500: All You Ever Have is Now—Always
Get Rich Education
Maximizing Time for True Living
This chapter focuses on breaking free from societal conditioning and limiting beliefs to prioritize owning one's time for true living. It emphasizes early action towards financial freedom and the value of mindset in achieving success. The concept of being a 'time billionaire' and practical approaches to adopt a surfer mentality for appreciating the present moment are highlighted.
Become a time billionaire.
In this episode of the Get Rich Education podcast, host Keith Weinhold explores the significance of living an extraordinary life, emphasizing the importance of time management and the value of time.
You are here today, gone tomorrow.
Gain new perspective on life and death.
The show promotes strategies for achieving financial freedom through real estate investing.
A hypothetical scenario examines the potential impact of eternal life on Earth's resources, prompting listeners to consider the implications of unlimited population growth.
The episode offers a blend of motivational content and practical wealth-building advice, with a side of philosophical musing on the nature of time and life's finitude.
We listen in to Neil deGrasse Tyson’s “Life and Death: A Cosmic Perspective”.
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Complete episode transcript:
Welcome to GRE! I’m your host, Keith Weinhold. You need to become financially-free so that you have… time to be present and live in the “now”.
You are here today and gone tomorrow. There’s not much time to leave your dent in the universe. All that you ever have is now - and that’s how it will always be. Today, on Episode 500 of Get Rich Education.
Welcome in… to Get Rich Education. I’m your host, Keith Weinhold.
At times, people tell me something like: “Look at what you’re doing. You live an extraordinary life.”
Now, I might reply to that person with something like - “Thanks. I appreciate it. I like to get out and see the world.”
But do you know what’s really going on inside my head when someone tells me that I live an extraordinary life?
I’m really thinking, “Well, of course, I do. Don’t you? You design your life: So why would you choose anything… else or anything… less… than an extraordinary life?”
Esp. in this world of abundance that we all live in. That’s why you have zero reason to live any life that’s LESS than extraordinary - if that’s what you want.”
Investing for income now is a tool for freedom.
When you're no longer trading your time chiefly for dollars, that's when you can stop living a disembodied existence - when you’re living such that your mind and your body are in two different places.
Begin to own your time and truly be yourself.
You need time.
And you don’t have much time. That’s why, in my experience, it's better to err on the side of being too early over being too late.
Are you truly living… or are you only existing in space and time? I think that deep down… you know. Ask yourself. You already know the answer.
Remember, Episode 1 of this very show is called: “Your Abundance Mindset.”
But if you’re thinking in LIMITING ways, here’s the good news - the really good news for you.
You don’t have to believe everything that you think.
The good news is that… you were born rich. You were born with an abundance of choices. Society stifled that.
You don’t have to believe… everything that you think.
Since there's never a "perfect time" to build financial freedom, your conception that it's too early is often just your fear.
As long as you've got a few touchpoints, once you dive in, you'll figure it out.
Old people tend to regret the things they didn't do, or didn't do earlier—not the things they did.
The best reason for becoming financially-free is so that you can buy time and finally start to be yourself.
If you don’t want to do it for yourself, do it for someone you love… because there's someone in this world that needs you to be... you.
Since all that you’ll ever have is “now”, you need residual income to buy time so that you can spend more of your life present in the “now”.
Now, if you were to ask yourself, what made the most successful leaders in the world successful, was it the capital they had, their technology, the people they knew, or their mindset? Which one of those things was it?
It’s their mindset.
See, because if you took away the capital, technology, or friendships from Jeff Bezos or Steve Jobs or Mahatma Ghandi or MLK - whoever you want to use as your leader.
If you took away those elements but they retained their mindset, they would most likely go on to regain everything they’ve got.
That’s why you must deeply explore and consider, what mindset do you have, where did you get your mindset, and what mindset do you need for the decades ahead?
Did you get it from… your parents? If so, I’m sorry to say, that’s usually a red flag… and that’s where most of us get our mindset from.
But most people never learn differently.
Realize this - and this is a little hard to say. But the truth is hard.
Your parents don’t want your success. Isn’t that ironic? Your very own parents don’t want your success; they want your safety.
They want you to have a stable, safe, say, accounting job, in a cubicle that only gives you two weeks of vacation a year - because it’s KNOWN and average.
A ship in harbor is safe; but that’s not why ships are built. Some safety is OK. But you weren’t built to live a life CENTERED on safety either.
That’s not even approaching living your dreams or doing anything ‘extraordinary’.
Most people aren’t living their dreams. They’re living their fears.
When your parents had you at birth - in the hospital delivery room - they’d be thrilled to know that you’d grow up to live your DREAMS. But on the day-to-day, they’ve got you living your fears.
Once your parents got “newborn you” home from the hospital, all the way up to adulthood, an overly fragile safety mindset often becomes pervasive… and it stifles dreams.
If you don’t take a chance, you don’t have a chance. Take the risk or lose the chance.
Don’t live below your means; grow your means. It’s in your genes… though that probably wasn’t part of the mindset of your formative years.
I love my parents. They cultivated the right environment for me. But you’ll often find an overabundance of safety from yours - especially from your mother.
Eckhart Tolle said: “Most humans are never fully present in the now, because unconsciously they believe that the next moment must be more important than this one. But then you miss your whole life, which is never not now. That’s Tolle.
Alright. But once you’ve made time, what’s next? It’s how you arrange your priorities.
We think it’s about time management - and it STARTS THERE.
True achievers in life make large blocks of uninterrupted time - notifications off, phone one room away.
But more specifically, it’s about your priority management.
For me, I know that I’m going to be living in this same body 50 years from today - just like you will inside yours, so I make FITNESS a priority in life - often at the expense of investing & business opportunity.
That’s my take - it doesn’t have to be your take. That’s an example of priority management.
First, you’ve got to play a game worth winning.
It’s been said that one question to establish focus is, ask yourself:Are you hunting antelope or field mice?
This… idea is simple (but supremely powerful):
A lion is capable of hunting field mice, but the prize wouldn’t be sufficient reward for the energy required to do so.
Instead, the lion must focus on the antelope, which does require considerable energy to hunt, but provide a sufficient reward.
In whatever you are pursuing, are you hunting antelope or field mice? Are you focusing on the big, weighty, important tasks that will provide sufficient reward for your energy?
Or are you burning calories chasing the tiny wins that won't move the needle?
Ask yourself this question from time and time and use your answer to reset as necessary.
Always hunt antelope!
When it comes to priority management…
… you’ve got to make time for yourself and create better “nows” for yourself beyond the mandatory loads that you’re already encumbered with.
Because you’ll still have meal planning, grocery shopping, doctor’s appointments, housekeeping, scheduling, meeting, driving…
There’s not much leftover discretionary time left over to make you the you that you need to be - whether you’re trying to be the best equestrian rider that you can be because you connect with horses…
…you’re trying to be the greatest PARENT ever, cleaning up a beloved local creek, coaching your kid’s sports team… or maybe you’ll move heaven & earth to write that book that you just KNOW that you have inside of you. Get it out there!
But instead, people rationalize away their low quality of life.
If you’re working for the weekend, examine your M-F. You’re not living in the “now”.
If you call Wednesday “hump day”, you’re not living in the now.
The good guys are BRAVE enough to risk investment, commitment, marriage, being vulnerable to family members, and all those things that make the non-doers and bad guys envious. Be brave enough to study and then risk boldly.
This is sad. You’ve probably heard of stats like this before - a Pew survey from last year found that 46% of US workers who receive paid time off from their employer take less time than they’re offered. Almost half!
People rationalize away their low quality of life - actually defending living a small, scared, too-safe life.
If you need a push to fire up Google Flights, consider that you will be happier because of it.
That’s what the science says: researchers from the Netherlands found that the biggest boost in happiness around vacations came from the simple act of planning one. Then you get to anticipate it.
How important is it to build a residual income rather than work more hours? Is working more and working late the answer?
Understand… that twenty years from now, the only people who’ll remember if you worked late are your kids.
Instead, become a time billionaire. Let’s lean into this and look at what some others say.
Graham Duncan proposed the concept of the Time Billionaire. If you’ve got a billion seconds worth of wealth, that’s 31 years. He said that:
"A million seconds is 11 days. A billion seconds is 31 YEARS… I feel like in our culture, we’re almost obsessed, as a culture, with money.
And we deify dollar billionaires in a way...And I was thinking of time billionaires that when I see, sometimes, 20-year-olds—the thought I had was they probably have two billion seconds left.
But they aren’t relating to themselves as time billionaires."
That’s what Graham Duncan said.
The central point here… is that TIME is our most precious asset.
No one ever posts pictures of napping on the sofa on social media. But if you’re a time billionaire - you might consider that an ostentatious display of time wealth. Ha!
When you're young, you are RICH with time. At age 20, you probably have about two billion seconds left (assuming you live to 80). By 50, just one billion seconds remain.
But as Graham Duncan pointed out, we don't relate to ourselves as the "Time Billionaires" that we really are. Most of us fail to realize the value of this asset until it is… gone.
In his passage called On the Shortness of Life, the stoic philosopher, Seneca, says, "We are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it." That’s Seneca.
To me, being a “Time Billionaire” isn’t necessarily about having the actual time, but about the awareness of the precious nature of the time you do have.
It’s about embracing the shortness of life and finding joy in ordinary daily moments of beauty.
Let me introduce the “Surfer Mentality”. Yeah, the surfer mentality. When a surfer gets up on a wave, they enjoy the present moment, even though they know with certainty that the wave will eventually end.
They fully enjoy THIS wave, with the wisdom and awareness that there are always more waves coming.
There are five ways that you can apply this “Surfer Mentality” and have this awareness in your life: (1) enjoy your next wave and embrace the present moment, (2) be strategic about your positioning in between waves, (3) PASS on more waves rather than jumping at the first one that comes your way, (4) always get in the water and stop sitting on the shore, and (5) roll with the punches that life deals you.
That’s the “Surfer Mentality”
Do not become an ostrich. An ostrich will bury its head in the sand to avoid danger. A lot of humans behave the same way when they encounter new information that challenges their existing beliefs or views.
An ostrich cares more about being right than finding the truth. Do not become an ostrich, embrace new information that forces you to change your mind. That, right there, is growth.
A great, actionable way for you to GROW with the time you’ve created and the priorities that you’ve outlined is to Do something new that scares you. This is EXACTLY what you did as a kid but that you forgot how to do.
For example, when you were age 11, you swam in water over your head for the first time. It made you rise up, grow, and gain confidence. I can’t tell you what grows inside you psychologically, but…
We’re operating 200,000 year-old mental software. That’s when the modern human brain came into existence.
Our primordial brains are evolutionarily wired to see problems - to detect threats like lions & tigers - and our body still responds to those threats like they are lions.
And today, we don’t have to look very hard to find those problems. Just turn on the news or scroll social media and there they are.
And in this environment, it can be easy to let ourselves be yanked around by our circumstances.
When it comes to OTHERS - peers, family, and friends along your life journey…
You have to be strict with yourself but tolerant of others.
That’s what the stoic Marcus Aurelius wrote about in his meditations. He has these exacting high standards.
Most people don’t have the self-discipline that you do… and it’s called SELF-discipline for a reason.
It’s not a thing that you get to project onto other people. You don’t get to go around insisting that other people follow YOUR standards and your code.
You have to be encouraging and forgiving of other people because they don’t have the gift that you have. They don’t own the drive that you have. There’s even a saying in ancient Rome.
“We can’t all be Catos.” If you remember from history, Cato was the influential leader that championed Roman virtues during THEIR empire.
We have to be tolerant, and accepting and encouraging of other people. If this realization is still frustrating to you…
Another way that you can think of this, is that others never signed up to the code and standards that you have.”
Money is a tool for freedom. The best reason to accumulate wealth is to buy yourself freedom from anything you don’t want to do, and the freedom to do the things you do want to do. Money is not an end in itself. If you sit on it and never use it, you’ve wasted your life.
Money CAN absolutely buy happiness. But only so long as you spend it on upgrading and expanding the things that make you happy or in buying time, instead of using it to play status games or on fleeting experiences.
Increase the difficulty. If you’re listening to this, then your life is (probably) already on easy mode compared to the global and historical standard. You need to strategically introduce some challenges to keep yourself motivated. Don’t ruin yourself, but don’t let yourself get too complacent, either.
Investing involves risk. You’re going to lose sometimes. The good news is that you don’t have to make money back in the same PLACE where you lost it.
If something in your business or life is losing money, you don’t have to plug the hole right there at that spot. Often it’s easier to make the money back elsewhere.
It’s never the right time. Any time you catch yourself saying “oh it’ll be a better time later,” you’re probably just scared. Or unclear on what to do. There is never a right time for the big things in life: having kids, changing jobs, breaking up, getting engaged, or buying the property.
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Err on the side of too early over too late. Related to that point, since there’s never a “perfect time,” it’s almost always better to do things “too early.” Your conception that it’s too early is just your fear, and once you dive in you’ll figure it out. Old people tend to regret the things they didn’t do, or didn’t do earlier. Not the things they did.
Bad things happen fast, and good things happen slowly. This is one reason why bad news seems more newsworthy - but it’s not actually more important.
It’s hard-wired within you that money is a scarce resource.
Don’t be afraid to commit. You’ve got to let go of fear about tomorrow and just get on with it.
Uncertainty is a PERPETUAL condition - it’s existed in your entire past, and will in your entire future. That’s why you feel uncertainty in the present too. Uncertainty only disappears when you die.
We all want to know the future. But the truth is, it’s easier to make decisions within your certainty of NOW rather than postpone & speculate about your perpetually uncertain future.
“Life is meant to be lived, not postponed.” Don't get so caught up trying to make a living that you forget to live a life. That's not a life well-lived.
Regretting past decisions is an utter waste of energy. Does the past exist now separate from your own thoughts? Nope… it doesn’t even exist.
Coming up - you’ll hear ANOTHER voice with a more COSMIC perspective about life and the power of “now” - it includes some sound effects to anticipate.
Then I’ll come back in for today’s conclusion. I’m Keith Weinhold. It’s Episode 500 of Get Rich Education.
LISTEN: Neil Degrasse Tyson: Life and Death - A Cosmic Perspective
That’s Neil DeGrasse Tyson on the significance of life, death, and the power of “now”.
Horace Mann said, "Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity."
Life feels ordinary. But in fact, it’s incredible that you overcame tremendous odds to have your… one… precious life.
In order to be born, you needed:
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2 parents
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4 grandparents
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8 great-grandparents
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16 second great-grandparents
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You needed 32 third great-grandparents
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64 fourth great-grandparents
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128 fifth great-grandparents
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256 sixth great-grandparents
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To be born, you needed 512 seventh great-grandparents
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1,024 eighth great-grandparents and
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2,048 ninth great-grandparents
For you to be born today from 12 previous generations, you needed a total sum of 4,094 ancestors over the last 400 years.
Think about what they overcame… to produce you – How many struggles did they have? How many battles? How many difficulties? How much sadness did THEY have?
How much happiness? How many love stories created you? How many expressions of hope for the future? – did your ancestors have to undergo for you to exist in this present moment…
The past is history, the future is a mystery, and this moment is a gift. That’s why they call this gift, “the present”.
Spend your time where time disappears. Your work should feel like play… your passions should feel like flow… with people that make hours feel like minutes.
The more present you are, the quicker the present goes. That’s the paradox.
A full life goes fast. But in the end, time that flies… is time well spent. And a life that flies by… is a life well spent.
At least here on Earth, all you’ve got is one life and one shot.
You shouldn’t fear death. You should fear a life where you could have accomplished more that fulfills your potential and aligns with your soul.
You’re here today and gone tomorrow. You’ve got NOW to go leave your dent in the universe.
There’s no time to wait. You now have less time remaining in your life than when you started listening to me today.
All that you ever have is now - always. Don’t Quit Your Daydream!
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