2024 March 5 Live life to your own fullest potential!

Hi, this is Jim Cranston from 7EveryMinute and 7EveryMinute.com, the podcast and website about reimagining your life. Thanks for joining me today to talk about living our lives to our own fullest potential. So let's get started. If you like what you hear today, please leave a like and tell your friends and send me a message.

Thanks for joining me tonight for a quick revisit on priorities and living to your own vision. It'll be a little bit short because the topic is pretty straightforward, and we've talked about it before. But I bring it up again because a lot of people will claim that people don't really live their lives the way we discussed.

They don't really live their vision. Life gets in the way and they talk about it, but I just wanted to very quickly mention a friend of mine who certainly does.  He's a bit older than me. He's actually one of my brother's friends. My brothers are all older than me, but I've met him a number of times. I've known him for a number of years. He's always been an eclectic sort of guy. He's always involved in some new project. He always has stuff going on. He's always learning about life and more things. He's a really fun guy to be around.

My brother mentioned to me a couple days ago that he hadn't heard from him in a while, not since the town he was in got bombed. I asked where he was at that he got bombed. He’s in his 70s, probably almost 80. He left to go to Ukraine, where he was working at a food kitchen to help others who had lost their homes in Russia's terrorist attacks and their invasion against Ukraine.

He could have just stayed home and complained or, like even more people do, just ignore it and change the channel, but that wasn't the way he was put together. He was always ready to help out when somebody needed something. He was there to help them.  He paid his own way over and affiliated with an aid organization there to help others who are suffering.

My brother's going to look into his well being and see what's up with him. Hopefully all is fine. The one thing I'm absolutely positive about is, although the circumstances may be unpleasant, I'm sure he doesn't regret his decision, because it was 100% consistent with his vision for the world and how he lived his life.

What a fantastic way to live.  We're all capable of doing it once we make it our priority. We often talk about living your life to your own definition of success. I'm sure many of his acquaintances and friends thought he was foolish, but I'm sure his real friends weren't surprised in the least.

Remember, if it brings you closer to your own vision, it really doesn't matter what others think about you.  It's what you think of yourself.  What matters is that you're living your life to your own fullest potential. You hear about these people and you read about them in the paper. They're actually around you.

A lot of people are doing things that, if you look beneath the surface, are amazing. Some are volunteering somewhere, helping people. I just met somebody who is taking unwed mothers into her home. She has three or four women living with her right now. It came up in conversation that that's one of the things that she does. There are many amazing people all around us, so if it's your vision and you're living towards it, you'll find incredible power to give you the spirit and the strength you need to make it a success.

But all this, talking about living your life, brings us to something called the Geezer's Paradox, which a good friend of mine shared with me recently. It ties in nicely with what we were talking about. It nicely dovetails with what we talk about because namely, your job isn't to please the rest of the world. If they like what you do, great, but if they don't like what you do, just as great. Your job is to live your life the best way that you can. 

The Geezer's Paradox says, “You don't become cooler with age, but you do care progressively less about being cool, which is the only true way of being cool. This is called the Geezer's Paradox.”  As always, live your life to fulfill your most wonderful dreams and visions.  

That's it. I said it was really simple tonight, but I just really wanted to give you an example of somebody who I work with and know personally. People do amazing things every day, and you can be one of them. 

That's it for the evening. Be proud of yourself and your own worldview, and focus on that which is consistent with your own values. Your homework (always optional) is to think about what big vision that you have, that you've been afraid to really envision, and try making that a priority. 

Think about it a little bit. We've talked about envisionment. You can just start working towards that, and saying, What would life be like if I really did live that vision? Extra points if you use our envisionment techniques to see if you can take that first small step towards making it a reality. 

As always,  UKR7.com is still up to help in Ukraine. World Central Kitchen is active in many places. They're at WCK.org. Keep those people in mind. If you can do anything to help them, that'd be great.  

If you want to help somebody locally, that'd be great too. If you just do something even as simple as meeting somebody in the street and saying hello, just making their day a little nicer, that can really turn the world around one little tiny bit at a time.

Remember, one of the best ways to care for yourself is to care for others. So if you can and you're able, please check out UKR7.com, WCK. org, one of your local charities, or just the next person you meet in the street. 

As always, thank you for stopping by. If you found something interesting or useful, please pass it along and please hit that like button. If not, please drop me a comment as to what you'd like to hear. Have a great week. Remember to live the life that you dreamed 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.