Conquering the World, One Day at a Time (Episode 147)

Ever feel like throwing in the towel and giving up? We get it. But what if we told you that perseverance, not quitting, is the key to success? In today's episode, we tackle this concept head-on, drawing examples from our own lives and the journeys of successful individuals. Discover how hard work, preparation and sacrifice can turn your dreams into reality. 

We all need a 'reset' button in life, don't we? Well, let's take a cue from the movie "Just Another Christmas". We traverse through the protagonist's journey, reliving Christmas each year, and come to realize the importance of sacrificing materialistic success for relationships. We also touch on the significance of leaving behind a positive legacy. So, are you ready to hit the reset button and reevaluate what truly matters in life?

And then, there are days that are just tough. But remember, every day is an adventure, laden with challenges that require our inner strength to overcome. We discuss the importance of identifying life's true priorities, and finding the courage to face each new day. This episode is your ally, your guide as you navigate through adversity and strive to thrive. So, let's embark on this journey together! Keep your eyes on the horizon, for there's success waiting for you. Tune in now and let's conquer the world, one challenge at a time.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:07

Hello friends, welcome to your motivational Gen Z and millennial expert podcast. I'm your host, my name is Dr Jason Wiggins and it is great to be here today. As everybody may know, or if you're new to the podcast, this podcast covers Gen Z and millennials. Everything that matters, and the spin we always try to put on it, is how we can motivate and be optimistic in the face of adversity, and today is a day that you know. Hopefully you had a great weekend and you're kind of thinking about the holidays coming up and where things are going, what you're going to do, what presents you're going to send. So it can be a very, very busy time. So if you're in the middle of your shopping, or shopping during this time as we listen to the podcast, I wish you luck with all of the foot traffic in the malls and wherever you may be shopping. So again, thank you for being here. It was a great weekend overall, with the exception of my son was a little under the weather, so we were watching him during the, you know, not feeling so great, but other than that, I'm excited to be here Today.

Speaker 1: 1:24

We have an excellent podcast. We're going to go over a few key topics. These topics are really resonate with most individuals, that are those that are looking to exceed expectations. So today we're going to talk about if you keep going, you'll keep growing, know what is important in life and fight on to live another day. Those are the things we're going to cover today and I think the, by the end of this podcast, you're going to feel really, really rejuvenated. You're going to be excited about what your adventures may lie ahead, and that is what this podcast is all about. It's about sometimes lighting a fire under where it counts to get you moving forward, and that is how we are going to celebrate the existence of you as leaders, as successful individuals, as expiring individuals and as those individuals that really have a lot of talents that need to be uprooted and surfaced and then spread to all of the areas that need to be spread with your talents, leadership and ability, as we talked about. The first is if you keep going, you keep growing. Now think about that. If you keep going, you keep growing, because quitting is easy In the face of adversity.

Speaker 1: 3:07

Quitting is easy, but a legacy last forever. Some things that are hard. They seem impossible. It's a mountain You're climbing up and up, and up and up and up and up. It just seems like it's taking forever to get there. But once you get on the top of the mountain, you can look down and see everything that you wanted to achieve is sitting right there waiting for you to take that reward that reward for getting you up the up the mountain and looking, overlooking all of the surroundings, everything that you wanted. You faced adversity, you overcame. Overcoming adversity is not easy.

Speaker 1: 4:02

Quitting is easy when you reach your goals. You surpass your goals, if that's in business, that's in your personal life, that's in your community, whatever it may be the success that you subscribe to, that you provide the ability to others to see and they notice that you are a successful individual who has accomplished so much. So maybe right now you're going through a tough situation where, no matter what you do, you just want to quit. You're running as fast as you can, your legs are hurting, but you can't quit. Why? Quitting is easy and there are no rewards for those who quit. Sometimes quitting may be the best, depending if your health is suffering due to whatever it is. I get it. There are times where quitting does make sense, but in the majority of cases, the only reason why you quit is because you don't think you can succeed.

Speaker 1: 5:22

And success is about the ability, the inner drive, to take what you believe is sitting there waiting for you and going to grab it. You keep trying to grab it. It kind of keeps going forward. You keep pushing to grab it. It just seems to be out of touch of your hands to grab that thing you want so much. So what do you do? You work harder, you prepare more, you do the necessary things to get you where you need to be. The ability to keep going is about deserving the in rewards Successful people that have started businesses.

Speaker 1: 6:09

They didn't just get there by the luck. In most cases they worked their tails off, they did what needed to be done to be successful. They read, they learned, they trained, they sacrificed. They did all of these different things to overcome. As a personal experience, the one thing I can relate most to on this is during my PhD process. The dissertation process was like the mountain, and no matter how tough it was to climb up the mountain, I can tell you I wanted to quit so many times.

Speaker 1: 6:49

Look, google, how hard a dissertation is. A dissertation does not merely try to state how intelligent you are as an individual. It's more about how you can persevere when everything is stacked up against you. It could be committee members don't like your dissertation topic. It could be all of the aspects that they go. This is not good enough. This is not good enough. And even worse, maybe somebody else has already chosen that certain topic because you took too long bringing it to fruition of the dissertation and completing it. Somebody else could have took that idea, they could have did the experimentations of that idea, and then you're left to start back from square one. But in my case, I struggled. It was the hardest thing that I've ever been through, and personally, and so I can really understand climbing up that mountain, doing everything you can to surpass your goals, to create that success that you know is there.

Speaker 1: 8:02

Look at successful people. They don't quit in the face of adversity, in the United States or abroad. Think about presidents of your respective countries or within the United States. These individuals are ridiculed throughout the process. Their backgrounds are turned upside down. It's not easy. Their family life everything is extrapolated into a big ball of everybody wants to know everything about it. That's not a great life to live, but that's the sacrifices they make to get where they want to be Famous people. Their lives are also turned upside down. They can't walk down the street because everybody wants to get into their life and their business. So successful people have to make sacrifices Gen Z and millennials and Generation X and Baby Boomers and everybody else. They had to have made sacrifices or they're going to have to make sacrifices to get where they want to be. So envision the successful person you are, envision that person, mold that person and then take that person and fold them into a dynamic that is going to make sense in the long run. Where do you see yourself in five years, 10 years, 15 years? Envision yourself on top of that mountain, looking down and going. I made it. I worked hard, I sacrificed, I faced adversity and I made it.

Speaker 1: 9:42

Theodore Roosevelt said Courage is not having the strength to go on. It is going on when you don't have the strength. Courage is not having the strength to go on. It is going on when you don't have the strength. If it's easy, everybody's doing it. The second topic that I want to talk about in the cover today is Know what's important in your life. Think about your life as an end game.

Speaker 1: 10:24

I just watched a recent movie that's actually made in Brazil. It's called Just Another Christmas and I want to give you kind of an overview of this movie in retrospect, to understanding what's important in life. And again, the movie is called Just Another Christmas, and what happens in this movie is there's a dad and a husband, they have two kids and he doesn't like Christmas, and what happens is they're having a family gathering during a Christmas Day celebration where his wife asks him to be Santa Claus, but they want him to be Santa Claus on the roof of their home with a bag of presents. And so what happens is she specifically tells him to put the presents down the chimney in front of the kids who are on the ground as he's up on the roof. But what he starts to do, he starts trying to push the bag, the whole bag, down the chimney and from that point he slips down the roof, lands on his back and hits his head on the ground.

Speaker 1: 11:47

The next time he wakes up, he wakes up on Christmas the next year and then he has to go through the whole Christmas Day again. He has amnesia, where he forgets the remaining part of the year and only remembers Christmas. And after about 20 Christmases his daughter is getting older she's probably mid-20s he finds out he has grandkids. But he goes to touch his daughter on the head and her hair comes off a wig and a hat. He finds out she has cancer and he realizes there that when he wakes up the next year, when he goes back to sleep, he's going to lose her. She's probably not going to be with them any longer. So what he does is he asks her what do you want to do? They sit down. They watch a movie. He cries as he holds her. He tries to stay awake but he knows he's going to fall asleep. And he falls asleep and the next time he wakes up it's the next Christmas and she did pass away. But there's the grandpa who's always sitting in the room and he always gets mad at the grandpa because he somehow thinks he was involved in changing him to forgetting the remainder of the year. He goes up and says I wish I could do it all over again, because he realized he didn't remember what was important. He didn't remember what is important in your life. And the Santa Claus says to him why don't you wish for it? And he's like what? Why don't you wish for it? And this grandpa never talks and he's the only one that's seen him talk in the 20 years. So he makes a wish, he falls back to sleep, he wakes up and it's the very next day.

Speaker 1: 13:41

Hello, friends, if you haven't had a chance and you see this episode, please check out episode 147 first. This is the second part of the episode, as we were discussing the three key topics that are included in today's podcast, which we covered the first one, which was, if you keep going, you keep growing in the first part of this podcast, which was again episode 147. And we also started discussing what is important in your life, and that's what we finished up with in the first part of the podcast of 147. And so episode 148 will continue talking about just another Christmas, as we talked about that movie where the individual that was in the movie fell asleep and he kept on waking up and realized that it was Christmas all the time and he lost sight of what was important. So that's the premise of that.

Speaker 1: 14:42

So, as we conclude with that, it goes about how do you do things differently? You have a chance to redo everything, because he made a wish that he wished he could have did it all over again the right way. So he woke up next morning and he was just as young as he was 20 years ago and he gets to see his children grow up and he knows that his daughter would eventually have cancer. So he had a cancer pamphlet with him to always remind him, to make sure that he reminded her his daughter to be screened for cancer. So that's kind of how the movie ended. But that goes back to what we talked about.

Speaker 1: 15:22

Know what's important in your life. Think of your life as the end game. And what can you do differently? How can you be the person you want to be while continuing to be successful? Don't look at success as something that has to consume your life. Success should be something that you and your family can enjoy together. We all have to work, we all have to have a profession. We all have to have the need to bring income into the house by having established established types of careers. Everybody understands that. But it doesn't mean sacrificing your family. In the movie he sacrificed his family. He became a big corporate executive, but he never had time for his family. His health went down in a downward spiral, he had the heart attack. And what it shows you is if we can do life all over again, how will we do it differently. But since we can't do life all over again, why don't we hit a reset button? You hit a reset button and say you know what, I want to do it this way. I'm gonna do it the right way. It's not too late to change. Maybe you've already sacrificed your family, your friends, to get where you want to be. But guess what? Sometimes you have to decide what's more important. What can you do differently? What objections can you overcome to make sure that whatever you do is the right thing to do for you, your family and all those around you?

Speaker 1: 17:11

Because when we pass on this good earth one day, nobody cares about how much money you made, how successful you are. What they're gonna remember is what you did for other people. Were you a person of kindness? Were you a person that cared about other people? Were you a good family man? Were you a good father, a good husband, a good neighbor? Those are the things that people are going to resonate with when you pass on. What kind of legacy are you going to leave If you just have a bunch of money and you scatter all this money around? But you weren't a nice person? People are just gonna remember you as some rich person, but that's not who we can be when we leave our legacy. It needs to be.

Speaker 1: 18:03

What could I have done differently? How could I have changed? I had the time. I had all these warnings. I had a wife, I had a husband. I had kids. I sacrificed them for my job. We don't want to say that when we go out on this good earth. We want to be able to say that people will remember me for the good things I did, for the heart I had, for the passion, for the integrity, for the trustworthiness. These are core values about no understanding what is important in your life, and your life is going to go through a series of different obstacles. We all think differently now today than we did 10 years ago. As generation Y and Z, baby boomers and generation X, we all have gone through different scenarios.

Speaker 1: 19:00

I can tell you, when I was younger, I would remember saying the music that my parents were listening to. I would always say I'm never gonna listen to this music. I'm always gonna be listening to the up-to-date music, whatever that may be, whatever that year is. Well, that was a fallacy. I still listen to that same music I said I would never listen to. I still listen to some newer stuff. But we all grow, we all continue to develop. And that's what I'm saying is know what's important in your life. And if you've had the chance to turn it all around again and you still know that you can continue to develop a better relationship with your spouse, your children, your friends, then this is the time to do it. This is the time to be able to understand what's important.

Speaker 1: 19:51

I'd like to provide a quote to you before we end this topic. It's at any point, you have the power to say this is not how the story ends. Again, this quote by Christina Miller at any point, you have the power to say this is not how the story ends. You write your own book. This is your story, so write it the way you want it to end. How do you see yourself going through life, envisioning yourself as you move forward? So think about that successful person you want to be and decide what am I going to do about it to get where I want to be?

Speaker 1: 20:38

And the last topic I wanted to cover in today's podcast is fight on to live another day. We've already talked about. If you keep growing, you'll keep growing. We talked about know what's important in your life, and now we're going to talk about live to fight another day. It's about the inner qualities, the characteristics that you have as an individual. Are you a motivator? Are you empathetic? Are you somebody that is trustworthy? Are you a good friend, a good parent? These inner qualities are what makes us unique and how others can identify with you. Remember, there is no duplicate of you. There is only one you. And sometimes you have to dig deep.

Speaker 1: 21:32

When things are tough, the day may be tough. You may be having a bad day with your spouse, your kid, work, something that's really important to you. It just doesn't seem like this day is ever going to end and you want to quit. That's where that mental health is very, very vital to us is. You have to make sure that you can overcome the adversity, the inability to see that there is greater good on the other side. We have to think if we wanted to make it to that next day. We want to be stronger. We want to build character. We want to be more successful. We have to keep fighting on. Every day is an adventure. Every day we wake up as an adventure.

Speaker 1: 22:22

Sometimes we don't know what's in tail for that day. I mean, you can think about it as a leader. As a leader, you go to work. You can have so many different things thrown at you that you have no idea how things are going to work out. But people are looking at you to make decisions that matter for them as coworkers for the organization, and they expect you to make sure that you make those right calls for not only the employees, but for the organization to keep being successful. So every day, if it's you have three or four kids, you have so many things you have to do. That day you don't know what's going to happen. Maybe your kid gets hurt at school or you lose your wallet, or you have identity theft or something happens that you cannot control. Then you have to figure out what can I do to overcome this? So when something happens, when change happens, when things get thrown at you and you don't know how to handle them, you become stressed, you become over compensated with whatever is happening right then, and there We've got to think to ourselves Tomorrow is a new day. I'm going to overcome this. Things are not good today, but they'll be better tomorrow.

Speaker 1: 23:45

Think about if you're 80 years old and think about it. Somebody comes up to you and says you know what? Tell me about all the catastrophes in your life and that 80 year old was going to go. You know what? Most of the catastrophes that I thought of never happened. So think about that. All the catastrophes that I thought about never happened. What that means is, during that day, they worried so much about how they were going to get through that day because of stressors that never happened. So you want to be able to fight on to live another day. And how do you do this? By sometimes taking some collective deep breaths Just breathe in, breathe out. My seven year old says that because he knows that sometimes things get tough and you have to just take a moment to take a deep breath and then release that and do that a couple of times. So you realize that I'm going to overcome this. This is a challenge that is difficult right now, but it's not going to define me about who I am Today.

Speaker 1: 25:06

I hope you enjoyed our conversation. We talked about if you keep going, keep growing, and that in that case quitting is easy, but your legacy lasts forever. The second topic we talked about was know what is important in your life. Think about that movie, just another Christmas, and how he had a chance to do it all over again and think about what was important. And the third discussion we had is fight on to live another day. Take those deep breaths Inhale, exhale. Things are going to get better when you dig deep. That is the strength you need to overcome all your adversity.

Speaker 1: 25:55

I Want to thank everybody listening today again. This podcast is for Gen Z and Millennials. This is a motivational podcast that describes what occurs in a daily life and how, as a collective whole, we can come together to develop solutions on being better as individuals, as co-workers, leader, family, individuals, spouses, friends and whatever is important to you. And so please, if you haven't had a chance, share this with your friends and family, and we will. We've definitely talked to you soon.

Speaker 1: 26:38

Next next podcast would be Monday, which is a holiday. That's Christmas, and so I hope everybody has a terrific holiday, has time with their family and friends, reach out to your loved ones. I Will try to have a podcast before then, but if not, we will definitely get together that week of Christmas and we will have another great podcast. I'll have another great amount of content to share with you, and so, again, I want to thank everybody For listening. I appreciate you and I can't wait to talk to you on our next podcast. On our next podcast. So thank you, take care, my name is dr Jason Wiggins and I am your motivational Gen Z and millennial expert. Bye, bye.