Matthew McConaughey at the Oscars in 2014 – “There are three things that I need each day. One, I need something to look up to, another to look forward to, and another is someone to chase.”
That someone to chase was himself, himself 10 years from now, his hero.
One thing to learn from this is that you create your own reality. Everything your mind leads you to do, is in fact something you have thought about or processed and even calculated. The best math you can learn is how to calculate the future costs of your current decisions. “Will what I do today get me to that 35-year life I want to live?” It’s the kind of math we all have to come to terms with, and the math we often get wrong. If you wake up in the morning and even consider 10 years ahead, your winning, slow progress is still progress.
Nevertheless, 10 years on, McConaughey goes on to state, at 35, when he was asked, ‘well, have you got to your hero yet?’, he replied, ‘Not even close!’ And so, this is the chase, he wants more. The truth is, you’re always going to be chasing life. You don’t know what’s going to happen in the next 10 seconds never mind the next years. Look at the previous 14 days of my life, I was living in Doha, teaching a class full of kids. Today I am sitting in Ireland teaching the same class online and thinking how great I’m going to be when I learn to play the guitar in my free time.
The current situation is a reminder not to hide the fact of NOW. The only things you can be guaranteed about is, what was, and what is. What might be doesn’t even come into it. With the NOW, the power is unbelievable. If you are able eat, breathe and sleep in a bed at night, you are winning for me.
The happiest people don’t have the best of everything, they make the best of everything. Those three things I mentioned above, I have. Added to that I have many more things like a PlayStation and a T.V. with Netflix. People don’t have that. I have people I can hug when I need it. I even have a guitar so I can strum away at it on nights out and pretend I’m Nathan Carter. If you can read this message, you’re in a better position than many people in this world, whether it be someone who can’t read or someone who doesn’t even have a phone.
The absolute truth is, ‘You Never Arrive At Life’, this life is your own and keeps going until the day you die. Things will change and we grow by experience. This life is the NOW. Make it the best life by always moving forward. Always chasing the better you, don’t look back your not going that way.
Live and Learn. Never loose.
