2025 May 13 Control your reality

You can view the original Facebook LIVE here.

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 controlling your reality. If you like what you hear today, please leave a like, tell your friends, send me a message.

We're going to talk about how we react to the world around us.The juxtaposition of two events today really made clear to me how our attitude and our response to the world can have such a profound effect upon our behavior—not just our personal behavior, but even the things we can affect, even as far as the behavior of the country.

For people in certain positions of power, all the way to how it affects the world. Some people, when they make a change, the change not only affects how they react to something, but it affects how they author things. Often, this behavior becomes enshrined in law. 

But first, I want to start with a quote from Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost, now known as Pope Leo the 14th. "To be a good shepherd means to be able to walk side by side with the people of God and to live close to them, not to be isolated."

We talk about this concept a lot because it's important. Avoiding isolation is important—both as individuals, and as humans. We are wired to have other people around us. When we try to live by ourselves, we survive, but it does affect us. It weighs on us after a while. Isolation and isolationism have become quite popular recently, but they're not especially healthy, nor do they reflect well upon one's personal approach to life.

I was reading some pending congressional Senate bills. The most noticeable part of the bills was that most of them were couched in us versus them language. They were called out in somewhat general terms, but it was crystal clear who they were talking about.

This morning, I was reading about a columnist from the Wall Street Journal who recently retired for medical reasons. His name is Jonathan Clements. He has written over a thousand columns on personal finance. His goal was to get everyday people to learn how to start investing so that they could have a better life and a nicer retirement.

Unfortunately, he has a rare cancer, and the prognosis is less than 12 months to live. But he’s already at month 13, so he said he's actually pretty excited—which should already tell you a lot about the kind of person he is and the kind of attitude that he has. You can learn more at 7em.link/jon1.

Jonathan faces a short, expected remaining lifespan—and what did he do? Jonathan worked with friends, supporters, and some organizations to put together a program to teach disadvantaged young adults (18 and up who are also participating in a youth employment program around the Boston area) how to manage their money and how to set up a Roth IRA retirement plan.

Roth retirement plans are the ones where you pay taxes on your money before you put it in—unlike a standard IRA—but then you don't pay any taxes when you take the money back out. So you can put in money, leave it sitting there for hopefully 20, 30, 40 years, and then you have a big bundle of money sitting there, which you can take out tax free. They're very nice if you can start investing when you're young.

Jonathan is working with a group called J-PAL and another group. They're going to take random samples out of that cohort of people and give those people $1,000 grants to invest into a Roth IRA to help them get started. Everybody gets education about the advantages of investing early and investing continually over your life. Then a select subset of them is going to get $1,000 to start their investment.

We talked a while ago about a great financier and author, John Bogle. He's passed away, but there's a memorial—The Bogle Center for Financial Literacy. They're promoting the program as well, and donations can be made there. You can visit them at 7em.link/jon1.

So Jonathan sat down and worked with a bunch of people to put together a program that could really make a change in the world—even as he's diagnosed with having a very short time left in the world.

But it goes on, because the whole group—the cohort—is going to be tracked after the program to see what their individual outcomes look like. That data is going to form the basis for optimizing an educational outreach program to try and help more young people realize the potential of saving and starting while they're young.

The analysis is done by J-PAL, which is the Poverty Action Lab at MIT, and at least two analysts are going to be working to provide solid results and see how such an outreach can be improved.

Best of all, it's not just a giveaway. Rather, since it's a teaching program, the concept is that a lot of the participants will come away with a real knowledge that it's worth investing.

There’s a way, even if they're only putting in $20 a week regularly, they'll be able to feel confident enough that they can share that with their peers and spread it even farther than just the people who were in the program.

So I read about the youth program this morning, and then I read about some of the pending new Senate bills. (Remember that you can always look up Senate stuff at 7em.link/congress. This will bring you to the site where you can look up various pending bills and your representative and your congressperson. 

I’m reading about all these possible new laws and thinking about the attitudes behind these pending bills versus what the Pope said, which was to walk side by side with the people of God and to live close to them and not to be isolated.

I’m looking at these two very different approaches to life—there’s a huge difference between the legislature I’m reading and the stuff that Jonathan was doing. 

One is keep everyone away from me. That’s the legislation. The other is bring everyone close to me. That was actually from the quote from Pope Leo. Look at it from another perspective, the first one comes from a position of fear. The second one comes from a position of strength and confidence—of having the world be close to you.

The only thing that's really different between those two polar opposite approaches is how the people behind them reacted to their world. As we often say, you may not be able to control reality, but you can control your response to it. That’s why I’m talking about this again—because it’s important to remember how much our beliefs and our attitudes affect our thinking and even our actions.

The senators authoring those bills were probably thinking about them in terms of keeping people away. You know, keep these people away, keep people who think this way away, keep people who think or act that way away.

The problem when you do this is that you miss all the ways that these targeted people could be—or perhaps actually already are—benefiting society—or even benefiting you,.

It’s much like the common knowledge filter that we've talked about before. You learn most of your common knowledge as a child. But unless you stop to review it occasionally, you may find that it’s holding you back in unexpected ways, because a lot of common knowledge is just plain wrong.

And a lot of these laws I see being written are based upon common knowledge. Now that they’ve actually done the statistics, they’re finding that a lot of the things they claimed just aren’t true. There’s no other way to say it, but a lot of this legislation that you see going on now, at the federal level in particular, is based upon some assumptions of how certain people act. 

They started looking at the actual number of people who came into the country illegally and the crime rates in this case. They actually found that the crime rates among immigrants are lower than the crime rates of the population taken at large.

That’s common knowledge. A good example of common knowledge that’s just plain wrong.

That's not to say there are no bad actors—but the common knowledge was always that everything spiked tremendously with immigrants. It did not. The number of people versus the amount of crime did not go the way they said it did. But they were writing legislation based on that assumption. That is negativity in action.

As we age, there are always new (and sometimes exciting) challenges. Some of them are laughable, like forgetting where you put your glasses. But some of them are truly a challenge, and they're likely to arrive no matter what. 

If you’ve been living your whole life with a resilient and open mindset, chances are that when these things arise, you meet them and respond to them in the most positive way possible. That isn’t to say life is totally awesome, but it probably is as awesome as you can make it.

However, if you live with a negative attitude, then there’s a double whammy waiting for you. First, whatever’s going on will likely have a bigger negative impact on you right off the bat—because you’re already living with constant stress due to your negative attitude.

However (probably inadvertently) you’re not going to be looking for any possible positive outcomes. And when you don’t look for something—it’s pretty rare to find it.

So if the only thing you're thinking about is negative, you're going to find negative things. If you try to keep an open mind and a positive attitude, you're much more likely to find positive things around you.

Right now, there's a lot of negativity going on. Whether it's wars, politics, the economy—there are many topics you can mention, and it's easy to find a negative interpretation. I'm not saying everything is great, but the world is what it is—and, very importantly, it's not what it used to be, which, as we've already talked about, usually isn’t quite as good as we remember it.

The good old days usually weren’t quite as good as we like to think, but if you’re surrounded by negativity, it’s very difficult to be positive. But—that’s exactly the challenge you should accept: to look for the positive outlook.

That doesn’t mean ignoring things. You may be positive that you can foster change, and that’s great. But if you succumb to negativity all the time, you’ll feel hopeless—and that’s very destructive at every level.

If you pay attention, you’ll see that many people who are still energetic and engaged all around you and they still seem positive. They may like things as they’re going, or they may oppose things. How do they stay positive? The big difference is, in both cases, they’re working to make a change and engage with the world.

Pope Leo didn’t say everyone in the world is fun to be around, just that we should walk side by side and live close to them. That’s what fosters understanding and forms the basis of positive change—both in ourselves and in the world in general. So don’t ignore the negativity per se, but embrace it. Rise above it.

When you let the world into your life, you see both sides. Realize that you do have a choice of how you react to it. Then you can chart a way forward. Living in isolation is lonely. We’re social creatures—and sometimes, the healthiest thing to do is take a chance and engage with the world, and try to shape it into something that’s more aligned with our vision of the future.

That’s it for the evening. Remember, next month I’ll be hosting the free webinar called SMART Goals for Life. In this interactive session, we’ll explore and expand upon everything we’ve done so far related to SMART goals, provide some practical worksheets and exercises, and help you apply these concepts to your own goals—whether you’re considering retirement, changing careers…

Whatever life transition you’re going through, this webinar will give you some concrete tools to create and achieve goals that truly matter to you. We’ll work through some real examples together, and you’ll walk away with a personalized action plan that you created yourself—to meet your very own needs.

If there’s anything in particular you want to cover, please drop me a note—we can certainly include it. Stay tuned for the specific date in May and links for signups. Please register, even if you can’t attend, because all registrants will receive a recording of the session. Everyone gets entered into a giveaway for a new product that we’re working on. 

Your homework tonight is to think of some negative attitude that you’ve heard recently and how it affected you. Then think about a positive corollary to that that you could embrace instead. Extra points if you take that idea and write down the next step you could take to make it more actionable.

As always, please remember the wars and all the political and social unrest going on. But also remember, everything is a small snapshot in time. So remember to keep perspective on how things are going. Remember that you always have an option to make a change.

And as always, we have links to UKR7.com. There are a number of links to donate to the people of Ukraine and help them in the situation over there. Then there is WCK.org, which is for the World Central Kitchen. They work in disaster areas; they’re usually one of the first, if not the first group on location after a disaster happens, like a hurricane or earthquake. Great group of people.

There’s stuff happening all around the world, but there’s also stuff going on in your own neighborhood, your own city. You probably have groups nearby you could help—either with money, time, or volunteering. Even if you’re not in a position—either time-wise or money-wise—to volunteer or donate anything right now, remember that we all have the option of making life a little better for everyone.

Something as simple as smiling at somebody when you meet them on the street—that can change their day in a way more positive than you ever imagined. Make the world a little bit better place in your own area.

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.