Are You Making The Most of Your Time? - Anthony Knopps (Transcript)

Here is the full transcript of storyteller Anthony Knopps’ talk titled “Are You Making The Most of Your Time?” at TEDxSNHU 2024 conference.

Listen to the audio version here:

TRANSCRIPT:

Reflecting on Life

Have you ever considered what you would do if you had just a year to live? What about a month? What about a day? What about an hour? What if you only had the sand left in this hourglass? Who would you call? What would you say? Would you feel you’ve made the most of your time? Or would you have regrets that you may have wasted it?

As I reflect on my life, I, like many of you, have a few regrets. But I also have a number of picture-perfect memories, as I’m sure you do as well. They could be a walk on a moonlit beach with the love of your life who’s having a birthday today. They could be seeing a child surpass even your expectations. They could even be the memory of a goal that you met when no one, not even you, thought it was possible.

All of us have memories like these that give us warmth on those cold, cold winter nights. We like to think we will always have an opportunity to create these perfect memories, that we will always have a tomorrow. The bitter cold reality is we don’t. Our time here is not guaranteed. I know of that guarantee, or lack thereof, firsthand. You see, I shouldn’t be here.

A Life-Changing Accident

In July of 2019, my son and I were traveling home after a nondescript day of running errands. We were less than five minutes from our house when a distracted driver, fumbling for her phone, checking the radio, whatever, hit our car. It was one of those crashes where you say no one could have walked away from that, yet we did.

Well, sort of. We were both checked out at the hospital and eventually given the green light to return home. Six weeks later, my world came to an abrupt end.

The Aftermath

Nothing worked. I couldn’t change my clothes. I couldn’t walk cleanly. I couldn’t complete a sentence. In short, I was broken. My wife, Camille, rushed me to the emergency room. I was trying to share with the medical folks what was going on, but all that came out of my mouth was gibberish.

In those uncertain moments, I was on my way to the only level one trauma center in our community. It took them only minutes for them to wheel me into the operating room for emergency brain surgery. I only have a few memories of that night. Of someone that I can only assume was the anesthesiologist who asked, “Do you want to be awake for this?” I went, “Duh, duh, duh.” My next memory was waking up in the ICU more than a day later. It was a football game on, so it was OK.

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A Second Chance

Now they tell you this when you’re sick or ill. Never Google what you have. They’re right. Former reporter, I did that. The brain bleed injury that I had, which had been growing since the accident six weeks earlier, had a mortality rate of 78%. It’s four out of five people with the type of injury that I had don’t survive.

After a successful procedure, a stint in the ICU, and weeks of rehab, including how to walk and how to talk again, going through the kitchen, learning where the coffee is, where the chocolate is, I was blessed to find myself on the positive side of that number. In short, I had been given a second chance. A chance to use my remaining time wisely.

I still wonder, if my wife hadn’t taken me to the emergency room that night, if I had been a typical guy and said I was fine and went to bed, if the medical staff on duty hadn’t reacted as quickly as they did, would I have been alive to see the dawn?

My psychologist, who is just one person in a fantastic medical team that I still work with today, gave me this piece of advice during my recovery, and I find it appropriate to share it with all of you. “You are now living in a new house. It’s not that you didn’t love your old house. It’s just that you can’t go back. You have to make new memories in this new house.”

Making New Memories

It’s what I try to find the time to do every day. I write mainly children’s stories now. I teach communications and political science, and I speak especially to groups about traumatic brain injury.

I tell them that I don’t consider myself a survivor, but rather a fighter. Every day, every moment is a battle for me. There are days that I win and days that I lose. Unfortunately, or fortunately, rather, the winning days outnumber the losing ones. I always thought there would be a tomorrow, another sunrise, another game. This experience has told me that nothing, nothing is guaranteed, that in terms of time, we are only given today, and even that is not always true.

Making the Most of Time

So what can we do, each one of us, to make the most of the time we have left? It’s a question, if you free of the expression, as old as time itself. The debate over what to do about time contains many voices, Aristotle, Kant, who said, “Time neither is changed nor apart from change.”

Benjamin Franklin said, “Lost time is never found again.” And that modern day philosopher, Dr. Seuss, wrote that “Sometimes you will never know the value of a moment until it becomes a memory.” What do those three quotes have in common? Well, it’s a challenge, we’re trying to quantify time.

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How should we define it? Or should we even try? Should we just leave that up to philosophers like Dr. Seuss? I’m sure all of you have felt changes in time, when there aren’t enough hours in the day to accomplish a task, or when time seems to stand still as you listen to a speaker drone on about something that should have been covered in an email.

But perhaps you’re older and feel a type of quickening, such as when you look back on 40 years since your high school graduation, it can’t be right, it can’t be right. So how do we find a balance when dealing with time?

Controlling the Journey

One way is to control the journey, not let the journey control us. In short, time is what we choose to make of it. Should we embrace every moment and be present in it? Yes. Should we put down our cell phones? Yes. Let me offer you three ideas to get you started in a direction that may be helpful to you.

Number one, do you save time? Or do you spend time? What’s the difference? Well, this really gets to the heart of who we are as a person. We all know those habitual savers. Perhaps we’re one ourselves. We must save for a rainy day. We must be prepared for when the harvest is bleak. And then there are those spenders, those who say you can’t take it with you.

And then my favorite, “You never saw a U-Haul in a funeral procession now, have you?” Think about that. There’s been a lot of talk in recent years from those influencers, influencers, that we need to budget our time just as we budget our finances. But if you’re a person like me who balances their checkbook every morning, don’t judge, is that really the best use of our time? There’s certainly value in delegating tasks in the office or at home, but does that give you a chance to devote your time to where it matters most?

Number two, do we look forward or do we look back? This is a challenge that each of us faces, and more often than we might realize. It can be tough not to replay a negative event over and over and over and over. So why do we? Often our brains do this as a chance to review what happened in an effort to prevent it from happening again.

Does that work? No. Not always. In my discussions with business leaders, I’ve found that those who are looking forward are often more successful, but they aren’t just chasing dollars, they’re chasing improvement. Walt Disney once said, “Around here, we don’t look backwards for very long, opening up doors and doing new things. That’s what we do. We keep moving forward because we are curious, and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.”

Learning from the Past

Finally, number three, take the lessons of our past and let them drive us to make the most of the time we have now and in the future. I’m a big sports fan. It comes from raising a daughter who played college basketball. Really start along before then, and before those side trips across the country with her in the backseat, usually asleep, and my son played track, he ran track, and my oldest daughter played football, soccer. Yeah, that’s us.

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My wife and I, 30 years ago, took our engagement photo in hockey jerseys. Yeah, the Blues and the Tampa Bay Lightning have each won a Stanley Cup Tencent, so can’t argue with that. One of my favorite players over the years has been Wayne Gretzky. Here’s a quote that’s applicable to our review of time.

He was famous for saying, although he may not have coined the expression, “Skate to where the puck is going to be, not to where it’s been.” A lot’s been made of that quote, so let me add my voice to those who have chimed in about its meaning and its value. In short, skating to where the puck is going to be means defining the action yourself.

It doesn’t mean you follow the trend. It’s a way for you to make the most of your time by getting to a position before it becomes fashionable and then making the most of it. Will you score a goal, or will you help others to do the same?

Doing Better Each Day

How do you make the most of each day? Well, it’s something that’s taken on added meaning for me in the time I have left. I know there are more days behind me than ahead of me, and that’s okay.

I work hard to move things forward. A wise old coach once told me, “Just do one thing better today than you did yesterday. I don’t care what it is. It could be big. It could be small.” It really is true. If you take that approach, then take a look back. You may be surprised at how far you’ve come. Just make sure you leave yourself enough time to do that. Thank you.

Are You Making The Most of Your Time? – Anthony Knopps (Transcript)