Hello, and welcome to the New Mindset Who Does Podcast. My name is Casey Kenney at Case.Kenney.i. Instagram, and this is my weekly podcast where I create short, no BS episodes dedicated to helping you become the person you're meant to be. Leave your comfort zone and live a purposeful and fulfilling life. Let's go.
All right. Welcome to episode 650. Hello, my friend. Welcome to a fresh new episode. A new mindset to do this. As always, thank you so much for listening. Thank you for supporting me. And today, a question. What are we doing with the time we've been giving?
Right? What exactly are we doing with the time we've been given in life? And I don't want this to be a generic motivational speech like, get up and just do you have the gift of today yesterday is gone. But I don't want that. But I do want us to think logically about our lives.
within this context to start. I saw this thread on Reddit where someone simply asked the question, what would you do if you woke up tomorrow and the year is 2005? So like you woke up and all of a sudden you're 20 years younger and you have all the knowledge you have today and you could work forward now knowing everything you know about yourself, about the world, about business, about everything, like what would you do? And of course, you know, Reddit did its thing and lots of people said they would buy Bitcoin or play the stocks or whatever.
But a lot of the answers, the real answers, the heartfelt answers, were along the lines of the following. I read a couple. One person said, I'd breathe a huge sigh of relief and I would do everything in caps differently. Someone else said, I probably take a moment to appreciate how chill things were, no constant notifications, just enjoying
little things like a burned CD, an instant messenger. Someone else said, I do everything differently. I'd make better and lasting friendships. I would nurture talents like singing or a sport. I would make myself a better version of who I am or I would just hug my mom or my dad.
A lot of answers like that. Personally, I sat in that question, what would I do differently for a moment? I thought about what I would do differently. It was actually pretty easy. I immediately came up with a couple of things. There's something about this question, about giving myself a specific timeline, something about saying you're 20 years younger, but with all of your current knowledge, it's easy with that. There's something about this question. It's easy to come up with answers.
And it made me realize something that I think we should all take to heart. Collectively, me, you, us, we all grossly underestimate the amount of power we have in the present moment. Like, think about it. What stopped you? What stopped me in 2005? Or even last year from stepping closer to who you want to be or doing what you want to do? Was it fear? Was it doubt? Was it laziness? Was it lack of knowledge? Whatever.
Like those things don't disappear with a reset. They follow you until you decide to stop giving them the keys to your future. And the reality is most of us live like we have all the time in the world, but every day we're just missing out an opportunity after opportunity.
You don't have to wait for some fictional perfect moment to at least start to make moves, right? If you're breathing, if you have the gift of life, you can make a change. And I think we like this question in particular, in part because we also like to romanticize the past.
the past, right? It feels safe in the past. It's easier to wish we could go back and fix things then. Then it is, be honest, to admit that we have the power to fix things today. It'll be uncomfortable, but we have that power. The future, on the other hand, that always feels uncertain. And uncertainty can paralyze us in the present.
But again, if with the question, if you woke up tomorrow and it was 2005, I think you would realize how much time you've wasted just wishing and wondering instead of trying. So why not save yourself the regret and start trying now? The only difference between 2005 and today is a mindset, right? Like, so often you hear people say something like, if only I knew then what I know now, I've played that game with myself as well many times.
If only I knew then what I know now." I mean, yeah, sure. But also, huh? Also, what? Like, you know now. You know now. You know what doesn't work. You know what does work. You know what sets your soul on fire. You know how to do this. You know how to do that. You know exactly where you've been settling.
The only difference is that you're a bit older than maybe you'd want to be knowing these things. So the question isn't what you would do with a second chance with your time machine. It's what can you do to now with what you have today? We've just changed the timeline. The question is, what would you do knowing what you know today? Well, you know it today. The clock is ticking, but it's kind of ticking in your favor. So ask yourself, what would 2005 you want from today?
What risks would they beg for you to take? What lessons would they hope you've learned and acted upon? The beauty of life is that it's constantly, constantly, constantly offering you chances to do things, to rewrite your story in different ways. You don't need a time machine to change the future. You just need to stop underestimating the present.
And questions like this, make believe, shower, thought scenarios like this, restarting everything, hopping in the old time machine, time travel fantasies like this are comforting in a sense because they kind of let us off the hook.
They lead us to believe that it's not our current actions that hold us back. It's our past mistakes. Ah, there you go. That's why it's all good. No, the reality is every day you wake up and you have your health and you have the ability to do things, you're in a position to give yourself a second chance.
The person you were regrettably or not in 2005 is gone. The lessons they've learned, the things they've acquired, the potential they carry is still there. You are walking around with all those things today. Just for some reason, me, you, us, we're convincing ourselves that it's too late. So I think it's really interesting here to be brutally honest with ourselves, to realize how much we've been caught up in thinking that we've missed our window.
So much so that we forget that life gives us windows every single day, every single day. If you think that you would make better decisions in 2005, knowing what you know today, what is stopping you literally? What is stopping you from at least trying to make those same decisions today?
Seriously, ask yourself that. What is stopping you? The same opportunities to grow and to try and to fail and to succeed and all those things, they're still here. They just might look a little bit different. They might look a little bit different. Sure. They're available today though. And I get things do change, of course, as you get older. You might have responsibilities that you can't just ignore. Health issues, of course. It's not as easy to just brutally hit reset, yes. But we can't think that the past holds all the answers. If that's our mindset,
Then the problem isn't that we lack time or ability or anything like that. It's that we're just waiting for permission to fully embrace the things we know. We think growth has to be this traumatic and life altering. Okay, back to 2005 reset thing. The truth is in a rather unsexy way, growth change, living the life you want. It happens in small everyday ways, small everyday decisions.
Of course, of course, of course, of course, it's the small things. It's the moment you say yes to what scares you. It's the moment you bet on yourself, right? You don't need a mysterious time capsule reset. You need a better belief system, a belief system.
the mindset that says your best days are behind you, that is the thief of progress. So I think the message I have for you, for myself, is to stop idolizing the version of you from 2005 and start showing up for the version you are today.
Right? If you woke up tomorrow and you realize you had another shot at everything, you would be filled with a sense of urgency and excitement. You would. You'd be like, oh my gosh, this is insane. This is incredible. Can you push yourself to feel an inkling of that today?
I think the truth is this concept of time is time isn't a neutral thing. Time doesn't care. Time doesn't care. The sooner you realize that the power you have to change is, you regardless of time, the sooner you'll stop living in the land of what if.
If this can become your mindset today, then we can cut through the crap of how I think a lot of us have allowed our mindsets to develop, the hypocrisy that we've allowed ourselves to carry, because one of the greatest fallacies in how we think about life, again, is our obsession with time.
Specifically, how we underestimate the time we have left while also overvaluing time that's already passed, or that's yet to arrive. Think about this, we romanticize the past. Very much so. We convince ourselves that the answers lie somewhere back there, hidden in these moments that we can't relive, we can't change.
Or we place our hopes entirely in the mysterious feature. We think that happiness and fulfillment and success, these things will magically appear someday when the stars align. And in doing so, we completely void the present. The most transformative time in our life, the present moment. And the irony of this, of course, is that the past and the present, they are merely concepts. The past is a collection of stories we tell ourselves.
A lot of the times exaggerated, a lot of the times rewritten. We dwell on what we could have done differently. We rehash old choices that could change our future, blah, blah, blah. The future, on the other hand, is pure speculation. We fill it with dreams. We fill it with worries. We fill it with expectations. We think that everything we want lies just out of reach in some idealized version of the future.
So all of that being said, we underestimate the present. And I think, you know, the reason we do this is the present is boring. The present is ordinary. It's easy to dismiss the power of the present because it doesn't come wrapped up in drama or regret or excitement, right? Either past or present. But think about it.
Everything you've ever accomplished in your life happened in a now moment. Every pivotal decision you've made, every life-changing realization you've had, every step forward, you didn't find those, you didn't do those in the past, you didn't do them in the future, you found them by showing up fully in the present. The problem today is that we spend so much time dwelling on the past or worrying about the present that we fail to realize the potential
of the today, right? And the trap that we fall into is assuming that we don't have enough time today. We act as if the window for meaningful change in our lives has closed. We've missed our chance it's closed. The truth is though, of course, you probably have more time than you think.
It just won't look like the time you've already lived, and that's okay. Different isn't worse. I always say that different isn't worse. What you do with the next five minutes, after listening to this, the next five hours, the next five years, the potential for change within that is limitless. I really think so. So that's the message today. That's the message for myself. I think this message, this episode is for me. Case time isn't running out. It's running forward.
And it wants you to come along with it. So if there's anything you take from this episode, it's that the answers you're looking for, the motivation you're looking for, it isn't buried in the past. It's not waiting in the future, it's here. It's in the choices you make today. The present is the only place where real meaningful change happens. If you want to write a different story, you have to start writing it today.
And I think the thing we don't tell ourselves is the present doesn't need to feel profound and crazy to be meaningful, to be powerful. This isn't about waking up every day with some grand epiphany or lighting the world on fire every moment with ambition. Most of the time I've learned that meaningful change shows up in seemingly regular moments. Ones that feel routine, even, or mundane, even.
And realizing these are the ones that shape your life today. It's the text you sent to check in on someone. It's the 20 minutes you spend today working on something that is meaningful to you. It's a willingness to be a beginner when your 36-year-old self is like, I can't do that. No, small, meaningful choices, big transformations start small.
And the only thing that's standing between you and the quote life you want is your willingness to do those small mundane things. So maybe today isn't flashy, maybe it isn't big and huge, but that doesn't mean it's not worth something. I think every time you choose to invest in yourself, even in small, quiet ways, you are sending a signal to the universe that you're ready for more.
You're proving to yourself that the best version of you isn't just a fantasy tied to a distant era or a hypothetical future. It's already in motion in the present. No need to go back. No need to go forward today. So that's it under right here. I hope this was helpful for you in some way. If it was, I'd be so grateful if you share this episode with a friend. Just send them the link to Apple Podcast or the Spotify. Thanks so much for doing that. And as always, thank you so much for listening. Thank you for supporting me. And until next episode, I'm out.
