If you’re watching this video, clearly this video is for you. And I imagine you’re somebody who is wanting to make a change in some part of your life career, relationships, finances. You want to start showing up differently. You have this deep, deep desire inside of you, like the one you know you’re capable of. Yet anytime you begin to take action towards going after what it is you know deep down you want, I’m talking about the dreams that maybe nobody else knows about besides you.
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Anytime you step closer to that vision, any time you have an idea and you want to take action and it fuels you away from the life you have towards the life that you want, there’s a little bit of fear and resistance that comes up. And I say a little bit, but that’s actually me downplaying it isn’t it? Because there’s no such thing as a little bit of fear. You have fear or you don’t. And sometimes the fear of going after what you want outweighs the desire for everything else.
So this video in particular is inspired by conversations I have every week with people who are wanting to make a change in their life. And they’ve been thinking about it for years. When I get on the phone with people, it’s not like they just identified a problem today or this week. They’ve been thinking about it. They’ve been thinking about making a change for years, sometimes decades, sometimes decades.
And maybe that’s you maybe there’s a part of you that you’ve been wanting to change for decades. And every year you keep making goals, you keep setting, you keep journaling, you keep trying to manifest things. Yet nothing has changed. And there are so many reasons why maybe nothing has changed. For example, when I wanted to radically change my life, I thought about it for five years.
For five years, I knew that the career I was in, the industry I was in wasn’t for me, but it was really for the people in my life. Right? I had the safety of a job. I had my three weeks vacation. I was guaranteed salary increases.
I was guaranteed a good lifestyle, like a good lifestyle. But what is a good lifestyle if you’re miserable every single day? What is a good lifestyle when you go to bed at night feeling unfulfilled, feeling like, hey, I think there’s more out there for me.
So when I’m having these conversations and maybe you’re having this conversation in your own head right now is, hey, there’s this thing I want to do. There’s this thing I want to change.
And every time I go and step up and I swing my bat, rather than even swing the bat and strike out, you just don’t show up to the Stadium. You just doubt yourself. So here are two simple reminders that I hope and these are two reminders that radically changed my life that immediately allowed me to take action regardless of any sort of fear or any sort of worry, there’s these two concepts I’d like to share with you.
The first concept I actually heard at a funeral last year and without going into too much details, the concept is called the dash and the dash. If you were to visualize a tombstone, the dash would be that date and time or the moments of time between the day you were born and the day that you leave the dash. So for me, it would be unknown for you, it’s whatever year you were born. Unknown, right? There’s some unknown date that we may not be here.
So you’ve got one dash. I’ve got one dash. Your spouse has one dash. Your kids have one dash. Your parents have one dash.
Now, anytime I have an idea that I want to take action on, I just think about that dash because one of the top five regrets of the dying is I wish I had lived a life true to myself, not one that others expected of me. So anytime I’m about to invest in a program or take a trip or do something that really scares me, I just think about, well, how does Karan want to live his dash. Is current.
The type of person who gets halfway there and then goes home or is current the type of person who goes 99% of the way there and then just backs up, last minute, backs out, stops going after what he believes in or is current. The person who despite fear and anxiety and maybe stress, is current.
The type of person who steps into the unknown. And when you step into the unknown, two things happen. Number one, you discover a part of yourself that you didn’t even know was possible. And number two, you realize when you’re on the other side, hey, it’s not that bad. You get to look back on where you were and you’re like, hey, wow, that wasn’t that bad.
I just had to take that first step. That’s the first concept called the dash. The next concept just taking an average life expectancy of somebody in North America, let’s just say in the US. And this day is always changing. But for the point of this exercise, it’s about 78 years average life expectancy.
It might be growing, it might be shrinking. At the time you’re watching this, who knows? Let’s just assume it’s 80 years old. That means you have 4000 week, 4000 weeks of beautiful life that you get to spend in a career, in a relationship, maybe raising kids, maybe hanging out with your friends, going on trips. You got about 4000 weeks of being able to express yourself.
And I believe that every day that you don’t fully express yourself and you’re not going after what you know deep down is calling you, it’s screaming at you like it was for me when I was in that five year thinking about it period, every single day that you’re in that period is a day lost as a day of discovery.
It’s a day of enthusiasm. It’s a day that your inner child can’t come out and play so whenever you’re about to step into something new when you’ve already identified you want to change and hey, if you don’t want to change cool this video is probably not for you and that’s totally cool but this video is really for the person who’s been thinking about making a change for quite some time and gets halfway there, sometimes even gets 99% of the way there but then something inside screams danger, safety, danger, safety go go back, back go back go back to the way things were because things are fine.
So these two concepts of living in the dash and 4000 weeks if that doesn’t wake you up if that doesn’t inspire you to take action, what will?
