Time Traveling Exercise (BeFirst Course 142)

I'm Dr. David King, husband, flower. Okay it's time to talk about time traveling. If there's one topic of conversation in sci-fi movies that gets a lot of treatment, it's time traveling. I really enjoy the idea of time traveling. I know nothing about the physics behind it, but it's a fun thing to talk about. So I'm going to read through this and hopefully it'll be helpful to you and provide you with some insight that's valuable. Let's take a few minutes to complete a mental exercise that is often recommended in success literature that's out there. Imagine for a few minutes that you are attending your own funeral, or perhaps we will start a little bit earlier than that. Yes, we can start with the very, very end and imagine and think through what we hope the people at our eulogy will say and how they will act and what impacts we will have made in their lives and that brings everyone to tears. But perhaps starting at the very end isn't what most of us need. Let's start earlier than that. How about this week? Let's consider what the end of this week will look like. It's Monday for me today, right now. What is it that you are attempting to accomplish this week? What will you, insert one week from now, look like? For me, right now, I'm sitting at a desk, not typing, but when I wrote this, I was typing, having just given a lecture to a group of third and fourth year dental students. My one week from now, I hope to see that I've finished writing the remainder of this book, but that isn't super realistic. So I'll say that my actual goal will be to get an additional 4,000 words completed in the book. As I think about this goal, this vision, this plan, I will need to focus my mind as I begin to consider the actual, accomplishable steps required to get to that point. Actual, accomplishable, sustainable steps. Let's say 4,000 words in seven days. That breaks down to just less than 600 words per day. That's doable, but I can't stop there. I've got to consider even to a more detailed level than that, 600 words per day. 600 words per day, but when will I be able to do that? What time, what time, location, what location, and how will I be able to carve that time out? Perhaps I want to work through the goal all in one day or two. Ultimately, the details are now up to me to plan, to plan, to plan, to plan. That's the key right there. I can have a goal all day long, but until that goal becomes written down, written down, planned down to actually a specific setting aside the time that will be required to accomplish it, the goal will only be a wish and a hope. So a goal, change the color here real quick, goal does not equal a wish or a hope, right? It's a wish or a hope until it becomes written down with accomplishable steps. The true power behind creation is manifest in the details that add up to the steps that add up to the accomplishment of the goal. So steps that add up to the accomplishment, okay? The power of creation is in the detail. Did you get that? I'll say it again. The power, the true power of behind creation is manifest in the details that add up to the steps. The power is in the details and the details is where we affect creation. Mentally, we can envision and foresee and create, but the power really lies in the details that we decide on, the details that we develop into outcomes, okay? So if we took a week and we took one simple creative goal, once I've entered the planned time into my calendar, meaning planned it and committed to actually doing it, we can move on to the next thing in our lives. I can begin stacking goals. You've heard about stacking, right? I can begin stacking goals that are from the same end vision, or I can start working on parallel goals, those things that are happening at the same time as the other items. So parallel goals and stacking goals, they can happen at the same time. All of these things can be accomplished in increments or in leaps or in chunks or in steps, et cetera, et cetera. The point here is that we need to be meticulous enough, granular enough, grainy enough to break the vision down through the process of mental design to its component parts and work toward accomplishing those parts. So some goals are simple, right? Some goals are very simple. I'm going to drink eight ounces of water the next hour. Okay, that's a very simple goal. Some goals are more complicated. I want to drink 120 ounces of water today. Okay, now I've got to break it down. Am I going to chug 120 ounces of water at 11.59 p.m. so my stomach explodes? That's probably not a good idea. But if I break it down and say 120 ounces, I'm going to be awake for 10 hours, so I need to drink 12 ounces of water per hour. Wouldn't that be great if we were only awake for 10 hours? My day normally starts about 4 a.m. and normally ends about 11 p.m. So let's see how many hours is that? That's 12, 19 hours. So if I divide 120 by 19, I don't know. I can't do that math. I'm not very smart on Monday mornings. But breaking it down is the key, right? Breaking it down is the key. And I don't think 120 ounces is enough water, to be honest. So don't quote me on those numbers, right? Okay, component parts and work toward accomplishing those parts. Yes, we're accomplishing the goal, but we're accomplishing the goal by accomplishing the component parts, okay? These principles are pretty well suited to personal adjustments and to business adjustments. It comes down to mental creation, discovery, mental design, and then creating an actual design. Creating an actual design through careful planning and specific attention as needed to goals and choices. As we are accomplishing small things, small control over our lives, we can also begin to accomplish large things, larger trajectory adjustments of our individual current location and pathways. Envisioning the outcome ahead of time. Envisioning the outcome ahead of time and mentally designing or engineering the steps or laying out the steps in a very granular way will lead us toward the goal insofar as we are willing to continue forward in focus and in faith that we can accomplish the end result we have planned. Let me read that last sentence again. It's a long sentence. Envisioning the outcome ahead of time and mentally designing the steps in a very granular way, that's, you know, well, let's move on, will lead us toward the goal insofar as we are willing to continue forward in focus and faith that we can accomplish the end result we have planned. So envision, right? Envision, design, it's supposed to be an E, design and focus and faith. These are keys. Now, faith has religious undertones to it for sure, and I think faith is absolutely critical in all of our life, not just in religion. Faith is having, faith is the action, it's the belief that leads us to action. Faith is an action word, okay? We can dissect that another time, but essentially faith is what drives us to do something. It's more than just belief. Faith is belief plus, it's belief plus action, belief plus motivation. Anything less than that is just desire, which is great. But when we start taking steps and having actions as a result of our desire, I like to call that faith. That's my personal opinion. So faith requires action to really be faith. Okay, so envision, design, focus and faith. Just a quick recap of this little section. All right, time traveling. We love time traveling in sci-fi movies, it's awesome. We love to move forward all the way to the end of time and look at, well, when I die, I'm going to be on my yacht, as Michael Scott said, so I don't really need to worry about money now. I'll have all my family and friends with me and have tons and tons and whatever. But then we talked about looking at a much smaller chunk, looking at a week, looking at a month, looking at a day, breaking it down into individual bites, just like how you eat an elephant, right? Plan it, like write down the plan and then calendar it, calendar, calendar, calendar, I don't know. Calendar it and then focus on those individual little detailed steps. The steps, the steps are really where the power lies, okay? The individual steps. Stack the goals if you want to, perfect. You can have parallel goals you're working on at the same time. Accomplish the component parts and you will accomplish the goal. Envision, mentally design and do things in a very granular way. This granular way right here. Sorry, there's too much color, too many lines here. Granular way means break it down to a very, very grainy point, point, point, like pointillism. You zoom back out, you can see the whole picture of the face, but when you pull your pointillist drawing or creation up close, you can see the individual little dots. That's what we're focusing on here. Envisioning an outcome at a specific time frame, look at the dots involved that it takes to get there and then focus on the dots, accomplish the dots. Periodically, we'll step back, we'll evaluate where we're at and then we'll move forward. Okay, another lecture check. Again, as we've talked about before, focus on two or three key principles or one or two key principles. You can always come back, review, find another thought that you latch onto and find value. Focus on some key principles, two or three, that allows you now to take action to move forward and improve yourself just a little bit. There's no use in digesting, trying to digest everything all at once. Focus on those things that resonate with you now, take action, and we will see you in the next lecture.