Those of you that know me, understand that I’m constantly on the lookout for creative ideas in how we can use our minds to improve our lives. And here’s another one for you.
Over the weekend I watched the movie “About Time” where the main character, Tim, learns he can travel back in time to relive certain times in his life. Of course, during most of the movie we watch as Tim first deals with this discovery then learns to harness it to help himself and those around him live the lives they truly desire. Near the end of the movie his father, who also has the gift, is dying and provides him with his final suggestion on how to use his ability to travel in time most effectively.
He tells Tim to live each day twice. First, live the day with the normal human challenges – stress, self-doubt, frustration, worry, etc. – and see how it goes. Then, relive the day and instead enjoy it. Appreciate the wonders of the world around you – the people you meet, the beauty of nature, the sights and sounds of everything around you. (The idea being, since he’s already lived the day once, he knows how it goes. Therefore, he’s not wasting time and energy worrying about what will happen. He’ll only be focused on appreciating and improving it.) His father said that way you’ll never miss out on the truly important things around you and you’ll experience an amazing life.
The movie ends with Tim saying he used to do exactly as his father had suggested, living each day twice. But after a while he learned to live each day as he would the second time. He learned to appreciate everything around, everything he experienced, the first time. So he found no need to live it twice.
The Lesson: Learn to enjoy each day that we have – connect and encourage the people we meet, appreciate the amazing world that we live in, and do the things that are important to us. And do it the first time. That’s how to improve your life.
The ‘How’: So how do we use time travel to do this in our own lives? Well, as you hear me say all the time ‘our thinking drives our behavior which determines our results – the situation, circumstances and outcomes in our lives.’ What that really means is that we live our life in our minds. Our thoughts, perceptions, and beliefs are all (only) in our minds. So the time travel I’m referring to here is mental time travel. We can use our minds to travel back in time anytime we want simply by using our memory.
Therefore, we can evaluate past activities, or performance, and learn from them. While we can’t change the past, we can change the future. We can decide how we’ll handle things differently the ‘next time’. (Just as Tim does.) And as we live our next day – which admittedly, for most of us will be similar to the prior day – we’ll do a better job. We’ll do better. We’ll be better.
Unlike this movie, or others such as “Groundhog Day”, where the main character gets to live the same day over and over until they get it right, we can’t relive the past. But we can make each new day better and better – and get better and be better ourselves – as we move through time into our future.
So the key is to reflect upon our experiences and learn from them to improve ourselves. I’ve found very few people actually invest the time to do this (either because they are so busy or they simply haven’t learned the value of reflection). Therefore, people tend to live ‘the same day’ over and over again, and it gets no better, since they aren’t improving themselves.
And for those of you that want a more ‘real world’ aspect to this, John Maxwell often says “Experience isn’t the best teacher. Evaluated experience is.” Or as I’ve quoted James Allen elsewhere on this site, “People are anxious to change their circumstances, but unwilling to change themselves; therefore they remain bound.” They remain bound to repeat tomorrow as the same day the lived today. No better.
Question: Do you take time at the end of your day to reflect on it, to evaluate what went well, what didn’t and how you can improve? What might you learn if you did?
