee, ice cream
Show notes
What this episode is about
Paul drove to Brussels specifically to watch Odyssey in a real IMAX cinema. Standing in line before the film, he noticed almost nobody reached for their phone. That observation became the thread for this entire episode: time as a deliberate ingredient, and what happens when you remove it from the experiences that matter.
The core idea
Passion is born out of effort times time. That formula is the backbone of this episode. Speed is useful. AI is useful. But a lot of the richness in life comes from adding time back in, consciously, because modern life keeps pulling it out of the equation.
Examples Paul uses
- Listening to a Hans Zimmer record on vinyl versus searching Spotify. The ritual of finding the right groove, placing the needle, walking back to your seat. That friction creates focus.
- Reading David Deutsch's The Beginning of Infinity with a pencil versus asking AI for the 10 main lessons. You remember what you worked for.
- Telling a child they can have ice cream at 4pm when it is 11am now. Delayed gratification as a teachable skill.
- Lying next to your partner with a gap between you, making eye contact, waiting before closing that distance. The waiting changes the experience entirely.
- Making coffee slowly before reading: smell it, take a sip, put it down, then open the book.
Key concept: tactical thinking
Paul uses the term "tactical thinking" as his preferred framing for what others call mindfulness. His point: if the word mindful feels too soft, rename it. The practice is the same and it is hard, not soft. Adding time to an experience requires discipline and intention.
The Christopher Nolan connection
In Odyssey, a single scene between Odysseus and his wife spans an intimate conversation, flashbacks from ten years earlier, and deliberate pacing that stretches the moment. Paul points to this as proof that time can be compressed, expanded, and layered, and that audiences feel the difference even when they cannot name it.
What to try
- Pick one experience this week and add time to it intentionally before you begin it.
- Use a book as a workbook: take notes, write in the margins, work for the insight.
- Play music on a format that does not allow skipping and stay with it.
Topics
delayed gratificationtime as ingredientpassion effort timetactical thinkingChristopher Nolan OdysseyHans Zimmer vinylslow living for entrepreneursreading books versus AI summariesidentity firstPaul Veth podcast
Full transcript
View full transcript
0:00
0Yesterday I went to Brussels to see the Odyssey. Why I went to Brussels is because that's only one of the cinemas where their original quality is shown for the Odyssey. It's because Christopher Nolan shot the entire movie in IMAX and there are just a few cinemas worldwide that that can show real IMAX with a really big screen. It's crazy how much bigger it is than the cinemas we have here in Breda. So I went to that movie and I was thinking, of course, I'm always thinking about things.
0:43
0And it hit me once again that there's one secret ingredient we all know exists. It's not something we can touch, but it's something we can feel, but it's not felt directly. It's felt indirectly and it shapes all of our experiences. What I'm talking about is time and of course there's a song by Hans Zimmer called time. In another amazing movie.
1:20
0Inception. But time is such an amazing tool and why it hit me is because in the Odyssey there is a humongous. Use of time, not only within the story, but also in the storytelling. And when you combine those, it's something he did even better in Interstellar, I think. And what hit me is I was standing in line waiting to enter the cinema because I was in time, but the Belgium cinemas are almost never on time.
2:06
0So I was there waiting and the people were inside still cleaning the room and I was standing there and I saw almost no one grabbing their phones. And it felt for me like everybody. Maybe they did it even on purpose. I don't believe that, but it was amazing. It felt like everybody was going in some kind of meditative state.
2:38
0And I believe that's what's happening in every movie that from Christopher Nolan. I don't see a lot of really long movies, but Christopher Nolan movies always. Take a long time, just like this episode, this video. But it's amazing because before the movie began. Everybody was in a meditative state.
3:06
0Then we enter the cinema, take our seats and everybody start eating all their popcorn and stuff like that. Drinking all their sodas and it's like there's still a lot of chaos, but all the the pre commercials came. Then thanks to Christopher Nolan, saw the beginning of June 3. So for several minutes people were watching a movie already in this immersive IMAX screen. It's almost as if it is virtual reality because there is no place I can watch and don't see a screen.
3:46
0It's amazing. And then the movie starts and at the moment the movie started, almost everybody ate everything already, so it was very quiet. And then the movie started and there's a gap in the storyline from twenty years. So that's an amazing thing because it stretches the mind. It stretches your experience because you have to time travel in your mind.
4:13
0But during the movie as well, it's pacing, of course. But also within the storytelling there was a moment one character, Odysseus, was talking to his wife And in that moment he was talking to his wife. There were flashbacks. Ten years ago, so. In that moment of silence of intimate conversation, there was delayed gratification in that moment.
4:52
0And within that moment there were flashbacks he was talking about from ten years ago. And that all combined in a scene that, I don't know, took five or ten minutes. And it was so intimate, small, big and large and time stretched as well. And for me, that's an experience you really have to feel and to understand that time and delayed gratification. And doing things over and over and over again in time or reaching for the same goal for a long period of time is something very, very.
5:46
0Worthy, it's giving richness to your life and for me as well. That's why I brought these two things. I already showed you the record of Hans Zimmer, because when you grab your phone and you play one song on Spotify and you're like, yeah, I don't like it and you skip to the next one and you skip to the next one and then you listen for it for one minute and then you skip to the next one. It's too easy. And there is no time.
6:24
0There is no delayed gratification for you to listen to the music. But if I want to listen to a record, there are. Several records in this. For example, part one. And if I play part one.
6:44
0I have to look with the needle. Okay, where is? LP one Okay side A. Where can I listen to Mission Impossible or Side B? No, I want Side B.
6:58
0I want to listen to Pearl Harbor. Another great, great, great movie, amazing movie. And I want when I want to listen to it, have to find the right spot on the record to place the needle. Have to walk over there to do it physically and then it starts playing and then I'm going to my seat or just standing and listening to it. But because I have to it takes time to put it on.
7:28
0I'm not going to skip because it's some kind of ritual that. Brings me to the point I can listen to the music Hans Zimmer produced. And thought of created with his whole orchestra, and then I can listen to it. And for me, that moment is much more enjoyable. It's much more rich of an experience than finding it on Spotify and searching for Pearl Harbor, Hans Zimmer and start playing it, because that's fast.
8:13
0And I believe that if you think about injecting time in experiences of your life, can enrich your experiences by adding time to it or deleting time. You have to pace yourself because now a day everything is available so fast that. Adding time is something you. You have to do yourself. Of course, there are several things in life that are just arranged for you by time.
8:49
0Like if you want to have bigger muscles, have to train overtime disciplined in a pattern three times a week, four times a week, five times a week. You have to eat the right stuff And then overtime your muscles will grow. So in several things there is time added automatically, but a lot of experiences in our life are not. Not rich anymore because time is lost. It's taken out of the equation and that's that's that's not.
9:27
0That's not what life supposed to be. Of course, I am happy. A lot of things go much faster because I believe in growth and I believe we can go to a really great future together. Now AI and robotics have this place in our society already, but in the near future it will have a bigger place in our society and we have to start working together to make our lives better of the whole world, everybody in the world and to make the planet better as well. That's my vision.
10:07
0But we have to think about, Okay, where can we add time to our lives so our lives can have a more meaningful. Life passion. Is born out of effort. Times time. Because if you put in effort once, you don't have passion for the thing.
10:31
0But if you put in passion and effort and energy and sacrifice for over years, automatically passion is integrated in that experience. But without time there is no passion. Never. You need time. We need time.
10:52
0We need to bring it. More consciously into our existence. So. I I believe I will play time. I am now looking at this record and it's the last one.
11:11
0The last song. Of the last. Record is inception time, so I will start listening to it. It's the same thing with books. Now we can ask AI, Okay, David Deutsch, tell me the beginning of Infinity.
11:29
0Time Infinity funny. Tell me the. The main lessons and it will give it to you, but it's different when you read the book, when you are sitting down thinking about what David Deutsch is meaning. It's intended thing, because a lesson if you got 10 lessons out of this book in front of you, you are never going to do anything with it. Maybe you combine all these lessons into one insight.
12:06
0You're like, yeah, that's a great insight, but there's no time added. Maybe one minute and what happens is you forget about the lesson. You don't do anything with it. But if you read the book, taking notes, maybe even in the book with pencil or with pen, doesn't matter, if you see it as a working thing as you have to work for the insights you get out of the book, then you add time automatically because if you have to work for something, there's effort. And when you add effort, you need to add time, it's combined and then you start to learn the lessons in a better, more integrated way than when you ask AI to give you the 10 best lessons of the book.
12:56
0So reading books, listening to records, I believe it's something you have to choose for nowadays because the fast living we have, the fast life we can have is amazing because in that movie there are several scenes and several things. There's speed, there's pacing and it's very, very quick all the time. And then suddenly it stops and it slows down immediately. And that gap between going fast all the time and slow down very, very good, really slowing down, almost doing nothing, almost doing nothing near doing nothing that gives you. A real richness of life, and that's what I want for you.
13:47
0To think about time and adding it as an ingredient for your life at the right moments and to feel what it does to you. And you can add it everywhere. You can teach it your children, Okay? You can have an ice cream. We will go at 04:00 this afternoon.
14:11
0Now it's 11:00. You have to wait five hours for an ice cream. Okay, if they are too young, it's not going to work. If they are a little bit older, it's going to work. Delayed gratification.
14:25
0Same in the bedroom with your partner. If you jump immediately on each other, there's no delayed gratification. What if you do this? Lay down next to each other, not against each other with the gap between you and your partner, And you wait and you stare in each other's eyes and you wait for one minute or two minutes, maybe three minutes. Watch what happens when you come closer and closer and closer.
15:06
0And feel what it does with you if you do that and then you touch each other. Try it for yourself. The same thing with reading a book. Okay, make coffee, jump on the couch, read a book or Okay, think about, Okay, I'm going to read this book. I'm going to make this coffee for me.
15:29
0Smell the coffee. It's almost like. Do a mindful course. You must do that. That's the.
15:37
0You can name it tactical thinking. If you think mindful is too soft, it's not soft. It's very hard, it's very difficult to be mindful. Make the coffee. Feel what it does with you.
15:53
0Smell the coffee, take a sip of the coffee, put it down. Then sit down, think about, okay, I'm going to read David Deutsch, the beginning of infinity explanation that transform the world. Okay, what does that mean for you? Book, a book like this, its intellectual property. That's matured over time.
16:21
0That's what books are. A book is never written in one week. It can be written in one week. The text, the letters, everything. But the information, the data.
16:37
0It's like good wine or good whiskey. It takes time. So take your time when you start reading the book. Yeah, you can speed read if you want. I don't believe that's working very well.
16:50
0Except when you combine it with using it as a workbook. That's amazing. So now I'm curious, what are your favorite things to do slowly? Is it taking a walk or do you use walking as movement that you go fast, but your thinking starts to slow down? Do you like to write with pen and paper?
17:15
0Do you like reading books, listening to records? Do you like sitting down in nature for one hour without anything? Do you like to have long conversations with your partner? What's your kind of thing to slow down and to be aware of time?
Frequently asked questions
What does Paul mean by 'passion is born out of effort times time'?
Passion is the result of sustained effort applied over a long period. Put in effort once and nothing sticks. Keep showing up, keep working, and over years the passion integrates automatically. Remove time from that equation and you are left with interest, not passion. That is the distinction Paul draws.
What is tactical thinking and how is it different from mindfulness?
Tactical thinking is Paul's term for the same practice many call mindfulness. His point: if the word mindful makes you dismiss it as soft, rename it. The practice, slowing down, using your senses, staying present in a moment longer than feels natural, is actually difficult and requires real discipline.
Why does Paul prefer vinyl records over Spotify?
The friction of vinyl creates focus. Finding the right side, placing the needle, walking back to your seat: all of that takes time and that time becomes a ritual. Because he invested effort to start listening, he does not skip. The experience is richer because time was added before a single note played.
Is Paul against AI and speed?
He is not. Paul is explicit that speed and AI are valuable and that a better future is built with them. His point is narrower: certain experiences lose their richness when time is removed, and in a fast world you have to add time back in consciously because nothing does it for you anymore.
How does this apply to reading books?
Paul uses David Deutsch's The Beginning of Infinity as an example. Getting 10 lessons from AI takes a minute and leaves nothing. Reading the book with a pencil, working for each insight, takes weeks and integrates those lessons into how you actually think. The effort and the time are what make the difference.
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The content makes the case that passion is born out of effort times time, and that most people remove time from the equation. Where in your work or life have you actually let time do its job, and what changed when you did?
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