2024 August 20 Look for opportunity! Life reimagined!

Hi, it's Jim Cranston from 7EveryMinute and 7EveryMinute.com, the podcast and website by, for, and about reimagining your life. Tonight's a little different. This week is Podcast Movement 2024. It's down in Washington, DC. I'm there—not as long as I'd expected to be. That's another story.

The theme of this week is looking for opportunities and being excited when you find them, trying to take advantage of them, and appreciating the things that come your way. It turned out that my trip down, which is normally about 6-7 hours, took me more like 30 hours. A few things didn't go quite as planned, but I'm here safe and sound, and everything is fine. Someone said, You seem kind of happy, concerning everything that happened.

But look at all the things that went right. I had car troubles, but it didn't break down on the Jersey Turnpike and didn't break down in the entrance to the George Washington Bridge. Things could have been far, far worse, and I got to meet a lot of interesting, nice people.

Life isn't always what we expect it to be, always what we want it to be, but we can usually find some good things if we spend a little effort. Now here I am down at Podcast Movement. I've come here a number of times over the years. I met a few people and got to know them quite well, but every year I meet new people and it's fun. It's a nice mix. I got here late in the day, so I quickly ran down to the show floor to take a quick lap around and get oriented where things were. I ran into a wonderful event friend of mine, James Van Prooyen.

He's indescribably fun to know on a lot of different levels, so it was really fun to run into James. We sat and talked. I made him late for his next appointment, but we always have a lot of fun. We talk together. It's not like we wait all year to see each other, but we're a similar age. He's been doing it a long time, and it's always fun. Hi, James! The guy's just great. Those things, they mean a lot over time. It's just the people you know. They know you, and it just brings a certain amount of continuity into your life.

I went for a walk earlier. You can see behind me. It's a gorgeous evening out, and I was walking down by the edge of the bay where we are and ran into a fellow. I thought he was a podcaster because he was set up with a tripod and taking pictures of himself. I thought he was setting up for a podcast.

We got to talking, and it turns out he's a hoot and a half. His wife feels he should be retired, and he's not yet. He's a plumber, but he has a whole huge sideline business of photography. He's a very good photographer. He showed me some tricks for taking self portraits, and we had a lot of fun talking.

Then I ran into him with his wife. They're celebrating their seventh wedding anniversary. We had a lot of fun and I took pictures with them so they would have them to commemorate their wedding anniversary. 

That was just one real example of this isn't why I did it. It just happened. That's why I say, you have to keep an open mind in life every day. I could have been really annoyed by the stuff that went on with the car and gotten down here and sat in the room or been angry about everything. I could have seen him and thought, Oh, I wonder if he's a part of this movement, and not say anything, and I would have missed that whole conversation and friendship. I'm going to try to get him to come on the podcast and do an interview because he's extraordinarily active. His wife is phenomenal. She holds her age extraordinarily well, and they're quick witted, and they're very fun together. The reason I want him on is because his son has been telling him, Oh, you really should retire. 

He was going on and it sounded like me, only even more. If I stopped doing things, I'd just completely stop doing everything. I can't do that. I have to keep going. There are a lot of things to be done. Every day is really important because it's really precious. A lot of things that we talk about here. 

You meet a lot of people at these shows across a whole spectrum—ages, capabilities, where they are in their careers and where they are in their lives. It makes life very full and fulfilling. That's really the takeaway in what we talk about a lot.

You can do what you want with life and it's there. You can like it. You can be mad about it. You can take advantage of it. You can NOT take advantage of it. It's all completely up to you—but I would encourage you always to try and reach out, meet new people, do new things, find different things to do, look at different perspectives as you find them.

I think you'll find that it makes your life and your days a lot more fun because it brings different perspectives into your lives. It makes you smile over different things. James has shown me his backyard (and what his neighbors call the resort, which should give you an idea of all he and his wife have done with it). It gave me a smile on a day that could have easily been a very stressful, poor day. I chose to not let it be that.  You can often choose the same thing. I know some days start miserable. There's nothing to do about it. But a lot of times, even when bad things happen,  we have the option to make a decision on how we want to react to those things and how we live the rest of our day.

That's the message tonight. It's pretty simple, to let you know what's going on, stop by, say hi. That's what I'm doing—meeting new people, finding people to come on the podcast and be guests. That's where we're at, Podcast Movement 2024.

As always, remember the war in Ukraine, all the wars in the world, in the Middle East, Africa—there's a lot of things going on. As we always talk about, try to live outside yourself, to look at the other person's perspective. That doesn't mean you always have to agree with what the other person says, but you really want to get a bigger perspective of life, because when you do that, it changes how you view the whole world.

Also, as we've talked about before, if you can have meaningful discussions with other people, that helps too, because it makes you examine your own feelings, and sometimes you find that they're not quite as clear cut as you thought. All those things make life a lot more fun. So try and make somebody's day a little happier, to stop, say hi, smile to them. 

I've done a lot of that today. One of the things I love to do is when people are taking pictures one at a time of each other, to go up and say, Hey, would you like a picture of all of you? I did that probably to five groups today. All of them were thrilled because they all wanted a group of all their friends together, but didn't really know how to accomplish it. 

Thank you for stopping by. As always, try to live the best life—the best life that you have is the life that fulfills your dreams and brings you to happiness and really comes from your heart. That's the big thing. So have a great week. Love and good wishes to everybody. See you next week on 7EveryMinute and 7EveryMinute.com. Thank you.