3 Reframes: Creating Present from Future, Rich vs. Welfare Mentality & What is in Your Cup?

3 ideas that will make you see things in a very different light.

The first one was from a Tim Ferriss Podcast – Chip Wilson — Building Lululemon, the Art of Setting Goals, and the 10 Great Decisions of Your Life (#514). Chip Wilson talks about how people create their future based on their past, which limits them.

“What I didn’t like was I learned that I was setting my goals from my past. So in other words, I had lived a life with experiences.

But what I really got from the Landmark course is that I could see how constraining my life was, creating my future from the past, as opposed to creating my present from the future. And it’s really easy. If I woke up in the hospital with amnesia and I got to set goals I wouldn’t be able to set them from my experiences in the past.

So I could start to see how constraining goals were from this past-based part.

Imagine that it’s impossible to think about anything in the future without relating it to some experience in the past. So if I don’t have a past, then I don’t have a future. And I think this is the same reason that people get drunk or stoned to a great extent, because it’s the act of eliminating the past.

So there’s no past, there’s no future. All there is is the present. You can see a three-year-old child crawling around the rug. They have no past, they have no future. They’re also so creative. And I also see it in older people when they’re told they’ve got three months until they die, they [couldn’t] care less about their past, they have no future, and they’re looking at every blade of grass.”

---

#ads

The second idea is a reply from Tony Robbins when someone judges how rich people spend their money.

“A guy looked at my airplane the other day and said I wonder how many people I could have fed for the price of that airplane…

I replied I am not sure, it fed a lot of families at the Dassault factory where it was built. I’m sure it fed a bunch of families that rolled the aluminium at the Alcoa factory. It surely fed a lot of people at the Honeywell factory where the experts built the turbines. It fed a whole company for a few weeks when I had them build me a new interior. It feeds the families of the linemen that fuel it.

That’s the difference between capitalism and a welfare mentality.

When you buy something, you put money in people’s pockets, and give them dignity for their skills. When you give someone something for nothing, you rob them of their dignity and self worth”

Related: Personal Power II: The Driving Force

---

And the best for last… when things get shaky, what do you spill from your cup?

You are holding a cup of coffee when someone comes along and bumps into you or shakes your arm, making you spill your coffee everywhere.

Why did you spill the coffee? “Because someone bumped into me!!!”

Wrong answer.

You spilled the coffee because there was coffee in your cup. Had there been tea in the cup, you would have spilled tea.

*Whatever is inside the cup is what will spill out.*

Therefore, when life comes along and shakes you (which WILL happen), whatever is inside you will come out. It’s easy to fake it, until you get rattled.

*So we have to ask ourselves… “what’s in my cup?”*

When life gets tough, what spills over?

Joy, gratefulness, peace and humility? Anger, bitterness, harsh words and reactions? Life provides the cup, YOU choose how to fill it. Today let’s work towards filling our cups with gratitude, forgiveness, joy, words of affirmation; and kindness, gentleness and love for others.

Related:

• Coffee … Like Michael Jackson is Black or White!
• Melitta XT6 Coffee Machine – Cleaning and Topping Up Milk