2023 April 11 Yes, you can do almost anything you dream of!

Hi, this is Jim Cranston from 7EveryMinute and 7EveryMinute.com, the podcast and website about re-imagining your life. Thanks for joining me tonight for a pep talk about being amazing. So let's get started. If you like what you hear tonight, please leave a like, tell your friends and send me a message.

Tonight I'll continue talking about being amazing through goal setting outrageous goals, of course, by looking at a recent LinkedIn post I came across from someone who I follow that is doing volunteer work in Ukraine. The fellow's name is Ryan Hendrickson, and you can find him at landmineremoval.org or ryanmhendrickson.com.

He's an interesting guy. I’ve followed him for a while. He started this whole program quite a while back. He's a special forces person who was injured by a mine-like IED, an improvised explosive device. He decided that he really wanted to do more to give back in Ukraine. One of the best things he could do, based upon his skills and training was to do demining because it is just a mess over there. You may say, Oh, that's really interesting, Jim. But what’s that got to do with me setting personal goals for ourselves?

Well, the reality is Ryan is just a guy. He's an ex active military guy, but he's just a guy and he decided he wanted to make a difference. Now this is his third or fourth trip over to assistant de-mining operations. Okay, he's a nice guy, but still. How does it apply to everyday people setting everyday goals?

Well, that's the point. He’s just an everyday sort of guy. He started out with nothing - actually injured, out of the military on a medical, but he kept his vision on his dream. Now, as time has evolved over the past year - and it's only been a year - every time he goes over, he brings more and more de-mining supplies, even including some demining robots.

So he's set up this not-for-profit, and he gets donations, but on this last trip, he was having trouble getting his equipment shipped (due to cost and time). So he reached out to his network on LinkedIn. If you're not on LinkedIn, join LinkedIn. It's the adult version of social media, and be active, like people’s posts, etc.

But he posted on his network on LinkedIn, and probably other places, and ultimately, people talked to friends at places like United Airlines who set him up with humanitarian shipping rates or donations. I'm not sure which it was. Later on, I found out that much of the whole process was assisted by none other than Chef Jose Andres, who we've spoken about before.

You may recall, he is the founder of World Central Kitchen, who we talk about at the close of every show. So you have this guy who had nothing but a dream, and through some perseverance, and people talking to people, is now hooked up with this person who's been doing overseas work, and this huge humanitarian group, World Central Kitchen. He provides meals in disaster areas, and for the last year in a war zone in Ukraine.

The whole thing is kind of interesting at a lot of different levels. Chef Andre learned about Ryan's post one way or another. I don't know if somebody alerted him to it, or he happened to come across it and he was able to make some calls because they ship a lot of huge things as  with World Central Kitchen, and he got a lot of the freight issues taken care of.

I just love this whole story in so many different ways and on so many different levels because here you have both these folks, just like you and me. They're regular people, but they had these huge goals. Instead of dreaming about them, they're working to make them happen. 

They've both done amazing things so far, but they're not done. Their goal is even bigger. They may be on different parts of their journey because chef Jose is more famous and Ryan's starting out, but he's still working and building things, and so is Chef Andres.

I went to their site in preparation for this tonight at World Central Kitchen WCK.org, and they're down where the tornadoes just went through in Mississippi. They are active internationally. He's accelerating on that. He's not slowing down. 

It’s not, Oh, great, I saved a bunch of people in a war zone. I'm done for now. He's going like crazy. Ryan's going like crazy. Even though they're in different parts of their journeys, they're still moving towards these almost unimaginable goals. One step at a time. That's the really important part. Even when they have setbacks, they regroup, they rethink, and they move forward.

Now, one of the things that's neat to come out of this is that Chef Jose Andres, by helping another humanitarian project, suddenly allows Ryan's project to have far more money to spend on his task at hand, which is demining. It makes the environment in Ukraine safer for the farmers and people involved in the food part of the project.

You have these two humanitarian projects who compliment each. Both work towards the same goal of getting people fed in the Ukraine. It's an absolute win-win. It couldn't have been planned better. As a bonus, Ryan's project will get even more attention now, which means more funding, and they'll be able to do more to undo the atrocities of the mines in the fields and the cities by the Russian invaders.

So now all this is coming together. Ryan has more money to spend because it wasn't spent on shipping. United got some good press out of it. The people who are supplying food for Chef Andres’ World Central Kitchen will be more likely to get more food to the people injured. The whole thing just works really well together because two individuals had some big ideas and just kept working. 

I can see some of you now probably rolling your eyes and saying, That's really great for someone with a huge network on the internet and all sorts of talents, but it has nothing to do with me. So I will say that, dear friend, is where you are exactly wrong. I’m sorry to be quite so blunt.

Let's go back to the beginning and listen to it again. These are two people. Chef Jose Andres. He's now well known, but he could just as easily have made a bunch of money as a talented chef and done nothing in particular to address world food shortages in response to natural disasters and a war zone.

But he did get involved. He did come up with entirely new ways to have a bigger impact at a much lower cost that also boosted the local economy and the local people's lives, and changed the entire model for disaster. Not bad for a guy who wasn't in that business. A few years back, he made a huge change worldwide.

Same with Ryan Hendrickson. He could have just said, I'm just an ex-military guy with a few friends, and done nothing. But instead, he put himself out there in every way that he could. He started posting everywhere he could about this crazy project of his, and people responded. He did it once, and then he did it again and again.

Both of them started with nothing more than a goal and determination to make a change. The only difference between them and so many other capable people in the world is that they decided to make their goal a priority, and they also decided that nothing was going to stop them. 

So what about us? Notice I didn't say, What about you? What about us? I'm in the same boat. Many of us are already doing a lot (according to some people), but are we really? I know a couple of you out there, probably a bunch of you, have that little half smile on your face right now thinking, Yeah, I know what he's talking about. Because as we've said before, the real goal isn't to be better than someone else.

The real goal is to be the best person that we can be, and that doesn't necessarily mean working day and night or depriving yourself of things or giving away all your possessions as donations. That may be what you want to do, but that doesn't mean that's what you have to do. But you know if you're really working to your full potential, or if you're holding back because of all the reasons that we've talked about. 

Are you saying to yourself things like, I'm not good enough. Or Maybe when I get some more time, or any of the other excuses that we make. We've all done it at one time or another, but as we've talked about, there are ways to take ourselves to the next level. Remember that much, maybe even most, of what we know was learned from our early experiences, and much of that probably isn't serving us very well.

There are techniques to tease out those limiting beliefs and replace them with the vision of what you want to achieve. But for tonight, I just want to encourage you to think about two regular guys who wanted to change the world on a large scale, and who followed those dreams and turned them into international organizations.

We are the creators of our own limits, and we will rarely exceed our own expectations. If you believe in yourself and envision the future you want, you too can change the world for the better. Ryan Hendrickson and Chef Jose Andres did it, and so can you. 

That's it for tonight. Happy envisionment. Try to imagine all that you could do if you knew absolutely positively that you would not, that you could not, possibly fail. Now take that vision and start thinking about how to make it a reality, because you can do it. 

Quick reminder, of course, as always. We still have the links up for UKR7.com. Those are the links to aid for Ukraine, of course. The other one is the World Central Kitchen, WCK.org. Both of them are doing a lot.

Remember, one of the best ways to care for yourself is to care for others. Food is still a major issue. It's in a war zone. Things are really a wreck in a lot of places in the country. A lot of the fields are full of mines. A lot of the equipment was purposely damaged. They're doing amazing things over there. You can't go wrong if you go with any of them. 

As always, thank you for stopping by. If you found something interesting or useful, please pass it along and hit that like button. If not, please drop me a comment as to what you'd like to hear. Have a great week. Remember to live the life that you dream of, because that's the path to true contentment. Love and encouragement to everyone. See you next week on 7EveryMinute and 7EveryMinute.com. Thank you so much.