My son is finishing his last week as a high school freshman. While cramming for finals, he was listening to “Non-Stop” from Hamilton. He complained he didn’t have enough time and asked me how to think about it.

I smirked because we had talked about the same topic in 2023, and I first wrote about it in 2018 in a Sequoia newsletter. Below is an updated reflection.

For me, there are three critical units of time: the moment, the chapter, and the book.

The moment. A friend shared an adage when my son was born: “The days are long, but the years are short.” Every second counts because you’re never getting that moment back. Make every moment count. Don’t let time pass you by.

The chapter. After the moment, the next unit is more nebulous. It could be a day, a year, or even a decade. Looking backward, what period marks a significant milestone — a finished chapter? Hopefully, you feel a sense of accomplishment. At a minimum, you carry what you’ve learned into the next one.

The book. At the end of your life, will your book tell the story of someone who fought hard on a worthwhile journey and left an enduring impact? Was it a purpose-filled and meaningful story? Who will line up to tell your story?

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Beyond the above timeless ideas comes a new revelation.

Our current generation of students and builders must accomplish orders of magnitude more than previous generations in the same amount of time. This is the reality and the price of progress, but it is also a wonderful clarifying constraint.

Fifteen years ago, the most valuable companies in the world were worth $300b to $400b. Today, several are worth $4t to $5t. The distance between planting a seed of an idea and building something truly legendary has grown by more than 10x. There is no reason to think the trajectory will slow. Meanwhile, the average human lifespan has barely moved. We have roughly the same number of moments, chapters, and pages as our predecessors did. To build something legendary, we now have to cover more than 10x the distance in that same fixed time, and in the next 15 years, we might have to cover an additional 10x the distance.

If the game has gotten harder, the question is not how to work more hours. The question is which moments, chapters, and books are worth writing at all. Every choice to work on one thing is a choice not to work on something else. The opportunity cost of our attention has never been higher.

The founders we admire most understand this intuitively. They are not chasing the most popular problems. They are finding the one or two questions whose answers can change paradigms and shift entire systems. They know that 1% better every single day creates a different person and a different company by year’s end. They have signed up for the long game and will compound for decades to come.

Before my son returned to studying, I reread a quote from Steve Jobs: “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

The moment is finite. The chapter is your choice. The book is your legacy. What are you building with your fixed amount of time?