Living Beyond Your Past

How You Can Live Beyond Your Past?

Measuring Your Length of Time – Part 4

What good is a decade that has passed?  Maybe it’s best you’ve made it through one decade and never want to look back at it.  How can you benefit from time that’s already spent?

The Thought or Concept:
Do you remember the movie “Back to the Future”?  This 1980’s movie starring Michael J. Fox as Marty McFly, is about a 17 year old boy, who gets to time-travel.  He, running for his life, ends up traveling back in time to the period when his parents were teanagers. He ends up accidentally altering the past and thusly changing the future of everyone he knows.  This sounds great, but he makes a mess of the future and must figure out a way to correct his new reality.

Life however, doesn’t give us the ability for a do-over.  Instead, we have to correct our own future based on what happened in our past. And this brings me back to my decade calendar.  

In the previous web-post, we defined my sobering and thought provoking decade calendar.  In this post, allow me to redefine it by sharing what each decade has taught me.  There is only one thing you can do to redeem time passed and that’s to learn and grow from it.

The Practice:
When you change decades, a good practice is to review it.  What has this past decade taught me and how will I use what I’ve learned for the next one?

Decade 1 (0-9): I am nothing ordinary.  I learned as a child that I was no ordinary child.  Decade one taught me the foundation of prayer. Prayer has been embedded in me since my youth and because of this, I decided to use it in everything I do.  What did you grab a hold of in your youth that you’ve never let go and how can you use it today?

Decade 2 (10-19): Hard work pays for itself.  No one can take from you the very thing you’ve worked for.  What you learn and the talent you sharpen, it’s something that can’t be taken from you.  In decade two, I learned how to give life my all, in an area and to stick with it so that I could become a master.  When I say master, I simply mean anything you work on for a decade, you master. I mastered school and became a master of church.  What did you put your work, energy, and effort into during your decade two and what have you mastered?

Decade 3 (20-29): Relearning what I thought I knew.  In decade three, I discovered I didn’t know everything and there’s a lot I need(ed) to learn.  John Maxwell says it this way, “The more I know, the more I know I don’t know.” The key to any area of growth is to never stop learning.  I figured that once I completed high school and college, I’d learned everything I needed to be a success in life. Boy, was I wrong. That was just the beginning.  What did your decade three teach you? What are you learning?

Decade 4 (30-39): There is more to my life than just me.  Life viewed in decades can have a sobering effect on you.  In my decade four, I found out the difference between life and death.  When you live for yourself only, your dead, but when you lose your life so that others can benefit, then and only then do you begin to really live.  While decade four brought me the most challenges, defeats, and disappointments, it also brought me the most victories, wins, and successes I’ve yet to experience. What has decade four taught you?  Maybe you’re not there yet and that’s okay. Don’t be afraid to think ahead so that you can shape your current decade and alter your future in a similar way Marty McFly did in “Back to the Future” to clean up his.

Decade 5 (40-49):  I have a lot to offer my world.  While I am nowhere near the end of this decade.  I can say that this one has been the best decade ever.  I owe that to what’s been learned from the previous and how we’ve built upon those decades.  

You might not be experiencing the best decade ever, but what you are experiencing will definitely shape the next era of your life.

Today is Friday!
Life is the best teacher so don’t miss out on what it has to teach you.  Each of us experience it differently and it all works for our good.
Why not take a look at your life by decades?  It will certainly give you a new perspective of what you call your life, your business.  Until next week, “make your life your business!”

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