Five For Your Hive: Now is The Most Important Time
NVIDIA, Michael Jordan, The Overview Effect, An Authentic Presentist, Right Here, Right Now
Now is The Most Important Time
In an interview with his alma-mater Stanford University, Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of semiconductor giant NVIDIA, was asked how he handled the pressure of stock swings (just recently, the company’s stock plummeted a massive 80%). “When you drop 80%,” he says, “it’s a little embarrassing. You don’t want to get out of bed or leave your house. All of that is true.” But then you can’t just pause your life, hoping all the problems would magically disappear. “You get back to doing your job. You wake up at the same time. [You] prioritize [your] day in the same way. Then I go back to the core belief and go back to work. I go back to ‘what do I believe?’” Now, he says, “the stock price changed, but did anything else change? Did gravity change? Did all the things that we assumed that we believed that led to our decision stay the same? Because if those things change, you gotta change everything. But if none of those things change, you change nothing, and keep going.” Huang famously said he doesn’t wear a watch because “now is the most important time.” Staying in the moment, in the present, in the now, and enjoying every minute of it—that’s the idea for today.
We’ll Know Where The Hell We Are
Tim Grover, Michael Jordan’s trainer, once said that if there was one thing that separated the basketball legend from every other player who walked the court, it was his extraordinary capacity to shut out anything and anyone except his mission. His mission? To play and win the next game. Not to win the play-offs. Not the beat the nemesis. Not to win the championship. The next game. As he said, “why would I think about missing a shot I haven’t taken yet? In 1998, after the Chicago Bulls won their 6th and final championship in Chicago, the team had this big celebration in a hotel room. Jordan was seated at a piano with a cigar in his mouth, having a good time. In the room was also a bunch of reporters. One of them asked, “Hey, you got another one in you?” Jordan stopped playing, turned to the reporter, and with two fingers he clipped his cigar from his mouth and let out a puff. “It’s the moment man,” Jordan replied, “It’s that zen Buddhism shit. Get in the moment and stay there. Just stay in the moment until next October and then we’ll know where the hell we are.”
Overview Effect
Edgar Mitchell spent nine-days on the Apollo 14 command module mission to the moon. On it’s way back to Earth, since most of his work had already been completed, he had a pocket of time to relax and stare out the window. His colleague, Stuart Roosa, had put the spacecraft in BBQ mode—a slow spin that evenly distributes the heat of the sun across the surface of the ship. “Every two minutes,” Mitchell later recalled, “a picture of the earth, the moon, the sun, in a 360 degree panorama of the heavens appeared in the spacecraft window.” Only a handful of people—mostly astronauts—have been privileged with this extraordinary view, this rare moment in time, to witness something so magical. As he watched the Earth, the moon, and the sun past the window over and over again, he was “struck by a powerful feeling of connection with the universe,” and “meditated on this experience for hours.” Apparently, Mitchell wasn’t the only astronaut affected by this in-the-moment phenomenon known as the “Overview Effect”—Chris Hadfield, Ron Garen, Nicole Stott have all reported versions of this sensation, where a present view of the Earth births an intense awareness of the fragility of our planet. In that moment, Mitchell said, “You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘look at that you son of a bitch.’”
An Authentic Presentist
Actor Cillian Murphy [Inception, Dunkirk, Peaky Blinders, 28 Days Later], who won Best Actor for portraying Dr J. Robert Oppenheimer in Oppenheimer, recently talked about his acting mindset. “I really am kind of, like, pathologically unsentimental about things,” he said. “I just move forward very quickly.” He never fretted about the past—he couldn’t recall it, let alone glamorise it. And for the future, like Huang, he simply wasn’t the kind of person who would map out far ahead, because now is the most important time. And so, “the one film on the horizon; the one song on the radio or the one painting on the wall. He was, in this way, an authentic presentist. Or, less abstractly, just a good listener, a good see-er, a good scene partner, a good person to have dinner with,” living in the moment, enjoying every minute of it.
Right Here, Right Now
In an iconic scene of one of my favourite adventure films, Walter Mitty (Ben Stiller) found himself next to Sean O’Connell (Sean Penn), a legendary photojournalist on a mission to photograph a rare snow leopard in the Afghan Himalayas to be used as the cover for the final print edition of LIFE (you can watch the scene here).
When the animal walks into the frame of O’Connell’s Nikon F3/T, he decides not to capture the picture-perfect moment.
“When are you going to take it?” Walter asks.
O’Connell looks up from the viewfinder, peers out into the direction of the mountains and maintains a brief silence.
“Sometimes, I don’t,” O’Connell replies, “If I like a moment, for me, personally, I don’t like to have the distraction of the camera. I just want to stay in it.”
“Stay in it?” Walter repeats.
“Yeah,” O’Connell says. “Right here, right now.”