Live In The Here And Now

Live in the here and now. What time is it? Now. Where are we? Here.

The origin of this was Aspen, anytime someone would talk about the past, war stories, telling stories about your home life, or glorifying a negative behavior, whatever it could be. When the staff would hear someone telling “War Stories” they would be like, “No war storying.” And then they’d also say, “Live in the here and now.” Or they’d ask us, where are you? And then you’d have to answer here. What time is it? Now. So then live right now. Don’t worry about what happened in the past. It’s no longer here. You are at this program with a backpack, or a survival pack, hiking in the Utah Desert. That’s your life. So live in the here and now. Focus on where you are right now.

Now, not only did they use this phrase, when we’re talking about the past, they’d also used this phrase if we were asking where we were going for that day. A student asks, so where are we going? They’d answer with that’s FI, which is future information. And then they’d say, “Where are you?” And then you have to answer here. What time is it? Now. So don’t focus about where you’re going. Just know that we’re going where we’re going. Just focus on right now, they drilled it into our head. Obviously, you want to know where you’re going. Not just walking around aimlessly, but what they were instilling in us was pay attention to right now. Don’t focus on the future. Don’t focus on the past. Focus about right now. That’s all you can worry about is right now.

The Consequences Of Living In The Past. We’re going to go through each of these; missing the basketball shot, past love relationships, the Letterman’s jacket syndrome, and family dynamics.

Missing the basketball shot. That is the consequence of living in the past with this. It’s not just a basketball shot. That’s an example. So let’s say, the game is on the line, you missed a shot. You lose the game. Now you can do one or two things. You can dwell on missing that shot and allow it to destroy you, that’s a consequence of living in the past. You can never get over that basketball shot, that missed goal, that missed opportunity, that missed trade, it doesn’t matter, right?

So if you’re on the stock market, and sometimes this screws me up a lot. Let’s say I made a great trade and made a good amount of money, and then the next day I’m living in that same mentality. so I’m looking for what I saw yesterday even though today’s a completely different day. I’m not living in the here and now. I’m living in the past. It’s the same thing as missing the basketball shot. You’re not living in the here and now. Right now there’s a new opportunity for you to make another shot. There’s another opportunity for you to practice harder and not worry about that shot. Just let it go. You missed a basketball shot. Let it go. Don’t worry about it. You can’t dwell on it.

Past love relationships. With past love relationships living in the past is not being able to let go. Holding onto something that isn’t there. Living in the past. Not accepting that life progresses forward, people change, and emotions for the other person, or for you, or whatever it is has ceased. The relationship is no more, but if you live in that past, you won’t allow yourself to move forward, or Accept the relationship is in the past and it’s over. You’ll always be worried about that closed door, opposed to looking at the future and looking at the open door in front of you.

With past love relationships it doesn’t have to just be with a person. It can also be with a vice that you had something that’s negative, something that you loved. But it’s something you know that you need to let go. It’s also kind of with the war stories. So let’s say you’re a recovering alcoholic, or recovering prescription pill popper, or whatever it is, it doesn’t matter. If you’re constantly around people that are using, or if you’re constantly talking about your past life, your past love relationship with whatever substance it was then it’s going to be impossible for you to put it in the past, it’s going to always be on the forefront of your mind because you continuously talk about it. It doesn’t allow you to move forward, you’re stuck in a love relationship that’s no longer beneficial for you, or no longer beneficial for your future.

The Letterman’s jacket syndrome. Now I have seen this multiple times, and sometimes I get myself into it, but I stop myself as fast as possible. The Letterman’s jacket syndrome is the 40-year-old, the older person with a beer belly wearing his high school Letterman’s jacket. Just imagine that picture. Beer belly hanging out wearing a jacket that’s obviously too small, but they’re living in their glory days. So if the Letterman’s jacket syndrome is you, now you have to paint the picture for yourself. I used to play sports when I was younger so that’s why I’m using the Letterman’s jacket, but it could be anything, just use your imagination. It’s being stuck on the past “glory days”, the good old days.

If you’re stuck in that mentality, you’re never going to give yourself the ability to move forward because you’re always looking for the past to fulfill your enjoyment. If high school was your greatest time and you’re always thinking of high school. Well, that message is the same message that you’re unintentionally putting into your kids and your grandkids that the high school sports environment was the greatest environment, and that’s all that someone has to look forward to. When you’re living in your past and you’re talking about, oh, I used to be the greatest at basketball and all this, well, who are you kidding? Because if you were the greatest, you would have made a career out of it, but you were not the greatest that’s why you did not make a career out of it. So if you’re wearing the Letterman’s jacket, preaching how great you used to be, then you’re only preaching mediocrity. It’s not a glory point that you should be bragging to somebody. You should take that jacket off and burn it as fast as possible, and move forward with your life.

Family dynamics. Now this is a fun one. People have a hard time forgetting, all right? So let’s say you were a troublemaker when you were five years old. Well, it’s ingrained in people’s heads. The memories that they have of you. So it doesn’t matter how much time you spend with somebody, right? It all depends on the memories they have of you, the points that stick out. So this could be a positive, or this could be a negative. I’m going to give it in two different situations. The perfect kid growing up, right? Parents love her or him, whatever it is, she’s just perfect, but then once she grows up, she never amounts to anything. Well, it’s ingrained in the parent’s head how wonderful she is. So in their mind, they’re still going to always give an excuse for her not succeeding, right?

Then you have the other one who was a troublemaker. Never really did well in school, the underachiever, but ends up becoming the achiever. They flip-flopped. The family dynamics in that is never going to look at the underachiever when they were growing up as the achiever. It’s never going to be good enough because they were an underachiever when they were in school so they’re always going to be in the family dynamic mentality the underachiever. Does that make sense?

So the consequences of living in the past is we have to take that into consideration when we’re with our family, or when we’re in different environments where we haven’t seen people for a while. It could be you haven’t talked to somebody in a while. You have to remember what is the last dynamic the two of you guys were in, and then that’s all you can base their opinion on you on. So it’s been five years. You’ve changed. You’re a completely different person, but you haven’t talked or seen this person in five years. The only dynamic that they can remember, and they could recall of you is how you were five years before. So if you were a complete loser, or a troublemaker, or unreliable person years before then the dynamic of that relationship is what people were going to remember you in the future.

So the consequences of living in the past is not being open to other people’s change, or not even being open to your change because the family dynamics within yourself is I didn’t like this in the past. I don’t like it now. There could be a million reasons why you didn’t like it in the past, which has absolutely nothing to do with the moment right now. So if you live by the family dynamics of my family didn’t do this, so I don’t do this then you’re going to have an issue. let’s move forward.

The Consequences Of Living In The Future. We have always planning, never executing. We have procrastination, unrealistic goals, and spending money before you have it.

Always planning, but never executing. Living in the future is another place. I wouldn’t say it’s as dangerous as living in the past, but it’s pretty close. So when you’re always planning, but you’re never executing. Now, planning is a great thing. I’m never going to go against planning. Planning is an amazing thing and all of us should do it. However, there comes a point in time where the planning needs to stop, and you need to start acting. Because I’m guilty of this.

So it’s not like I’m perfect. I’ve lived in the future. And I’ve lived in the clouds of my mind, daydreaming where I’m just planning it and planning it and planning it. And then I never end up getting around to doing it. let’s talk about writing a book. These lessons that we’re going through happened when I was 10 to 12. I’m 37 now, I had always been planning this, writing this book since what? I was 22. But I was planning it, and I was planning it, and I was planning it, but I was never executing, right? It took me what? 22 to 37, we’re talking what? 15 years give, or take. 15 years of planning to do something what took me three weeks to execute. See how the consequence of living in the future of always planning to do something, but never actually just sitting down and being like, I’m going to do this and I’m not going to stop until it’s done. The difference between planning and never executing.

Procrastination. Now you might be like, well, how has procrastination living in the future? Because how many times have you known you were supposed to do something, envisualized yourself going to the gym everyday. You can see that perfect body, but you say, “I’m going to start tomorrow.” Then tomorrow comes and then you’re going to start tomorrow, but in your mind, you are changing. You have made the change already in your mind. However, you’re procrastinating ever starting.

Now, quick example. I’ve done this before. Almost with the book example, but it’s a little different because that’s just keep on planning to do it and then never executing. The procrastination part is going on the run. Now, I know I need to do it, but an even better example is writing this chapter. I could see me being done with it, but I wasted 2-1/2 hours this morning procrastinating. I have put together a bookcase. I have done everything. I’ve rode the bike for 20 miles, an hour and a couple minutes. I’ve done some pushups. I have literally done everything I possibly can to avoid Writing this chapter but why? Procrastination. I’m living in the future. I can see it done, but I can’t get it started.

Unrealistic goals. Now when we live in the future and it kind of corresponds with always planning, never executing, and procrastination. Part of the reason we do this is we have unrealistic goals to start. And it’s by living in the future that we have these unrealistic goals. If we never procrastinated, and the second it comes into our mind we activate and we do it. When we plan it, we execute. We don’t procrastinate. We don’t always come up with a good plan. (What do you call it? Test it for errors.) Once we figure out that it’s within our timeframe, within our metrics, we start, we do it. That will keep us from having unrealistic goals because you’re constantly monitoring how fast you’re able to achieve different things.

Let’s put it like this. In mid January, I had an unrealistic goal. I didn’t know it was unrealistic when I came up with it until I tried to do it. I was living in the future, right? I was like, yeah, man, I’m going to have this big library. I’m going to index all these books. Everything’s going to be great. I’m going to do 50 books a day. An unrealistic goal. I had no idea how much time it would take to do a quick review of a book. Now I could have kept planning and planning and never executing this. I could have procrastinated, but I jumped all in. And then I realized it was an unrealistic goal.

I would have never known if I never started, I would have always planned, and had every minute detail of my online library picture-perfect. I would have procrastinated actually building the library. I would have done a lot of busy work, but the actual hard work of creating the videos and opening the books and finding something interesting in each book, I didn’t realize how much time that was going to take, but once I started, I realized how much time it was. And the unrealistic goal became a realistic goal, but not at this time, because the skills that I have right now are not at the place they need to be in order for me to accomplish this unrealistic goal.

I have been a horrible example of spending money before you have it. This is the worst of living in the future. When we plan and we are living in the future then we already make plans. We have already seen it. We know what we’re going to do. And when the government, or when our boss, or whoever it is says, “We’re going to give you this amount of money, have you ever heard the expression, the money is burning a hole in your pocket? Well, that’s living in the future because instead of us paying attention to what’s going on at the moment, we’ve already thought about what we’re going to do. We don’t even have the money, but we’re going to spend it. We’ve already spent it. We’ve already bought a new TV. We’ve already bought a new car. We’ve already bought the clothes that we couldn’t afford yesterday, but someone’s going to give us some money today so we’re going to buy it. Spending money before you have it is a huge consequence of living in the future. If you never want to have anything in the future, live in the future, and spend all your money in your imagination. Live in that, and you’ll never have anything in the now. All right. Let’s move forward.

Live In The Here And Now. Be honest with yourself and the situation. Focus on what’s directly in front of you. Discipline on money habits. Can I afford it now? Be present. Hurry up and wait. And turtle and the hare. Live in the here and now.

Be honest with yourself and the situation. The only way that you can progress in life is if you are honest with yourself and where you are, not where you want to be, not where you’ve been, where you are. It does not matter in the past you had a Ferrari. It does not matter in the future you want a private jet. Where are you today? What are you doing today? What situation are you putting yourself in today to accomplish what you need to tomorrow, right? So if you’re telling yourself I want to live until I’m 100, but you’re eating at McDonald’s. Those don’t add up. It’s not going to happen. You might be the anomaly, but the odds are against you. Be honest with yourself and the situation. If you want to achieve greatness, then you need to do great things.

Focus on what’s directly in front of you. One of the major things that I’ve seen people have a problem with is keeping things simple. There’s always some elaborate reason why successful people are successful. It couldn’t be the simple fact that they keep things simple. It might be very complex, but it’s very simple, right? So follow me on that. It could be a very complex system, but the way they implement it is very simple. They do one thing at a time. They focus on what’s directly in front of them. That’s the only way they can accomplish more than other people. They see one challenge, they get over it. They see another challenge, they get over it. They don’t focus on 10 different things to accomplish one. It might seem like they’re focusing on 10 different things. And the faster and more efficient you get at this, the faster your brain is already working. And it looks like you’re doing more than one thing at once.

So right now I’m talking to you, but also I’m working something else. Does that make sense? I’m focusing exactly what’s in front of me, making these videos, worrying about these slides, but I’m also concerned of other things. So my mind is also working on other things, but I’m keeping focused on what’s directly in front of me. So when I’m done with this, I can move on to the next one.

Discipline on money habits. Can I afford it now? Why do you need it? That should be the first question you should ask yourself. Why do you need it? I have more clothes, more gizmos, and gadgets. I have a two car garage with an extra space in the back, and a little office space. It’s all full of stuff. My main room in this house is all full of clothes and stuff. I don’t even know what I have. However, I didn’t buy any of that stuff with debt. It all has a purpose. I just accumulated it. It’s mostly for sale. A lot of it’s books as I have a bookstore. A lot of it’s clothes because I don’t like spending a lot of money on clothes. So I just buy in bulk and then I try to sell the rest of them and make a profit, but every dollar I spend on bulk is so I can buy it at a discount and then try to make a profit off of it then with debt.

So right now I’m actually talking to you on, well, my computer, I paid for it, but the phone it’s a brand new phone. It’s debt from Apple, but it’s logical debt. Can I afford this $800 phone? Yes, I can. However, I need to establish credit with Apple. They only gave me $800 right now, 850. Well, I need that higher because $850 at Apple is not enough. I need a few thousand. Well, how am I going to get it to a few thousand? Be disciplined on my money. Pay them every month on time, even pay them a little bit more.

Now, wait a minute. If I could not afford it, I would not have it. Everything that I have to this point is paid for cash. The problem is cash with zero credit doesn’t get you very far. I need some credit with some banks so I can buy some more properties, and grow my wealth at a faster rate. Not so that I can buy clothes and materialistic things that don’t matter because I saw it on TV, or I saw it on Amazon, and it was a best-seller, or was the number one trending thing so I just had to spend money because it’s trending.

No, you have to have discipline on your money habits. Create a game out of saving. Look at the quarters. If you have a hard time saving money, put the quarters because they’ve made this for a reason. They might tell you in the media to spend, spend, spend, spend, but the United States mint created different backs on the quarters for you to do one thing, save. So just pay attention to what’s actually going on. They made them for you to save them. So save them and only use your money when you need it.

Now, discipline on money habits. I have a 3,000 square foot house. I have a Tahoe. I have a truck and I have a box truck. I have a pool. And I would think all of my expenses are less than $1,000 a month. I can afford my life working a minimum wage job. However, I have most everything that people that don’t have discipline with their money habits what they want. They want the big house with the pool, with the cars, and the jewelry, and everything else. Yeah, I have all that, but I don’t have any debt so it doesn’t cost me anything. So it doesn’t mean quite as much because I don’t have to worry about it every month to pay for it. It’s already paid for.

When you have to worry every month to come up with a bill, then it brings more value to that. So that car is worth more to you than it is to somebody that doesn’t have a car payment every month. So if you want to get ahead, get rid of your debt, and don’t buy things that you cannot afford. Ask yourself this question every time. Can I afford it now? I didn’t say, can you afford it later? I said, can you afford it now? If you can’t afford it now, wait, buy it later. Be present. Hurry up and wait syndrome, and turtle and the hare. Be present in what you’re doing.

Have you ever heard the expression hurry up and wait? Why? Why don’t I just take my time and then get there on time and don’t have to really wait and not have to stress? In today’s society we’re always so rushed. I personally don’t understand it because if you just wake up a little earlier and go to bed a little earlier what’s the point? What really happens after nine o’clock anyways? Nothing. It’s just wasted time you’re probably just watching TV. You’re just draining time until you get tired and then you go to sleep and then you wake up at seven and then you’re rushed to start the whole day. Why don’t you just cut out the two hours of TV, and just go to bed and then you’re going to wake up two hours earlier and then it’s going to change everything because you’re going to have two complete hours that you’ve never seen before because you’re not hurried. And you’re just shifting the time that you’re wasting at nighttime and you’re putting it in the morning.

So there’s no different, you’re not changing anything. You’re just going to bed opposed to wasting time. And then you’re waking up and then you’re getting everything situated. You could watch your TV, watch the same program that you were going to watch at nighttime to put you asleep and watch it first thing in the morning while you’re waking up, because it might take you 30 minutes to wake up. So instead of hurrying up to do what? To go wait in traffic, which makes absolutely no sense. Why don’t you just wake up earlier, get everything taken care of and cruise to work before rush hour.

Turtle and the hare, kind of goes with that. Now, they teach us this story when we’re a little kid. Who wins the race, is it the turtle, or is it the hare? Now in the storybook, they make the turtle look really boring and kind of nerdy. Nobody wants to go for the turtle. Everybody wants to go for the hare. The hare is cool, got the coolest sunglasses on. He’s the popular one. All the little animals are rooting for the hare and he’s extra confident, but he runs so fast. He is so hurried he wears himself out. He looks back at the turtle and the hare is like, man, I got this. What does he do? He fell asleep because he worked himself so hard. He burned himself out. Now here goes the turtle slow and steady, wins the race. Living in the here and now. Paying attention to what’s going on at the moment. Be present, right? You don’t have to rush.

When it comes to making money you don’t have to rush because if it was easy for you to get, it will be easy for you to lose. I’ve turned thousands into lots and lots of thousands, but then lost it the next day. Easy come, easy go. The older I get, I’d rather make a small amount everyday than a huge sum once. That huge sum once did not teach me the correct steps in order for me to do it on a consistent basis, but making a little everyday, taking it slow, being present to what’s going on at the moment allows me to be able to absorb more information, and make better well-defined decisions than living in the past, and always thinking about what happened yesterday, or living in the future, and always thinking about, ooh, I could get this if I make a million dollars. Right now, today, I can go buy this mansion.

Instead of paying attention be honest with yourself. Where are you? Where are you in life? Focus on what’s directly in front of you. What is the first thing that you can do? Discipline your money habits. Don’t spend money you don’t have. Do not go on vacation on credit. That makes absolutely zero sense. Be present in today right now at this very moment. What are you doing? And then move forward. All right. Hope you enjoyed. Talk to you next time.

Live In The Here And Now

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