Time Machine
Five Decisions to Accelerate Your Success Timeline and Live a Thousand Lives
An aspirational guidebook, Time Machine is replete with suggestions for achieving rich business and personal lives.
In his unconventional business book Time Machine, Kris Krohn explores and redefines true wealth through daily decisions with intentional choices.
Divided into three parts addressing foundations, calibrations, and timelines, this text focuses on topics that are presented as crucial to personal success, including logic, money, joy, energy, and intuition. All are geared toward exposing the fallacy that time is money and proposing alternative approaches, raising standards to ensure better returns on one’s invested time. Naming six steps to move forward on one’s success timeline, the book’s methods include reconsidering what a business’s big picture truly entails and understanding the three properties of energy (physical, time, and motivation). All reemphasize the central point that time is the most precious commodity that a person has.
The text is conversational and interactive, asking the audience to self-evaluate and determine what is most valued at the end of one’s days; elsewhere, Krohn tells the audience, “Please, show me. I’ll wait.” It is sometimes hyperbolic, as with its idea that a person will have lived one thousand lives after making their time more valuable, and its metaphor using lenses to achieve 20/20 vision (used to address the goal of making clear, logical choices) is belabored.
Still, the book builds persuasiveness by introducing eye-opening statistics and facts, as with naming the total minutes in a day and comparing this reality to the time one spends sitting in front of a screen. (Its breakdown of the precise number of hours allocated for priorities is more clinical in tone.) All such time added up, it suggests, people devote days to excess, and that’s time that cannot be recovered. But to soothe the related worries it raises, the book includes encouragements to avoid regret and victimhood in favor of empowerment, as with the possible decision to release energy-depleting grudges.
Recognizing that wealthy people have more time, money, and freedom, the book holds up self-made millionaires as models of success, mining their methods for replicable business strategies, as with delegating low-return tasks to others, independent earning rather than working for someone else, and adopting multiple active and passive streams of income. But it also names success-building methods that anyone can adopt, such as reselling thrift store items for a profit; some such methods are further used to illustrate complex concepts like arbitrage with clarity. And it encourages everyone to devote ten minutes a day to thinking about growing wealth, developing passive income, and reclaiming time through resource allocation. Discursions to discuss the importance of nutrition, physical activity, and sleep point to a holistic approach; though not specific to business, they come across as valuable suggestions.
Suggesting ways to break free from indecision, Time Machine is a self-help book for those pursuing rich business and personal lives.
Reviewed by
Andrea Hammer
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book and paid a small fee to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Foreword Reviews and Clarion Reviews make no guarantee that the publisher will receive a positive review. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
