Time-zone: EST

Over the weekend, dining out with friends suffering in high-paying, corporate jobs, I had a realisation: There’s a big difference in how you measure time when you’re owning a business versus working for one.

When we work for someone else (usually something else – the money), we want the time at work to shrink. We wait for the lunch hour. We want the end of work day to arrive quickly. We look forward to the weekend all week. We want month end, and salary, to come quickly. We plan the time between vacations thinking, dreaming and planning the next vacation. We wish the clock just moved faster. A lot faster. We’ll call it Employee’s Shrinking Time. Or EST.

When we own what we are doing – our team, our firm, our idea, or our dream – we want the same time to expand. We don’t want end of month to come any time soon as that just means you’ve lost another month of critical time… even if we’ve been working 100 hour weeks all month. We want the day to have more than 24 hours, and sleep to vanish. We want the weeks to be longer and weekends shorter. In fact, we don’t just want the time to expand, we want it to just stop. Till we’re finished. (Which, if you’re good, is never.) We’ll call this Entrepreneur’s Stretching Time. Or EST.

So, which EST time-zone do you follow?

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P.S.: Own what we do will mean different things for different people. In fact, for some the ultimate dream may even be rising to the top of the firm they are working for and leading it. I don’t dispute it. The people with a dream of rising to the top in an established organisation will, in my opinion, likely be older than those with a dream outside the organisation they are working for, unless that organisation is a product of their dreams. Confusing, probably. Offensive, hopefully not.

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