2023 April 18 Just your perspective can change the world!

Hi, this is Jim Cranston from 7EveryMinute and 7EveryMinute.com, the podcast and website about re-imagining your life. Thanks for joining me tonight for perspective on recalibrating your perspective on life. So let's get started. If you like what you hear tonight, please leave me a like and tell your friends and send me a message.

Tonight, we’ll look at the news and we’ll see what's going on. Depending on the news you're looking at, you get a slightly different perspective. There's a lot of really unfortunate stories you see in the news these days. I was just reading about some teenagers having a little mini riot thing, we used to call it a rumble, in downtown Chicago this past Saturday. Then I saw two generals in Sudan are blowing the whole place up while they're both trying to avoid having to return to elected government. The Brazilian president, Lula DeSilva,  is making the rounds of every dictator and troublemaker in the world, including Iran. China is militarizing Myanmar, the great cocoa island, and it's just off the coast of India, and there is, of course, the ongoing invasion of Ukraine by Russia.

The list goes on and on. There are lots of little things going on too. Nothing's ever at the top of the discussion a compromise anymore. If you don't totally agree with me, then you're a total idiot and  I won't even speak to you, and I'll actively work to try and destroy you. It just goes on. There's variations upon that theme throughout the news and every single day on a wide range of topics. 

So not shockingly, feelings of hopelessness in the younger generations are at record levels, and optimism about the future is lower with every younger generation, which is exactly backwards from what it normally is in a healthy society. So there are a lot of bad trends going on, but then there are people like us. You're listening to this because you are different. It's something that I think you should be proud of. You don't think the world sucks, you don't think the US is some sort of trash receptacle.

You don't think that every historical bad choice condemns a society forever, and you believe that people can choose to get along and compromise. You're also smart enough to realize, both by common sense and by conscious choices, you can alter how you decide to look at the rest of the world, and that will change your reality and how you then perceive and act in the world.

You can focus on every scary and accusatory headline. You can believe every doomsday conclusion. You can think independently, look at the real science, the real politics, the real economic indicators, and find both the good and the bad and how they relate. Perhaps most importantly, you have faith in yourself and in your place in the universe.

You realize that you're capable of accomplishing pretty much anything that you let yourself be committed to. Think about it. Amazon, Tesla, SpaceX, FedEx, World Central Kitchen, Pencils of Promise, Oracle, the big database corporation, Linux Software, which runs almost the entire internet, Homeboy Industries, which has worked to redirect thousands of gang members in Los Angeles, and hundreds of thousands of other companies and organizations were started by a single individual with a goal and the purpose.

You can't use having a big goal as an excuse to not start to change the world, and you can't use age either, because you're never too young or too old to really follow your heart. If it's something that's really important to you, you will find a way to make it happen. And because you're the kind of person you are, you also know that success doesn't necessarily come by being right the first time.

Success comes from being sure of your goals and willing to keep working towards them until there's no other possible outcome than to succeed. I'm fortunate to know, not closely, but professionally, a number of people who are probably either millionaires, or pretty close to it. Almost every one of them was considered an overnight success, and yet every single one of them worked for years before that big breakthrough where they finally found everything they'd been working for for years.

Every single one of them also never doubted the outcome, because although they may sometimes have been a bit puzzled about the path they're going to use to get there, they never really lost faith in themselves in the long term or in what the outcome is going to be. That's the message and perspective that I want to share with you tonight.

Are there real and serious challenges in the world today? Of course there are. Were there yesterday, 10 years ago? Of course, they were there then. What has changed is this modern focus upon all that is bad, celebrating the sensational over the truly newsworthy. There is only the opportunity to see what others miss, to see that, as a people and as a nation,  we have far more in common than in difference. The forces driving us apart do so for their own gain, not ours, that by recognizing our limitless power to do good in the world, we can immediately start making a difference in someone's life and maybe a lot of people's lives.

You recognize that personal responsibility is always more important than deferring our future welfare to someone else, whether it's a government, a political party, a social agenda, or anything that requires you to sacrifice yourself, your family, to nebulous or shifting goals. You also know the value of humility.

Yes, be wildly proud of your work when you work hard and accomplish something fantastic, but also recognize all the others who helped you get to that point, both directly and indirectly, and be genuinely empathetic. This alone can help solve so many issues, and this alone is extremely difficult to do, especially when our society is turning into this big mass of carefully defined cliques who are being pitted against each.

By really trying to understand what motivates someone else, you would usually make some surprising discoveries in what's motivating you. It isn't what you think, and as we often talked about, may not even be something that you consciously chose. Along with humility and empathy come respect and reverence.

Respect is something that everyone deserves, as long as they participate in society. When they do not, they still deserve the institutional respect of a justly and equally applied legal system that is the same for everyone. Reverence for the very many things that touch us every single day, whether it's the beauty of nature, the strength of our own internal survival energy, the magic of our brain and our consciousness, realizing that, with all our current knowledge, we still basically know almost nothing - which in itself takes a lot of humility to say that we know almost nothing about what's going on around us, and acknowledging that there are forces of work well beyond what we're able to comprehend, let alone understand.

It doesn't matter if your reverence starts in a church, in a field, in the ocean meditating upon the complexity of the entirety of the universe and the wonder that we even exist. What matters most is that you treat it with reverence, that you treat that reverence very seriously, and that it's not something to be trotted out for holiday events or party discussions.

It should be a part of your very spirit, your very soul. It should be something that helps guide you when the physical world becomes uncertain. It's always there, always developing, always ready to hold your hand and lead you to the next step in a way that respects yourself and all of those around you. 

Since you're that  person, whether you're just beginning to realize the power that you have inside of you, or we've already come to realize that you contain any worthy goal that you desire, you'll want to share that with others, which is what ties this all together, because you are confident in an unconfident world. You are certain when there seems to be no apparent clarity. You see hope and opportunity when others only see despair, and because of all these things, you'll naturally attract the attention of others. Rather than be shy about it, this is a special opportunity to teach others how to gain the confidence that you have and to see the opportunities that are there for them as well.

Just by sharing one little aspect of your life, and more so the more you share, you are already improving the world. As more people realize that they themselves can change the world for the better, more people will act upon it, and the world will indeed improve in both big and small ways.

Many people acting for the common good rather than the popular rhetoric will always make a positive difference. By reframing how you react to the world and acting towards your goals, just by that one action of looking at the world differently, you will change your own actions and by that, improve the world around you.

That brings us back to the fact that you can truly influence the world around you by how you react to the situations that the world brings to you. I often get comments along the lines of, Well, those are nice words, but it doesn't really work out that way.  My neighborhood is still bad, or whatever thing is bothering you at that moment. 

I never said that you might not have to change as well, but how and what you change is something that's very personal and completely up to you. In the example above, it may be that you do have to move, or maybe you have to stay and work to change the neighborhood. There is some personal discomfort or maybe even risk, but aren’t there an endless number of options and possibilities?

But that's exactly the point. Now you are in charge of your future. Life happens for you, not to you. You may not always like the lessons that life has given, but you should really try not to waste it by not paying attention to the lesson and just repeating what you did. So the homework, if you want to do it, is to pick one thing or one topic that's  been on your mind.

Think about what's really bothering you about it, and then think how to reframe it in an actionable way so that you can make the situation more manageable. Actually, it's best if you can think of many options, and how they might play out. Now you're in a far better state of mind to make some sort of balanced decisions and even better provide some perspective and guidance to others who used to feel like you felt, but who want to feel like you feel now more in charge, someone who has options and at least has feelings about how to move forward from that point. 

We've talked about it before, but it's worth bringing up. How you reframe the world and how you react to the world has a tremendous effect upon how you respond to the world, and how you respond to the world affects how you respond to others.

So just by reframing the things that you might find concerning right now, you'll find that you will be in a position to actually lead others to that place of having more calmness in their life and more confidence in the world going forward. So that's it for the evening. 

As always, we want to remind you about UKR7.com.  That's our page of links to places where you can make donations to the people in Ukraine. The wars continue on and on. If you have any interest and you would like to support them, there are a lot of links on that page to different methods that you can use to support the people in Ukraine.

There is also the World Central Kitchen at WCK.org. It is a humanitarian organization that provides food to areas of need. They were just active after the hurricanes went through in the US. It's not just overseas. They work throughout the entire world. They do amazing things. We talked about this a number of times, so they are also linked there.

Remember that one of the best ways to care for yourself is to care for others. It changes your whole perspective on the world, changes your perspective upon yourself. So if you can and you're able, please check it. As always, thank you so much for stopping by.

If you have found something interesting or useful, please pass it along. Please hit that like button. Drop me a comment if this is what you'd like to hear. Have a great week. Remember to live the life that you dream of, because that's the path to true contentment. Love and encouragement to everyone. See you next week at 7EveryMinute and 7EveryMinute.com. Don't forget that your actions can change the world. Have faith in yourself. You truly can do it. Thank you very much. Have a wonderful, wonderful week.