2023 March 21 A perspective on time and why it's meaningless!

Hi, this is Jim Cranston from 7EveryMinute and 7EveryMinute.com, the podcast and website all about reimagining your life. Thanks for joining me tonight to talk about transformation and what time really means in our lives. If you like what you hear tonight, please leave a like and tell your friends and send me a message.

This week, we're not going to directly go into the reenvisionment process. We're going to talk about some things around it a little bit,  because last week for four days I attended a virtual Tony Robbins seminar called Unleashed the Power Within.

Tony Robbins is, arguably, the most well-known and famous life coach ever. He's coached many people that you probably have heard of. People like President Clinton, Mother Teresa, Oprah Winfrey, Serena Williams, and many others. There are about a thousand takeaways, literally, from those four days. A few that really struck a chord with me are, not shockingly, some of the same things that we talk about. Be committed to yourself and your goals. Play full-in with your life. If there's something you want to do, decide if it's a must, and if it is a must, make it a priority, then make it happen.

Envision vividly what you want to retain, and through that, get full buy-in by your brain. Tony has a great saying that sums it all up. Where focus goes, energy flows, and where energy flows, whatever you're focusing on, grows. So if you're looking for more love and that's your focus, that's what will happen.

If something is important to you - more faith, more calmness in your life, more peace - if you make it a priority, and really work towards it, that is what then will become a priority in your life. So you will do things, your brain will do things, to make sure that you're able to attain your goals.

We've also quoted Henry Ford, Whether you think you can or think you can't, you'll be right. If you look at those last three thoughts, you'd probably be pretty much unstoppable! It isn't difficult, but it's not easy, because we're always stopping ourselves, to keep ourselves safe. Everyone's scared right now, because the world is imploding. Everybody says everything's bad, and it's not only bad, it's getting worse. We should all be scared and do nothing.

To my older listeners, remember we've been through this before, repeatedly. To my younger listeners, I suggest talking to my older listeners, because they've been through this before. Are there changes happening? Absolutely. But change is opportunity. If you pay attention, there's always a path forward.

It may not be easy, but it's far easier than giving up and letting life happen to you instead of for you, which is another Tony Robbins phrase. Life is something that happens for you, not to you. It's a really good one to keep in mind. If you’ve watched my daily minute videos, oftentimes you'd see me sitting in the woods: sometimes in the rain, sometimes in the snow, sometimes in heavy rain or heavy snow. If you meet life on its own terms, instead of wishing for some sort of perfection, there's a lot more of life that can be lived.

Another concept that occurred to me earlier this afternoon is the whole concept of time. We have the whole envisionment part of it, which we just talked about, but then there's the whole time part of it. We're told that time is so critical in our lives. Has it really become more important?

I would argue not, and I'll tell you why. I've heard some people say time is just imaginary, and I've thought about that, that time means nothing. It was just created by humans. In reality, there's a lot to be said for that. Yes, there's the passage of time, for lack of a better name, but that doesn't mean that we have to measure that time and act everything upon that time.

I was talking to some friends and one of them said that he couldn't believe that ticks just sat around for hours and days hoping to bump into a host and get a free meal. My other friend said, Well, what do you think they're going to do? It's not like they have a job to go to. That's the way they survive. Even to the smallest of insects, the concept of time is irrelevant. You have a goal that you set, which is to find your next meal, and you wait around until that happens. Nature doesn't generally work on a really tight schedule outside of seasons and birth, or things where temperatures change. If the ants don’t finish cleaning up after the picnic, they'll just continue to work on it tomorrow. 

Accomplishing a task is a goal, not accomplishing the task within some sort of aggressive timeline, but we humans dominate our lives with time. The time of day, the time when something's complete, time when someone's old enough to start doing something, time when they're old enough to stop doing something.

It’s rarely, Did we get it done? but rather Did we get it done in time? Then there are all the other time-based measurements. How old are you? How long have you been doing this?  Are you too young to be doing that? Are you too old to be doing that? When you take all these time-based measures and try to map them over what really matters in life, what you discover is that most of them really don't matter and don't make a lot of sense.

I've known people in their eighties and nineties who were far sharper and stronger than I am in my sixties. I've also known people in their forties who weren't using their talent, skills, and physiology anywhere near as well as me. So time isn't the measure. It's the energy level in your life that determines your life age, just to make up a term.

If you want to make the most of your life, no matter what your chronological age, you can make your life age nearly stand still. It doesn't matter if you're young or old. Right now, you can stop using time as a reason why you can't do a particular thing, because that's really something you convinced yourself is the truth.

To live with energy and focus, follow those three principles above. Remember, those were to 1) envision vividly what you want to attain, and get full buy-in from your brain. 2) Then from Tony Robbins, where focus goes, energy flows. 3) From Henry Ford, Whether you think you can or think you can't, you'll be right. You'll find that if you live your life by those three principles you’ll  have a lot more vitality, peace and happiness in your life, by far, than you will by worrying about your age or what they say about you because of your age. 

This is super, super important, and I've got to say this. This isn't just for old folks. This applies whether you're 20 or 70, and anything in between. If you go around saying: I'm too old or too young to start planning for retirement. I'm too old or too young to start a business. I'm too young or too old to buy a house. I'm too young or too old to learn a language, to go on an overseas trip, start a new career, start a new skill, learn to play the piano. You can use that as an excuse for anything, and it's just not so. It's not true. If you believe in yourself, then you'll be amazed at what you can do. 

Mother Teresa is somebody who always fascinated me. She's just this little petite nun. She would go meet with heads of state, and they were strongly opposing what she was asking for. She knew that going in - they made it very clear. Yes, they were meeting with her, but there was no chance they were going to agree, but in a matter of hours, she’d turn all those opponents into supporters. She could do that because she believed in herself, and she knew that no other outcome would be acceptable to the people who needed help. So she went in with only one vision, one outcome, and she just made it happen. 

You can do the same thing for anything you believe in, and you should start by unconditionally believing in yourself. Thank you. Happy envisioning and creating your new future. So that's it for today.

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Have a great week. Thank you for stopping by. 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 on 7EveryMinute and 7EveryMinute.com. Thank you.