Fast Time, Slow Time

Your financial life moves in Fast Time and Slow Time.¹

In Slow Time, things shuffle along. You hear good news and bad. New inventions will revolutionize the world! They mostly make you switch charging cables. Big changes are coming from D.C.! You drive on the same bumpy road to work. Most of life is lived this way. Lots of talk, but it’s noise. Slow Time.

Fast Time is different. The effects of money decisions, both wise and foolish, suddenly happen all at once like a flood. Financial life (from the value of a 401(k) to your uncle wanting his money back) changes under the pressure of all the other financial activity happening rapidly. Time went slowly, then all at once.

Most of your financial work is done in Slow Time. Most of your gains or losses appear in Fast Time. Life happens in Slow Time, and when Fast Time comes, you won’t remember you read this book. You’ll be too busy telling the kids everything is okay. Or, if you are lucky, job offers, business sales, or other payoffs from wise choices will come in swift batches over the space of a few weeks or months. A lifetime of work and investment will pay out big. Either way, the pace of change won’t last. Soon, life will return to Slow Time in a new equilibrium that feels better or worse than before.

You live most of your life in Slow Time. You get rich in Fast Time.

This is the opposite of today’s money guru advice, that the way ahead is by steadily accumulating savings for fifty years. In history, and today, most people who got rich worked slowly, but their paydays came suddenly.

The distinction is vital for you to absorb and apply. In Fast Time, prices, job openings, and debt start to move together; everyday people are not in control of their own destiny. They are along for the ride. You can certainly make it worse, but most of what happens in Fast Time is done to you.

For everyday people in America, Slow Time matters most.² What you set in motion during Slow Time is what confronts the whirlwind in Fast Time. This may be the opposite of what is true for stock traders, where huge fortunes are made and lost in the heat of battle. But for you and me, Slow Time is where the real work gets done, and where you can act on the world. The right decisions in Slow Time (who to marry, which career paths to take, what you get addicted to) are what prepare you to survive, or thrive, in Fast Time.

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Mistaking Slow Time for Fast Time changed my town forever and, as a bonus, inspired the Netflix hit series Schitt’s Creek. I live today in Braselton, Georgia, a tiny town outside of Atlanta once owned by superstar actress Kim Basinger³. Depending on your generation, you know her as a Bond girl (Never Say Never Again), Viki Vale (Batman), Eminem’s mom (8 Mile), or that really old Fem-dom (Fifty-Shades Darker). She owned the town. As. An. Investment.

Her plan was to put a tourist attraction in the empty mills and build a movie studio . . . in Georgia . . . in the 90s. But building a dream happens in Slow Time. Taxes mount. Investors get anxious. Investments take more investments, and soon you run out of cash. Basinger declared bankruptcy. Actor Eugene Levy found the story in a Google search, and the rest was pandemic-era comedy gold starring himself as a failed businessman whose final remaining possession is a backwater town with a funny name.

But who gets the last laugh? Today, the fastest growing movie production studios in the world, bigger than New York and soon to overtake California, are in “Y’allywood,” a district just outside Metro Atlanta⁴. The town Basinger bought is home to one of Atlanta’s largest tourist attractions, a winery and resort called Chateau Elan. They sell accessible French luxury on Georgia clay. It’s surrounded by the mansions of pro athletes, famous rappers, C-level reality stars, and (oddly enough) me. And it works. It’s profitable. You should visit. Basinger, bless her heart, just didn’t understand that she couldn’t speed up Time.

A British journalist observed “delusion lies in the conception of time⁵” because dreamers seek “to condense the future into a few days.” The Brits are better with words than we are. Most Americans just say, “hold your horses.”

An American who held his was Norman McGhee⁶, one of the first black stockbrokers and a Midwest business titan. Born in the rural South in 1897, he worked his way through Howard University as a railway porter, studying banking law. He learned business from the bottom up with the headwinds of Jim Crow blowing in his face. By his mid-thirties, he knew much, but was worth little.

Then came the Great Depression. While others felt the crush of Fast Time and lost their homes, McGhee made his first fortune. Seventy years before the 2008 bubble burst, before Blackstone and corporate-landlord–gate, McGhee took what he knew about borrowed money and bought over 100 foreclosed homes, turning them into rentals. Possessing little money but a keen sense of opportunity, he became one of America’s first $0 down real estate investors, buying with 100 percent borrowed funds, renting to pay the mortgages, and holding on for dear life for values to rise. That move eventually helped him break the race barrier on Wall Street. When Fast Time came, Norman McGee became one of the most important black businessmen of his generation—because he knew how to think about Time.

Neither of these stories—the beautiful bankrupt or the Jim Crow millionaire—is what we think happened in their respective eras. The 90s were when Ace of Base saw the signs of a booming economy, and it opened up everyone’s eyes. The Depression was filled with Woody Guthrie songs and faces of failure. Basinger, though, mistook Slow Time for Fast, thinking the future would be willing to get here quickly. McGhee, who labored patiently watching and learning through Slow Time, turned history on its head.