1: The year was 2022. Dave Prout was scrolling through Twitter when he saw a post by Sahil Bloom.
“Call your parents more often,” Sahil wrote, “they won’t be around forever. When you’re young and arrogant, death is a theoretical construct. Realize the people you love won’t be there forever. If your parents are 60 and you visit once a year, you may only see them 20 more times in your life.”
Dave wondered: “Man, I wonder what that number would be for me.”
He was the creator and designer of many of the world’s most popular games, including Call of Duty, Halo, and Medal of Honor.
Two years earlier, his mother had been diagnosed with cancer, Sahil writes in The 5 Types of Wealth.
Dave had grown up in Seattle, where his parents still lived, but he had moved to Austin years earlier, where he was raising his family of four children.
The prognosis for his mother’s cancer had initially been good, and Dave and the rest of the family assumed she would beat the disease.
“The treatments had sent the cancer into remission several times,” Sahil writes, “but in each instance, it came back.”
Dave decided to make a change. “I started to travel to see my parents every six weeks the rest of that year,” he recalls. “I got in several visits in 2022 that wouldn’t have happened if not for seeing that post.”
By January 2023, the cancer had progressed to the point where there were no additional treatments available. Dave and his family decided to move his mother to the family’s home rather than transition her into hospice care. He made the trip to Settle even more frequently to participate in her care while also supporting his father.
“On May 28, 2023, Dave Prout’s mother passed away peacefully in her home,” Sahil writes. “Tragically and beautifully, the date was his parents’ wedding anniversary. . .
“A few hours after she passed, Dave went on a long walk to process his sadness. ‘I noticed what a beautiful spring day it was. I just felt so much gratitude that she was able to pass on her terms, at her home, her family all there, and with the weather as pretty as it was. It was, in a sense, kind of perfect.'”
Later that day, he shared the sad news on Twitter and linked to Sahil’s May 2022 post: “Thanks to this thread, I started visiting my parents more often last year…. My mom passed away this morning. Thanks to this, I visited my mom and dad at least 2 times more often than I would have otherwise. Probably 10 visits total. Because of this, I now have a whole set of memories of my mom, not just the tough ones from the last few weeks as she got weaker.”
2: Yesterday, we looked at how Sahil’s entire life changed when he realized “the mathematical reality of the amount of time I had remaining with the people I loved most,” he writes. “It was a hard reset for my life—an emotionally challenging yet necessary intervention that sparked new awareness and priorities.
Dave’s story is an example of what Sahil refers to as the three core pillars of Time Wealth:
- Awareness: Developing an understanding of the fleeting time remaining
- Attention: Narrowing the aperture to focus on the things that truly matter
- Control: Allocating time according to goals and values
“Each pillar builds on and is a by-product of the foundation established by the others,” Sahil writes. “From awareness to attention to control, Dave Prout cultivated his Time Wealth—and we can too.”
Over two thousand years ago, Seneca wrote, “We are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it.”
Understanding the three pillars of Time Wealth allows us to live a more intentional life.
“The climactic final scene in Pixar’s classic animated film Toy Story offers a useful analogy to bring this to life,” Sahil writes.
“The two protagonists, Woody and Buzz Lightyear, are attempting to light a small rocket to propel them back to safety, but their match flames out,” he notes. “Woody looks up at the sun and has an idea: He grabs Buzz and angles his glass helmet toward the sky—creating a makeshift magnifying glass—and directs the concentrated beam of the sun’s energy onto the fuse of the rocket.
“It bursts into flame and the two are successfully launched toward a happy ending to the epic adventure. While the movie might have been intended for children, the underlying insight is important: The focused, concentrated energy of the sun through the helmet magnifying glass was significantly more powerful than its scattered, unconcentrated energy.”
We can apply this principle to our attention: “Concentrated attention is the dedicated, deep focus on the high-leverage projects, opportunities, people, and moments that truly matter. Attention is what allows us to get ahead, to stop running faster and start running smarter. It requires appropriate project selection and rejection—saying yes to a few high-leverage things and no to everything else.”
3: In 2019, Alexis Lockhart was living a happy, normal life in Houston, Texas. “The mother of three boys, ages twenty-three, nineteen, and eleven, she possessed a rare stoic awareness that her time with her sons was fleeting,” Sahil writes.
“Since they were young, I had been saying that you don’t get your children for eighteen years, you get them for about twelve or thirteen, if you’re lucky,” Alexis says. “After they cross that line, you become a chauffeur, a taxi, and a hotel—they need food, a bed, and transportation to events with friends, sports, school activities, and, soon enough, jobs and dates.”
So, she decided to plan a ski vacation for spring break, “a trip she called ‘a huge treat,'” Sahil writes, “since her older sons were either working or in school at the time. Reminiscing about the adventure, Alexis broke into a smile. ‘It was the trip of a lifetime; many memories were made.'”
After they returned home, she planned a small birthday party for her middle son, Jackson. “Even though he was ‘too old’ for cakes and parties, we had a family celebration with presents, a cookie cake, and candles. We celebrated him.”
Then, on May 23, 2019, what every parent fears the most happened: Jackson died in a tragic motorcycle accident just days after celebrating his twentieth birthday.
Sahil writes: “When I received an email from Alexis in April 2024 telling me this story, it stopped me in my tracks. As a new father, I could not even bear to imagine the pain she felt in losing a child. When we spoke later, she shared photos of her boys, pausing on a photo of a four-year-old Jackson and smiling broadly. “I cannot tell you how happy he was as a little kid,” Alexis said. “He never lost that.”
“Always remember,” she said, “everyone we love, they are on loan to us for a short period of time. They are gone in the blink of an eye.”
More tomorrow.
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Reflection: How intentionally am I focusing my time and attention on the people and moments that matter most to me?
Action: Identify one relationship I want to cherish and make a concrete plan this week to create a meaningful memory together.
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