Living Boldly Beyond Atomic Fears – Episode 566

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[00:01] Welcome to the Prosperity Podcast. Prosperity thinkers, on this episode of the podcast, we’re going to be talking about on living in an atomic age. And this is from CS Lewis. I mentioned this because of all of the chatter and noise throughout the world, you know, over the last weeks or months, people are saying, is it going to be World War III? What’s going to happen? What’s going on with the future here and there? And here’s the cool thing, Kim, you’ve been as cool as a cucumber on it. And I think this quote that I’m going to share may be totally in line with the things that you think. So first, have you felt in the business world and in families that some people feel like they’re out of step and out of balance?

[00:51] And then while you’ve seen others like, nope, charging along, moving ahead. Absolutely. Our prosperity thinker community tends to fall into the charging along, moving ahead. Nevertheless, I am privileged to be able to help a few that call in that are not. And so I am well aware that there is, and there always is something to be afraid of. And so we are, as prosperity thinkers, responsible to help our mindset get on the right track every single day, sometimes every single hour as we progress through our lives because we cannot do good in the world when we are dealing from a position of fear. So true, so true. So I’m going to grab a piece of this quote from C.S. Lewis. We’re not going to read the whole thing.

[01:40] Just going to grab a portion of a paragraph that I felt nails exactly where we’re going to go today. Says, if we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that when it comes finds us doing sensible and human things, praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, aiding the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts, not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies. A microbe can do that, but they need not dominate our minds. Wow. Written probably amidst World War II. Yeah. 1948. How about that? And like those are words that we can read today. And those words go completely in line with prosperity thinking.

[02:41] Yes, they do. Right there. But they need not dominate our minds. So, Kim, we’ve got families out there that are seeing interest rates all over the place. We’ve got markets that some days feels like it’s the strongest, most healthy market. And then the headlines come of layoffs the next day. We hear about inflation. We hear about and we hear about things rising. It’s just chaos. Yet you’re charging ahead. So let’s have that conversation with listeners right now. Well, so happy to do so because in our own business, we have had major shifts recently that have caused us to rethink and retool. And it’s what life is about. I really believe that every single person should have, if you have to call

[03:35] it this, some type of midlife crisis about every 10 years, because if you don’t, you aren’t alive, teaching, praying what were some of the other words C.S. Lewis used, reading, enjoying the children, growing, thinking, giving. And so it’s so important that we have really self-imposed growth occur literally every single day in small increments again, sometimes every hour. And so how do we do this? We take a time and it could be literally two minutes. It could be 10 minutes. It might be a full hour. Maybe it’s once a day. Maybe it’s once a week. Ideally, it’s throughout the day. Even if just short periods, we find things during that time. We find things that we’re grateful for. We breathe. We sit quietly.

[04:32] Now, this is not easy for me either. I find that I have to change where I am physically. So I typically leave my little office that I love and have such a beautiful view out the windows, which does help me keep my head up literally and my thought up as well. But I need to leave that office and go outside and sit in the swing or go sit somewhere else and just have a few minutes of gratitude and graciousness and breathing. And there are sometimes certain exercises that I will do. Sometimes I will just sit and be quiet. The more I do it, the better I am at it. And then guess what happens when I get back to the office, even if it’s five minutes later, whatever the opportunities are, I am able to more clearly see how

[05:21] to take advantage of them, whatever the problems or challenges are that I might have been dealing with at the time. I will have a different perspective from and with and to I choose to listen to Father Mother God during that time. You may choose to listen to your own inner soul or some particular person that you really like that may guide you through a meditation or a thought process or listen to music or do whatever it is to shift your thought. And as stated, sometimes it helps to shift our bodies too, because a shifted state of thought will enable you to come back and serve more and serve at a higher level. And this is what human beings were put on earth to do. It’s one of the things I love about having children.

[06:11] It forces us to be less selfish. And so we have this person, this little human being that we are serving as we are parenting. Now I get it. My children are grown and older, so it’s a little easier to have this perspective on parenting. Nevertheless, that’s an act of serving. And then of course we have most in our lives, something that I call reverse parenting, which is when we’re helping our 80 year old parents deal with whatever it is they’re dealing with when they sometimes act like children. And so it’s so important at the beginning of the day, of course, a lot of prosperity thinkers have very good morning practices, but I believe that at a minimum at lunch and ideally for a few minutes in the evening, you

[06:58] take some time to listen, be grateful, write in a journal. If that works for you, listen again, be grateful more and enable you as a human being to come out of those few minutes, sometimes longer and continue to serve at a high level throughout the day because of those little breaks that you take along the way. Absolutely. You know, I don’t know if it’s a creature comfort that comes to us when we forget those things, but I want to take this back to the conversation of when we all first became parents. And so the audience now that doesn’t have children, you may be able to understand some of this to a point, but for all of our listeners that do have children, you’ll get this completely. We’ve all been parents when we maybe happened to be just dead sick or tired,

[08:02] or we had that night where the child was up all night and you still get up in the morning and you still do the labor that is required of you. And I think there are times in life when we’ve become comfortable. When we sit there and the AI is doing this for us or we have whatever success so that we don’t feel the pressure and we can say, I can just relax. You didn’t mention that. You said you changed your environment and you continuously work on your thinking. I do believe that it’s important to relax. Go do that on the weekends occasionally or on vacation and then get right back at it. Absolutely. So for all of our listeners out there, regardless of what the headlines are, if it’s world war three, or if it’s this country angry at another country,

[09:03] there’s one word in that quote from CS Lewis, I want to focus on myself and I’m going to make that an extension and there may be one word for you, but the word working. I love that word. That word feels so good because that is a word of action and it’s an word of pursuit and our founding fathers use the language pursuit of happiness. It may even be better of like working towards happiness because that’s what feels great. You know what I mean? I agree. And it is a shame that there are a lot of people out in the marketplace today that just for whatever reason, want out of that workspace and it’s because they don’t enjoy their work. And so if you, as a listener are feeling that I encourage you to spend

[09:54] every extra moment that you can finding work that you love. It takes a little trial and error. So if you’re younger and you don’t know yourself as well, use the Colby profile, use the strengths finders, find work that you love and absolutely disregard every article that you see about retirement at 50 or 55 or 60 or 65 or frankly, even 70 or 75. You’ll have a much more enjoyable life if you will intend to work well into your eighties and nineties and take awesome vacations and free days. Dan Sullivan’s definition of free days along the way. Absolutely. Let’s swap that word retirement and use the word freedom or independence. Maybe independence. We’ll say that. And so you’re going to know, I’m going to pepper you with a couple of things,

[10:48] but I want to arm our listeners with call it a backup plan. That’d be helpful. So as we’re in the pursuit of working, as we are working on our gratitude and, and doing the work, not focused on retiring life does happen. Meaning people end up getting sick or people end up getting hurt for situations like that. You need to have, you know, a safety net, call it disability insurance for unexpected people passing away, you need to have a life insurance policy for families changing and again, elderly passing away, you need to have a trust set up properly. So what are some of the other things we’ll call those safety nets as we are focused on the pursuit of good, but what are a couple of the other safety nets and then how can people reach out and get

[11:43] that guidance from you? Absolutely. Well, one additional safety net without a shadow of a doubt is that emergency opportunity fund. The value of liquidity is just so beneficial in a family’s life. And as we’ve stated, cashflow issues don’t go away. They just get bigger zeros on them. Both emergencies and opportunities. And so that emergency opportunity fund is so peace of mind giving. And I want every single person to build one and we have two specific ways to do it. One is life insurance focused. One is not so yes, without a shadow of a doubt, reach out. If you are prepared and dedicated to build liquidity, you know, I was talking to an accredited investor the other day and they were so excited about this investment and they had the hundred K to do the

[12:33] investment, but they didn’t have the 150 K that was required by the investment company of other liquidity in order to do the hundred K of the investment. And this is a really common thing. So that emergency opportunity fund. And then I believe community is important. So whether it’s family, extended family, neighbors, this is a time that it is good to know your community. Now, some of that can be done online. Of course, but there is an awful lot of value in having people with close physical proximity to be able to band together should a challenge arise. And so I would encourage you to love on your neighbors, develop those relationships and create a very tight, strong, close knit community right there in your physical location.

[13:26] Love it. That’s so good. So there we go. We’ve got the CS Lewis Quo it, we know where we’re focused. We’re strengthening our minds and you have the safety net, the strategy to go forward with that. If you need to get some of those questions resolved, send an email to hello at prosperity thinkers.com. If you’re a new subscriber, we want to thank you. We’re going to continue to put out episodes like this every single week. Thank you for listening to the prosperity podcast to take control of your money and have it work for you. Visit ProsperityThinkers.com. I founded Ornot in 2013. We manufacture clothing for cyclists. For me, the best part of Shopify is the possibility of managing the business even if it doesn’t have technical knowledge.

[14:29] We can manage everything from back-end to front-end and make sales online without complications. If Shopify were a cycling equipment, I would say it would be the bike itself and that’s what allows us to get where we want. It is in Shopify that we manage our business. Start your free evaluation at Shopify.com.