2025 October 7 Wake up excited

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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 taking steps towards the life that you really want. So let's get started. If you like what you hear today, please leave a like, subscribe, tell your friends, and send me a message.

Tonight we're talking about taking real, concrete, tangible steps towards the life that you want. We've been talking about some planning fundamentals over the past four or five weeks, and if you haven't listened to them, please go to the website and either listen to the back podcasts or read the blog version, which is also there. Those fundamentals are really important, but at some point we kind of want to start making progress on our plans.

By now you should have some idea of a plan or life vision that's important to you. Maybe you're financially set for retirement but you're just looking for some meaning in your life, or perhaps you find great meaning in your life but you're concerned about money. Or perhaps you're looking for both meaning and money. We're going to talk a little about how you can obtain both of those by essentially the same method, just changing the emphasis or focus on what you're doing. And if you have a meaningful life and you are financially set, well, congratulations. First off, and then please come on the podcast. Seriously, we're always looking for speakers and guests to come here and share how they arrived at a comfortable place in life and how they maintain it. There's a signup form on the website.

You may have seen the ads asking things like, would you like to start every day full of energy and excitement? Well, that kind of really is the question, isn't it? Do you want to start every day excited that you have another day to live? It doesn't mean that you have to run outside to your new sports car waiting in the driveway or look out the veranda on your cruise ship vacation or whatever, but what it really means is you've filled much or most of your day with activities that align with your life vision. And at least some of those activities will move you closer to your goals to reach that vision. That seems a lot more attainable, doesn't it? Just get up, be excited about what you're going to do, and know those things have meaning for you. A much easier goal to work towards.

But we still have the problem of where to start. And as we always say, you start at the beginning. The beginning in this case is looking at your life vision and, in particular, what particular circumstances are keeping you from living into that vision. Our example for tonight—and we could do a lot of different ones—we're just going to do a real simple and easy one and talk about wanting to do some more things that have meaning in your life, or possibly having some more money available, or maybe even both those things by doing the same activity. The path we're discussing tonight is doing some sort of part-time work or side hustle that aligns with both your skills and your vision.

To be clear, you don't necessarily have to learn new skills, and it doesn't have to be a full-time job with endless hours. If you structure it carefully and nicely, you can often create kind of a side career that has convenient working hours and is either personally fulfilling or pays you an income, or both. Sounds good, right? But where do we start?

The first thing you have to decide is what are your skills and what are your passions, your vision, and do they overlap? Maybe they do, maybe they don't, but can they overlap? That's a different question. A lot of times people forget that some skill they have—they may know it so well that it seems not worth teaching. Everybody knows that.

I still participate in a little mastermind in my local area, and it's related to my mentor James Wedmore. One of the members did travel coaching and it literally took us weeks to convince her that her travel experience, although trivial and totally familiar to her, was beyond the imagination of most people. She had family relationships in Europe and so the structure of traveling across countries—having passports, getting stamps, driving in different areas, how to do accommodations, working through language barriers. I should note she speaks three and a half languages. She saw all those things as normal. And she also does an incredible French accent. She can talk about things that make you just want to go to France, even if you don't like France.

After we talked to her a lot and said, you know, there are people who would really want this information from you. They can't imagine how you just do these things, how you're not concerned about it, why you aren't scared about the travel. So she started doing a series of travel posts for what were, to her, simple problems. And people were like, how do you know how to do that? How did you discover all this?

So now she does luxury equestrian tours to Europe and beyond, and she loves what she does. It's personally satisfying because she's introducing people to new cultures and traveling in parts of the world that she loves. Just a shout out to Sandy—she has a business now, Just Travel With Sandy, and she has no idea I'm doing this. But I really like what she's doing. If you go and search that on Google, you'll find her and you'll see that she does trips throughout Europe and around the world. I think she was looking at doing some stuff in India and the UAE. This was somebody who thought that her skills were nothing special. To her, she was so comfortable doing it that it just seemed normal.

So you have to look carefully in your own life because probably you do a lot of things that people just can't imagine doing. And probably at this point your mind's coming up with the reasons that you couldn't do that. Because you aren't a wealthy horse owner who travels the world, or you don't have people all over, and you never took the time to do all these languages and all this other stuff. But she's not a wealthy person who travels around the world either. She's passionate about travel and she's passionate about horses, and she worked to find a way to bring her skills and her passions together.

And that's the secret. Because we all have things that we want to do and we all have skills that others would value. What we have to do—and it's simple to say, but it takes some thought—is sit down, think about our skills, think about our passions, think about what other people have trouble with that we do easily, and then how can we bring those things to other people?

There was a story in Monday's Wall Street Journal about the big uptick in entrepreneurship these days in the age cohort of 70 and older. That's right, 70 plus years old. Nearly 30% of employed people in their seventies who are working work for themselves. That's one of the highest rates of people who are entrepreneurs of any of the age cohorts. Many of these people lived what most of us would consider pretty ordinary lives, but when they looked at what they were good at, it turned out a lot of other people valued that skill.

There was one woman, Charlotte Bishop. She's a retired teacher who taught office administration skills at SUNY, State University of New York. Before you say, oh, a PhD? No, she has a master's and taught very practical skills—office administration. When you look past the description of office administration, basically she taught people how to organize things, how to get up and just make sure that you get things done that you said you were going to do, and how to organize things so you can find them.

Once she retired, people kept asking her to help organize their files or to help clear out clutter in their lives. So she started a company, Life Files Professionals, and she manages documents, organizes offices, apartments, computer files. Then she expanded it to organizing long-term care options and health records and grocery orders for older adults. And now she's doing pretty much all of this remotely. She works from home. It's really important because she just turned 80.

Her business simply took what were simple skills that she was good at, offered them to people who weren't good at those things, and she figured out a way to do that that was consistent with her lifestyle and her age. Now she's an entrepreneur. It provides her income, it gives her some additional social interaction time. She feels good about helping to improve the lives of others. Ms. Bishop did it by recognizing her skills in organization were different than her career, which was teaching, but still had value to others. So she could both help others and gain some extra income, which is always helpful.

So again, the first thing to do is decide what are your skills? What are your passions, your life vision, and how can they overlap? If you're having trouble finding anything, try talking to some friends or family or neighbors and ask them if there's anything that comes to mind that you do well. There'll probably be some jokes at first, but once you get past that and they realize that you're serious about it, they'll probably start to come up with some ideas—some things, possibly things you never thought about. It could be something that you might think is silly. Like you always remember everyone's birthdays and anniversaries, or you're really good at leaving nice phone messages. Who knows what else?

Then the second step is to look at that and see if there's something that other people would be interested in. Remember, you aren't trying to make a million dollars here. It's something that somebody else would pay for that aligns with the vision. In many cases you're even less concerned about the pay. You may just want something that brings some satisfaction in life, teaching skills to other people to make them and improve their lives.

Just for an idea, let's say that you leave nice phone messages. Maybe those could be turned into nice texts or chat messages, but maybe just stick with the phone messages. Is that something you could scale if more people knew about you? Could a simple Facebook ad bring maybe a dozen people a day or maybe a couple dozen people a day willing to pay $3 or $5 to have a nice sounding voice leave a surprise message to someone? Sounds silly to you? Well, if you've got a dozen requests a day, five days a week, that's an additional $3,000 a year. If you're living on a low income, that could be really handy. It's not a small amount of money.

And if you still think it's silly, one of my brothers sings in a barbershop quartet and their major fundraiser for the year is leaving singing messages on Valentine's Day. One day a year, they pay for the expenses for travel for the whole year. But the point isn't in the specifics. It's that if you search for your skills, no matter how small, and look at what your life passion is, often there's a way to get those two things to align in a way that both brings you pleasure and in many cases some additional money. And if the money doesn't matter to you, you can always volunteer or donate the money to an organization that is important to you.

We could spend a lot more time on this, but I hope it at least opens your mind to some potential opportunities that could both bring you satisfaction and potentially some additional income if you need that as well. I hope that it gets you thinking that indeed there may be ways to start every day full of energy and excitement.

So that's it for the evening. Your homework tonight is to think about some skills that you might have even taken for granted, but that other people might value. Extra points if you take that a step further and see if there's any way to take those skills and use them in a way that aligns with your life vision for both life satisfaction and satisfaction in helping others.

As always, please remember the many wars that are going on in the world. There's a lot of stuff going on in the world—domestically, foreign, all over the place. UKR7.com is for the people of Ukraine. There are links there, ways to support them. They definitely can use your thoughts, prayers, and also your money, quite frankly, because running a war is not cheap by any means. A lot of good people—I follow them heavily and they do a lot of great things. A lot of people are getting injured. 

If that's not something you're into, there's World Central Kitchen at WCK.org. Another great organization. They work in areas where natural disasters happen and they go in, usually right after the disaster, to help get food and basic services to people. Great organization. 

But as we always talk about, there are also a lot of great places probably right around you. Little organizations, maybe even something very local, a couple of people helping out. I know in this area—I live in the northeast of the United States—coat drives are starting up. They can always use help. Food kitchens, all those things, any of those places. A great place to volunteer, great place to donate to. And if you don't have the time, aren't in the mindset, whatever—remember, even just a simple smile can change someone else's life in ways you can't imagine. You can change the day, change a life. So if you can and you're able, please check it out at UKR7.com, WCK.org, local establishments near you, or just a smile for someone else.

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. Drop me a comment as to what else 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.