2025 September 23 Start with a strong foundation

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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 some more fundamentals in reimagining your future.

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Tonight we'll be talking about two more fundamentals that will really help us live a life that we truly enjoy and find fulfilling. So far, we've talked about things you can do to change and improve how we interact with life, especially how to avoid negative self-talk and how destructive that can be.

Tonight we'll focus on two more areas which we used to naturally know how to do when we were little, but seem to forget as we get older: being patient yet persistent when learning something new, and remembering to start with the fundamentals first.

Let's begin with starting at the beginning. My awesome mentor, James Wedmore, is doing a 30-day challenge on money mindset right now. You might expect he'd jump right into money topics, but the answer is no. Although the symptom is money issues, the cause is much deeper than that. The first part of the course is really discovering your beliefs about money.

Many of our beliefs were formed in childhood or even early childhood. We talked about that previously. Very often we didn't even understand the meaning or the implications of what we were hearing, but we still internalized those beliefs because they came from somebody we respected like an adult or a favorite sibling.

The same is often true about our money beliefs. We're currently developing a series of courses dealing specifically with money beliefs and finances, and we have some great potential guests already lined up to talk about this subject.

If we use that as an example and think back to when we were young, we probably didn't want to jump into the middle of learning a new topic. When we wanted to learn to walk, that was our goal: to stand up, take a step, move our feet, and walk. We probably didn't think, "Well, if I can't run and jump over things while running on my first try, then I'm not even going to try to learn to walk." No. We were focused on that very first step and then the next step—first to stand, then to move forward by walking and not crawling.

Once we had those basics done, then we thought about walking faster, then running, then jumping while running. It was a series of steps done in increments—very small, little improvements—and that's what we were focused on.

Somewhere around the transition from early childhood to being a young child, that all changed. We instead wanted to know how to do the final result without learning any of the basics. I remember that very clearly as a child. We wanted to learn to play the piano or guitar, and immediately wanted to play what we just heard on the radio. It never occurred to me that maybe I didn't somehow have all the knowledge needed to do that. I wasn't interested in learning notes or music theory or anything else. I just wanted to play that one song that I heard.

Of course, we're often told we had to learn the basics first, which, if you were like me, was about the worst punishment in the world. But probably not for the reasons you think. It's because no one took the time to explain to me all the things I'd be able to do if I did learn the basics. If they had done that and also encouraged me to play more by ear, then I probably would've been a far better musician than I am today. I would've been satisfied both with the immediate desire (I would've, with one finger, probably picked out the tune I heard on the radio), and I'd also have been given the tools to have an exciting future to look forward to—to be able to create music at will and make my own music.

Now, think about most of the things you've heard about finances and money. Probably it's a lot of rules and things that you cannot do. No fancy coffees, no discretionary spending, no movies, no this, no that, and unpleasant things that you had to do. You had to do a budget, you had to track all your expenses, you had to analyze everything that you did.

Well, what about a different approach? Much like my music example. Instead, what if you could discover the underlying reasons you feel the way you do about money, and perhaps why it always seems to be a problem? But at the same time, what if you learn some simple steps about taking back a little bit of control as a quick win so that it wasn't frightening to open your checkbook or look at your bank account?

Now you get some immediate positive feedback from those quick wins, which encourages you to continue. At the same time, you're discovering the basics, the underlying reasons of why you behave like you do. That's setting you up for long-term change and success. This is why we're going through the basics now and explaining some of the perhaps hidden things that may have become part of our regular routine, but they're holding us back from attaining what we want.

We could start off developing our life vision, and we will get around to developing our life vision. But unless we change how we view and act in the world, it's very difficult to get a new outcome using old ideas to really change our life long-term.

So rule number one is: start with the foundation and build up a strong life from there. Look at what things you've done, look at how you've gotten to that point, and then you'll see the steps to how to move forward.

Associated rule number two, of course, is: be patient yet persistent. Just like in our little walking example as a child, our goal wasn't to run a four-minute mile. It was to take one step, then another, and then walk to our parents. And while we might have gotten a little frustrated and fussed a little bit, it never stopped us from trying again and again until we succeeded.

We didn't start off researching why most bipeds (people who walk on two feet, things that walk on two feet) have great difficulty with balance and why it's a difficult skill. Then sit down with our favorite AI tool and see if there are any hacks we could learn to walk faster, and then spend days or even weeks or years trying to decide if we should even try it. We just started and got excited with our little wins, and those wins motivated us to keep trying to improve.

Then somewhere, probably in grade school, we learned why instead we should expect to fail and why we should be so cautious, especially in the face of possible criticism from our peers or, even worse, superiors like adults or our teacher. And those lessons, at some level, have followed us throughout our lives. Remember, our brain's number one job is keeping us safe, and keeping us safe includes being safe from anything that makes us feel bad, like criticism or what we perceive as personal failure.

One of the places I walk with my dog is along a big tidal river. It's a beautiful, lovely place. A few weeks back, there was this dude learning how to use a hydro board or a hydrofoil board. You basically take a short surfboard, put a horizontal wing underneath it, and you get going by hopping on it and jumping up and down while you're balancing on it—front, back, and side to side. You steer it by leaning side to side, but then you have to navigate around the waves and the water.

If you think, "Wow, this sounds really difficult," well, it sounds impossible actually, and it takes a lot of coordination to do it. Yet this guy wasn't making it further than about four or eight feet before falling off, swimming back to the boat launch dock, climbing back up, and trying again and again for over an hour.

Fast forward two weeks. We're again back down at the river. The same dude is there, and now he's going like 20 or 50 feet and starting to be able to turn it under his own control. He didn't focus on the probably hundreds of failures. Instead, he kept his goal in mind, and soon he'll probably be able to go out and wake surf and go up and down the river as he wishes and do all sorts of things because he was patient and persistent.

Now, if you want to make real changes in your life—because real life changes are difficult—that is one of the most important attitudes you need. You have to be patient. You have to be persistent. You've been living the same way with the same unfulfilled desires and the same kind of hidden agenda that you've learned as a child for probably a long time, and now you have the opportunity to remake your life more in line with how you want to live. What could possibly stop you?

Well, the answer is you. You'll be tempted to fall back on all those old thought patterns of why it'll be hard and why you might fail. But you can also choose to see all the potential great changes that you can make in your life, to feel invigorated and live a life aligned with your vision. But you need to be, again, patient and persistent. You must celebrate your wins and learn from the challenges you have. You have everything you need to make your changes a success. You just have to remember to think and to act with the focus and persistence of a child, to start with the basics and to build a strong foundation, to understand yourself and believe in what you're capable of accomplishing.

So that's it for the evening. Your homework tonight is actually really simple. It's just to think about one single thing that you'd like to do or accomplish or attain or change in your life. Then write down how it would feel if you actually did it. Just think about the outcome. Don't worry about all the reasons it's difficult or whatever you tell yourself it is.

Just think about what it is. If it's a money issue, make the money issue go away. If it's a skill, make believe you have the skill and think about how you would feel. Think about what you would do. Think about how it would affect other people around you, how your attitude would change. It can be simple, it can be large, but it should be something that's truly important to you. Then, again, think about the result of actually doing that.

So that's it for tonight. Thanks as always. Please remember the many wars and political and social unrest going on right now. As always, UKR7.com has links to places that support the people of Ukraine. If Ukraine is not your top priority, WorldCentralKitchen.org is another place. They work throughout the world, going into areas where there are natural disasters, and they help rebuild the infrastructure and get food to people right away. Both are really excellent places.

But as we always talk about, there are big national and international organizations, but you also have people probably in your own local community who can use your help as well, whether it's money or time. And if you're just not in a position or mindset at this point to donate money or time, remember, one of the best ways to care for yourself is to care for others. Just something as simple as a smile to somebody you meet in the street can change their day and maybe even their life in ways that you can't understand.

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