2025 June 17 Making a difference

You can view the original Facebook LIVE here.

Making a Difference

Hi, this is Jim Cranston from 7EveryMinute and 7EveryMinute.com, the podcast and website about reimagining your life. Thanks for joining me today to talk about making a difference. If you like what you hear tonight, please tell your friends, leave a like, subscribe, send me a message.

Tonight we're going to be talking about making a real difference in something that matters to you. We'll talk about it in two contexts—not about the potential outcome itself, but rather what working from a place of true life passion can accomplish for you. This is being recorded on June 17th, 2025 episode.

The No Kings Protests

This is three days after the worldwide No Kings protests. If you haven't heard of them or weren't sure of the message, it was simply that the office of the President of the United States is just one of the three branches of our constitutional republic, and that no president, including the current one, is above the law nor the Constitution, and is not authorized to just ignore laws they find inconvenient.

To be clear, this is hardly the first attempt in the executive branch—and certainly not the only attempt—to target people by race or ethnicity or religion. One of the more blatant recent ones that always comes to mind is the incarceration of people of Japanese descent after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

But there are a number of other ones that have happened throughout history, starting from very early in our republic. The defining matter is that all of them were stopped and overturned by a combination of the other two branches of government—the Congress and the Judiciary branch. And often, that whole change was encouraged, we might say, by the support of the common people.

So everybody got together, really made a lot of noise, and Congress and the judiciary realized that we just can't let this go on. So that's what the protests were about. And a lot of people, myself included, were thinking, Well, where did this actually come from? You don't put together something like that overnight. You don't just throw it together. There had to be something it came from.

The Power of Two People with Passion

The underlying framework for the No Kings protest came from a group called Indivisible—as in one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all from our U.S. Pledge of Allegiance. Indivisible was actually aided by over 200 other organizations. The whole thing was a big effort.

The whole concept was started by Indivisible, which was founded by two people—Leah Greenberg and Ezra Levin. They met when they were congressional staffers in Congress. Before you think that makes them too elite or too exclusive or just a little tiny group—right now, I think this year there are around 31,000 congressional staffers. 

So, you have this huge mass of people, but they happened to meet there. They had a lot of common goals and a passion to make those goals come true. That's one of the big cruxes we're going to talk about.

These two highly motivated individuals wanted to do something—and that passion and focus ultimately ended up creating a worldwide protest of well over five million people. Which is pretty impressive results for a couple of folks who wanted to get a political message across and ended up doing it with help from over five million other people—two to five million.

That's a 2.5 million to one multiplication of your efforts—which comes all the way back to you, and to me, and to everyone who feels they have nothing to contribute, or they couldn't ever do anything really important, and any of the other excuses we all tell ourselves.

If something's truly important to you, and you can show other people why it should be important to them, then there are limitless ways to make a positive change in the world.

Age Is Just a Number

In the chat group of one of my mentors, there was a recent comment from someone who had just joined at the age of 71. Now, most of the people in this course are in their twenties or thirties, and a number of people in their forties, but they're all younger people looking to get going and make huge changes in the world. But this person said not only did they think their age wasn't a hindrance, but it was actually the basis of their superpowers that they wanted to teach others.

That's a really positive and forward-looking approach to making a positive change. And while this person's results may not be as obvious to the rest of the world as a multimillion-person rally, nothing says they might not be as influential in their outcomes as any other huge thing that you see.

Obviously, when you make a little tiny change in something, that can really ripple out in a very positive way.

So if you have something you think is important, and you teach it to a couple other people, and they teach it to a couple other people, maybe one of those people goes on to start a company or a class or something, and they teach it to some other people—that little effect just keeps rippling out bigger and bigger and bigger in a very positive way.

Stop the Negative Self-Talk

So I would encourage everyone, the next time you think that you want to make a positive change but it's too late, or you're too old or too young—just stop for a minute. Stop all the negative self-talk, which I know sometimes is hard, but just stop and try to clear your mind. Then think about what it is you really want to accomplish.

You know how to do it using the SMART goals—we've talked about that—and do a quick review of some of the next steps you think you could take to get working on that goal. Not to finish it—just to get started. Then think about the simplest next step you could take. And probably, it is pretty simple.

Write it down on a piece of paper or put it in your calendar and make a commitment to start by just doing that small, maybe even seemingly insignificant, next step. And then just keep doing that, and every day you'll be moving forward and closer to your goals.

Remember, the five-plus-million-person No Kings protest started with two people who wanted to make a difference.

Tonight's Homework

So that's it for the evening. Thank you so very much for stopping by. Of course, your homework tonight is to take any goal that you've been carrying around for a while—but felt was too big to be achievable, or for whatever reason, you just couldn't get started on it—and break it down into some steps. Try and figure out how to start working on that first small, maybe even tiny, step.

Then extra points if you try and approach it using our SMART goals and really lay out the beginnings of a plan to reach your goal. And you might be surprised where you end up.

Making a Difference in the World

So as always, remember that there are a lot of places going through a lot right now. There's wars, unrest, and stuff pretty much everywhere you turn your head. Do what you can, however small it may seem.

We have UKR7.com—that's links to places to support the people of Ukraine. And then, of course, the other one is WCK.org, World Central Kitchen. They work around the world in disaster areas, bringing food and necessary supplies to people.

Besides these two big international organizations, we always talk about how there are probably a lot of local people near where you live who are doing work too. They can always, always use your help. Support can take a lot of different forms. If you can give money, great. If you can give time—even better, sometimes. And if you can just tell other people about it and keep it in people's minds, that matters too.

The thing to remember is that if you look outside yourself and see the rest of the world, it really changes your perspective on things. It gives you different insight into how you can move things forward in very positive ways.

Even something as simple as smiling at someone you meet in the street, wishing them a good day—that can make a huge positive difference. And sometimes, if something's really important to you, you get together with all your friends... and maybe you end up with five million friends.

As always, thank you for stopping by. If you found something interesting or useful, please pass it along. Please subscribe, 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.