Leave the house one hour earlier

Imagine you’re running late for an important meeting.

On the way to the office, you start getting sweaty, hurried and anxious. Sitting in traffic, helpless as a leaf in a gale, you cycle through the excuse barrage in your mind.

How will you justify being late so your coworkers aren’t pissed and your client doesn’t fire you?

Maybe tell them there was a traffic accident. Say you jumped out of the train car onto the highway to rescue a group of children from a burning school bus. Make yourself look like the hero, good call.

Once you get that story straight, you start beating yourself up for acting unprofessional and disorganized.

God damn it, why do you always do this to yourself? You should have left the house earlier. Rookie move.

When you finally arrive at the meeting, exactly seven minutes late, nobody notices. In fact, the meeting hasn’t even started yet. But you look and feel like you’ve just outrun the cops. Cortisol is pumping through your bloodstream, your heart is beating out of your chest, and while your pulse slowly stabilizes, the events of the morning replay in your head, so you zone out during the first fifteen minutes of the meeting.

Eventually, you’re able to settle in and get down to business. But the damage has still been done. Clearly, there has been a cumulative impact on your psyche.

This exact scenario used to happen to me almost daily. For years. Being just barely late became my brand. And it was killing me.

Not to mention, annoying the people in my life. It wasn’t until my early thirties that it finally crystalized.

One day I was meeting a friend for coffee, and totally by accident, I was forty minutes early for our appointment. It was fantastic. Walked around the neighborhood, bought a snack, listened to a podcast and read a few chapters from my new book.

The commute was relaxing, slow and satisfying. Fear wasn’t soaking my back and staining my clothes. And once my friend arrived, it was easy to be present during our conversation.

Suddenly it occurred to me. I would rather be an hour early than a minute late.

Not in that alpha male, persuasion strategy kind of way, where executives use the constraint of rushing as a tactical advantage so the competition’s last minute details and decisions are in disarray.

No, my theory is simpler than that. Being an hour early rather than a minute late is not a power move. It’s not about having leverage over others. It’s about lowering our blood pressure. Slowing down so we’re not blind to what is so awesome about existence.

The problem is, we love to impress ourselves. We fall for the seduction of short term notability. We manufacture emergencies as if some studio audience or a panel of judges were watching us.

But they’re not. Nobody is watching. Hell, most of us are not even watching our own lives. Because there is nothing heroic about rushing.

Next time you have an important meeting, simplify rather than maximize. Announce to yourself that you have all the time in the world to do everything you want to do, leave the house exactly one hour earlier than you would normally, and see how it feels.

See if the dividends pay out.

LET ME ASK YA THIS…
Where are you still trying to impress yourself?