It seems that using a hashtag and saying that you stand with whatever the latest thing is has become the default mechanism for trying to change the world. What if we all stopped trying to change the world and actually had the humility and common sense to try and change ourselves first. In today’s episode I explore the wisdom of Benjamin Franklin who reminds us that the best way to create a better tomorrow is by ensuring that each of us becomes better today. If you are weary of virtue signalling hashtags and soundbites then this is an episode for you.
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Transcript
Well, Hey everybody, Jonathan Doyle with you once again, welcome
Speaker:friends to the daily podcast.
Speaker:Hope you're doing well.
Speaker:Thanks for tuning in.
Speaker:It's such a privilege to just have just a few moments of your time.
Speaker:It doesn't mean a great deal to me that.
Speaker:Whether you're in your car, you're in the gym, whatever you're out
Speaker:and about doing that, you are going to lavish this extravagant gift
Speaker:of time on me and in the hope.
Speaker:Let's hope it's not a vain hope that I will bring you some,
Speaker:uh, some erudition, something inspiring, educational encouraging.
Speaker:Gosh, we need it.
Speaker:Don't we?
Speaker:I said a few episodes ago that we don't, uh, brush our teeth once and decide that
Speaker:we have, uh, we don't need to do it again.
Speaker:We don't go to the gym once and decide we don't need to do it again.
Speaker:We, uh, we don't take a bath or a shower once and say, well,
Speaker:I'm glad I've got that done.
Speaker:I never need to do it again.
Speaker:There are some things that we need to do on a daily basis.
Speaker:And for me, It is this kind of thing.
Speaker:It's immersing myself on a daily basis.
Speaker:In the wisdom of amazing men and women throughout history, trying to share that
Speaker:with you, trying to share various insights that I pick up in my own daily life.
Speaker:Because I think we need this.
Speaker:I think we need daily encouragement.
Speaker:You know, we need this.
Speaker:There's so much in the world telling us that things are really bad.
Speaker:And just these, uh, these little moments of inspiration
Speaker:that we share together, I hope.
Speaker:Uh, helping you move along in the path as always, please
Speaker:make sure you've subscribed.
Speaker:Hit that subscribe button, go and check out all the show notes.
Speaker:You can book me to speak.
Speaker:You can, um, get free access to my book, bridging the gap.
Speaker:There's links across to the YouTube channel.
Speaker:It's all there.
Speaker:Uh, lately I've been posting some of my daily crazy exercise routines.
Speaker:Over on the YouTube channel today.
Speaker:Um, I'm talking about, I've done two.
Speaker:I thought over 200 kilometers on the bike in the last 48 hours.
Speaker:And I'm in the video, I'm going up another mountain with a huge backpack as you do.
Speaker:So, um, and as I said yesterday, listen, when you hear me
Speaker:talk about the exercise I do.
Speaker:It really is relative.
Speaker:I mean, I just do what I do.
Speaker:Um, but, uh, you know, there are people that are more extreme than me and
Speaker:there are people who are, you know, Just walking to the letterbox, but
Speaker:as long as we're all doing something, I'm a big evangelist for this lately.
Speaker:I think we need to be doing stuff.
Speaker:It's our school holidays at the moment.
Speaker:I've, uh, I give my, my son he's 3.6 minutes, access to technology
Speaker:a day, and then I dragged him up the mountain with me today.
Speaker:Uh, he's like, thanks dad.
Speaker:It was really cool just to have that time with him.
Speaker:So.
Speaker:He's becoming my camera man, to go down, we can do drone shots.
Speaker:We can do drone shots.
Speaker:Dad I'll bring the drone.
Speaker:I go, you know, look man, I'm 48.
Speaker:I don't know how many people are that excited about seeing some 48 year old.
Speaker:Suburban dad going up a hill with drone shots, but Hey,
Speaker:maybe that floats your boat.
Speaker:So keep it on the YouTube channel today.
Speaker:My friends.
Speaker:Oh, what are we going to do today?
Speaker:Well, yesterday we haven't heard it go back to yesterday is really good.
Speaker:We did.
Speaker:It was a longer one.
Speaker:It was.
Speaker:Yeah, listen to questions.
Speaker:I went through, listen to questions.
Speaker:We did, uh, we did dealing with toxic people in the workplace.
Speaker:We did relationship trust issues, and we did how to deal with guilt.
Speaker:So a very human experiences.
Speaker:If you haven't heard that jump back to yesterday, we, uh,
Speaker:There's so much good content coming out today.
Speaker:I want to share with you a quote from one of my favorite historical figures.
Speaker:Franklin, the little known brother of Benjamin Franklin.
Speaker:Now let's just go to Israel.
Speaker:Let's just go to Benjamin Franklin.
Speaker:And, uh, one of the great founding fathers of the United States and great figure
Speaker:of history, just a incredibly driven.
Speaker:You know, intelligent, hardworking, complex, uh, figure.
Speaker:And just reading his stuff is, can be quite inspiring.
Speaker:He sort of, I feel like I have a bit of a kindred spirit.
Speaker:One of those people you'd love at your, your world's greatest dinner party, right.
Speaker:Benjamin Franklin would be there.
Speaker:So friends listen to what he has to say to us today.
Speaker:It's a great quote.
Speaker:You ready?
Speaker:It says this.
Speaker:How do you become better tomorrow?
Speaker:And by improving yourself, the world is made better.
Speaker:Be not afraid of growing too slowly.
Speaker:Be afraid of standing still.
Speaker:Forget your mistakes, but remember what they taught you.
Speaker:So, how do you become better tomorrow?
Speaker:By becoming better.
Speaker:Today.
Speaker:One of the reasons I love this guy is because he just packed so much
Speaker:in there is there's an economy of language that is just so powerful.
Speaker:Let's just pass this a little bit.
Speaker:Let's just.
Speaker:Explore this together.
Speaker:Listen to this first part by improving yourself.
Speaker:The world is made better.
Speaker:My friends, please understand.
Speaker:There is a place.
Speaker:Someplace.
Speaker:Uh, for government programs, um, I think we are living in an age of technocracy
Speaker:and concerning bureaucratic control.
Speaker:I'm a big believer that if you want to change the world, I
Speaker:don't think it's at the level of.
Speaker:Massive government programs.
Speaker:I think you changed the world by exactly how Benjamin Franklin says it here.
Speaker:He says, you, you make the world better by improving yourself.
Speaker:So I've said this recently, like really this obsession with, I
Speaker:stand with the latest thing.
Speaker:I stand with this, I stand with that, the virtue signaling that's going on.
Speaker:Look, let's be honest.
Speaker:Most of us are not going to play any part in the great events of history.
Speaker:That's the truth.
Speaker:It might be grating to hear it.
Speaker:People can think that cynical or it's defeatist.
Speaker:It's not the fetus.
Speaker:It's re it's being a realist.
Speaker:It's that?
Speaker:Most of us.
Speaker:I mean, you really want to change history.
Speaker:Let's get to work on changing our own history.
Speaker:First, before we go around and changing the history of the planet,
Speaker:let's change our own history.
Speaker:Let's change the histories that we come from.
Speaker:Let's change the histories that we've believed about ourselves.
Speaker:Let's change the history of what we think we can achieve in the future.
Speaker:That's a bit of a, well, that's kind of back to the future time war argument.
Speaker:But fringe, you get my point, right?
Speaker:That.
Speaker:Really I'm a believer that, um, the older I get.
Speaker:I genuinely think it's not cynicism.
Speaker:It's not that it's just.
Speaker:If, what can I control?
Speaker:I can control what I bring to the table.
Speaker:I can control.
Speaker:The quality of my closest relationships as best I can.
Speaker:And as I improve those, it's like a ripple in the pond.
Speaker:It's like, it just radiates out slowly.
Speaker:So I think so many things could be changed with a return to areas of personal
Speaker:responsibility, personal development.
Speaker:Self-development looking at ourselves first.
Speaker:And not worrying about, you know, this is addictive kind of mentality where we
Speaker:just, you know, we're a news websites, we're just sourcing news all the time
Speaker:in terms of, you know, fearful approach to what's going on in the world.
Speaker:But let's.
Speaker:As Ben Franklin said he improve ourselves and then the world
Speaker:will take care of itself.
Speaker:Next line.
Speaker:He says, be not afraid of growing too slowly.
Speaker:Be afraid of standing still such a great insight.
Speaker:You know, we all have dreams and plans and those things we'd love to be, have, do
Speaker:and contribute, but let's not forget that.
Speaker:Uh, it's okay to grow slowly.
Speaker:It's okay.
Speaker:It's okay.
Speaker:Just to take the next step on your path.
Speaker:It's okay.
Speaker:Just to be fractionally better today than you were yesterday.
Speaker:What you don't want is either to be still or going backwards.
Speaker:You don't want to be stationary in life in terms of your
Speaker:development and you definitely don't want to be going backwards.
Speaker:So it is okay.
Speaker:My friend to grow slowly.
Speaker:It is, they created be slightly better than you were the other day.
Speaker:The next line he says, he forget your mistakes, but
Speaker:remember what they taught you.
Speaker:This is good.
Speaker:If you go back to the.
Speaker:Uh, episode yesterday when I talk about guilt.
Speaker:You know, we.
Speaker:We need to take the lessons of the mistakes that we make.
Speaker:We need to look at the beliefs, the behaviors that drive them.
Speaker:But then we don't want to spend the rest of our time.
Speaker:You know, going through life cataloging, every mistake we've ever made playing
Speaker:at a 2:00 AM when we can't sleep in big Technicolor, full screen glory.
Speaker:We need to go.
Speaker:Yep.
Speaker:I did that.
Speaker:It was wrong.
Speaker:I made this decision.
Speaker:I'm going to change it.
Speaker:I'm going to get better, but remember what you learned in the
Speaker:process, but don't beat yourself up.
Speaker:You know, I'm a believer in that.
Speaker:I'm not a believer in sort of, um, ignoring what we've, what we do,
Speaker:because that turns us into sociopath's.
Speaker:You don't care about our effect on others.
Speaker:It's not what I'm saying.
Speaker:It's as if we hold onto our mistakes and replay them and
Speaker:replay them and replay them.
Speaker:We end up not growing and that robs the people that we love have the best of us.
Speaker:So finally he says here, how do you become better tomorrow?
Speaker:By becoming better today.
Speaker:I'm a believer in this it's incremental.
Speaker:Um, I'm, I'm taking a break from heavyweights and I'm back to doing sets
Speaker:of hundred of a hundred pushups at a time.
Speaker:So I'm pushing, you know, each day and then it's like 105 and
Speaker:then it's 106 and it's 107.
Speaker:So it's like, you can find any area of life, you know,
Speaker:for me, that's an obvious one.
Speaker:You.
Speaker:Just slightly increasing my pushups each day.
Speaker:Or, you know, just trying to make the podcast fractionally better
Speaker:each day, getting the video channel fractionally better each day, trying
Speaker:just a tiny bit better as a husband and father, as a friend, just
Speaker:incremental, tiny little things.
Speaker:We could call it glacial.
Speaker:But I remember when we were in Iceland, we went to, you know, we were on this
Speaker:tour for a couple of days and you see all these waterfalls and glaciers,
Speaker:and it's the first time I'd really got up close to a glacier and it's like,
Speaker:The sheer scale of the thing, right.
Speaker:Basically fills a valley.
Speaker:And you see this kind of thing moves as it moves.
Speaker:We don't really see it moving cause it's glacial, but you get my point.
Speaker:You can see its progress.
Speaker:And the force and the power in that thing, it is grinding rocks to dust.
Speaker:In that tiny little movement as it just slowly moves down the valley.
Speaker:So for us.
Speaker:Our progress can be glacial, but it can still be very, very powerful.
Speaker:So just pick an area of your life, pick something at the moment that you
Speaker:know, could be slightly better that, you know, you would like to change.
Speaker:Just something you can improve.
Speaker:Fractionally.
Speaker:And get to work on that.
Speaker:Do you want to be better in a month's time?
Speaker:You want to be much better in a year's time.
Speaker:Just focusing on getting fractionally better.
Speaker:Today, pick something, come on, just pick it.
Speaker:There's something in your life, you know?
Speaker:Is there a way that you speak to people that needs to change is there is an
Speaker:addiction that you need to address.
Speaker:Is there a lack of effort or energy in some area that you could improve?
Speaker:Fractionally?
Speaker:Just go to work on that.
Speaker:And the other stuff is going to take care of itself.
Speaker:Around my friends.
Speaker:That's it for today.
Speaker:Um, uh, I'm going to be posting some live videos.
Speaker:I'm going to be a.
Speaker:In different parts of the country.
Speaker:So I'm going to try and get you some good stuff from there.
Speaker:So stay tuned, make sure you've subscribed to this.
Speaker:And also to the YouTube channel, hit that link and come across and
Speaker:check out the YouTube channel.
Speaker:It's really.
Speaker:Enjoying doing those videos each day.
Speaker:All right.
Speaker:God bless everybody.
Speaker:My name's Jonathan Doyle.
Speaker:This has been the daily podcast and I'll have another message for you tomorrow.
