Episode 09: If you Had All The Money and the Time in the World

[00:00:00] Seth: If you had all the time and money in the world, what would you do with it? Would you spend your time buying new cars and going on vacations? With unlimited money, you could do anything. Have you ever beat a video game? And did you ever want to play it again after you finished it? Maybe you did. Maybe you played a harder level.

Maybe you waited a while until you kind of forgot it so that it was fresh again. Or maybe you played it again to see if you could beat the whole thing faster. I highly doubt you played it the exact same way twice. When the challenge is gone, it's just, it's hard for a game to be fun. A long time ago, I can remember playing a game where there was an option where I could use all of the resources and the abilities available in the game.

It was like a cheat code or something. And so I did it and that game. Lasted 15 minutes before I had to just turn on all the challenges back on again, because it was no fun whatsoever. I had to restore those limitations before I could enjoy it. Now, if you had all the money and the time in the world.

It might be fun to chase novelty for a while, but eventually you're going to want some purpose to struggle for. The joy really is in the journey. I read one time that it's actually pretty common for people that achieve high, high levels of success in sports, like people who get gold medals, for example, they've reached the top of their, of their category, whatever that may be.

And they get there and they have their moment of glory after which, afterwards, they don't really know what to do with themselves. They've hit the top, the game is done, they've, there's nothing more for them to achieve. As we know, for some of these athletes, the next goal is, well, can I, can I get more of them?

How many of them can I get? So they have to increase the level of challenge before they can enjoy it. And they're not unique in that we're all that way for years. My goal has been to make enough money so that I wouldn't have to think about money anymore. I didn't really think beyond that. And as I have gotten closer to that goal, it's made me more and more thoughtful about what I actually want to do with my time, because I'm realizing as it gets closer that I want to do something after that I have hobbies.

I love my hobbies. In fact, I can have fun doing almost anything, and I have no plans of stopping anytime soon. But if all you do in your life is have fun with hobbies, how does that make you different from a perpetual child? See, in the quiet moments of my life, when no one is around me, I'm left to my own thoughts.

I either feel compelled to distract myself with a phone or a TV show, or heaven forbid, I'll have to sit and face my inner landscape. When I'm stuck with that problem, the question becomes, What will fulfill me? Can I serve any higher purpose than just to exist and to experience new novelty? I have a family and that's always gonna be a priority for me and they will always bring meaning to my life But someday my kids are gonna be grown They're gonna move away and they're gonna find their own paths and I'm gonna be stuck with myself again You know all this purpose that my children bring me it reduces as far as how much of that is My mission as they get older, which is a good thing They become independent They find their own place in life.

Hopefully they find a purpose that drives them. But beyond my children, I want them to be proud of me. I want them to have a dad that they respect and love and to be that man I need to have something. Beyond just my own novelty, I would like for them to be able to say something more than, Dad sure had a lot of fun.

I would just be so happy if my kids could say something like, My dad cared for other people. My dad would give the shirt off his back to, to somebody. I don't know that I'm that guy, but something to that effect. I want them to have something to be proud of. So even if they, are grown and gone, I still want to find some level of purpose in my life.

So that brings me back to the question that I started out with. If I had all the money, or let's talk about you. If you had all the money and the time, what would you do? And if you were to figure out what you would do in that situation, is there anything you could be doing now? Are you distracting yourself from what you could be doing?

Are you letting thoughts of the past or worries about the future control your mind? Try to step out of those thoughts for a moment. Take a deep breath and let yourself just be for a moment. I have found that in the moments when you remove those distractions and even your own thinking, when you just let your thinking stop and you just exist in that moment, those are the moments where the inspiration can come.

I think what you'll find if you spend enough time doing that. And the inspiration comes for, for what you could be doing or what you really want to be doing, or the thing that will fulfill you, I think what you'll find is that most people arrive at a similar place, just with different approaches at the very core of what most people.

Come to is a desire to give to other people. What we give and how we give it is gonna vary from person to person. And whatever pathway that is can be wildly different from one to the next. But at its core, of course, people want to give to other people. And when you find that place. In your heart, and you learn what is going to fulfill you, the important question becomes, can you start doing it now?

If not, what can you be doing now that will get you to a place where you can start doing it? We become so distracted in life by the things in our life, the little things that suck our attention. It's almost like we're boats in the night and we're sailing past the treasure island that has all the answers to what we would want and just going right past it to chase something else.

So that's why when I say that you have, it helps to separate yourself from the distractions in your life, the beeping phone, the compulsive hobbies, the TV, et cetera, separating yourself from, from that from a time. And if you can actually separate yourself from your own thoughts for a moment, it's like turning a light onto that inner landscape and you start having the, the opportunity to experience some of that, some of that inspiration.

I think this is why a lot of people. They have to go hiking. They have to get out. They have to walk outside. They have to do something that gets them away from all of the little things that are sucking their attention away, that are sucking their capacity away to do something better. When, when people reach that place, it can take, like I said earlier, it can take a lot of different shapes.

For some people, that thing that they want to give back, it may be music. It may be that they just realize they want to be that person that's in the trenches, helping the sick and the needy. For some, they may realize that they really just love teaching. And if you have it, if you have material wealth, maybe that's just your thing.

How can I give back? How can I take what I have, the resources I have and give it to other people? Maybe you're only good at business. Well, if that's the case, that's, that's a great thing to be good at because then you have, like I said, the material wealth that you can use to. Give to other people someday and for some people they already know What they would do if they had all the time and the money in the world and they may even be capable of doing that Thing to some degree already, but they still don't and why don't they do this because we get caught up in distractions Because there's always that small thing in our life that needs our attention.

That's just not as important There's always that thing that's calling our attention That wants to keep you from doing something that might actually be helpful to somebody else. See, there are things in life that are going to keep you wallowing in the mud, and there are things in life that will get you out of it.

And if you look around, it isn't always that hard to tell if you just think on it for a minute. For me, my phone is an attention sucker. Are there good things I can do on my phone? Certainly. Are there things that could facilitate what I believe to be my purpose? Absolutely. But it is so full of other distractions that sometimes I just have to separate myself from it.

Another one, never ending TV shows that just want to suck you in and this, this, this dopamine hit that you get from watching the next episode and then the next episode and the next episode. For me, it was a major obstacle. So I cut them out because they were not taking me anywhere I wanted to go in my life.

And after you've cut things out in your life, find that purpose, seek out a calling. Everyone's got something that they can do. Everyone has something that they can do and enjoy. You don't need to compare yourself to world figures whose action impacts millions or even thousands because ultimately the fighting happens face to face.

The most important things happen person to person. Any one person that has significant impact. Really only has significant impact because of the usually because of the hundreds of people that are helping them or you may think of like a Teacher or somebody that that just has a really big voice in the world I mean their big voice is big because people are talking to each other about it And sometimes that's just the role you play is just being one of those people That moves something in the right direction.

So I think this question of thinking about what would you do if you had all the money and all the time, I think it's a good question to think about now, because even though you may currently not be in that situation, at least you'll, it will help you come to an understanding. of what you would like to be doing, because the time and the money, in a way, those are our two biggest excuses for not doing things that would otherwise fulfill us.

And so if we can figure out what that thing is that we would do if we had all of that, at least we have a starting point. So don't wait until you've got millions of dollars or unlimited time. Money and time only allow people to do things on a grander scale. If you think you would behave differently. If you had all the money and the time in the world, maybe it's worth thinking about how you could do those things now, albeit on a less grand scale.

In a machine, a cog typically only fits one place and it performs one function to make a machine work in one specific capacity. In life, we get to choose what kind of cog we're going to be and that machine is going to keep on functioning with or without us. And the beauty of it though, is that depending on where we place our cog and what kind of cog we want to be.

We can change the functioning of that machine ever so slightly. In a positive direction. So when I was working on this, I found a poem that I thought was very appropriate for the topic. And I'm going to read that to you. This is by a guy named Edgar Albert Guest. I think he was alive around the late 19th century, but he wrote this poem called Tomorrow and I'm just going to read it to you.

He was going to be all that a mortal should be tomorrow. No one should be kinder or braver than he. Tomorrow. A friend who was troubled and weary he knew, who'd be glad of a lift and who needed it too. On him he would call and see what he could do. Tomorrow. Each morning he stacked up the letters he'd write.

Tomorrow. And thought of the folks he would fill with delight. Tomorrow. It was too bad, indeed, he was busy today. And had it a minute to stop on his way, more time he would have to give others, he'd say, tomorrow. The greatest of workers this man would have been tomorrow. The world would have known him, had he ever seen tomorrow.

But the fact is he died and he faded from view, and all that he left here, when living was through, was a mountain of things he intended to do tomorrow.