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DR JOHN DEMARTINI - Updated 2 years ago
Everyone lives with different space and time horizons.
Let’s look at a very generic example of a large factory and the various individuals working there. While very generalized, it may help to give you an idea of what I mean when I speak about “space and time horizons”.
A factory worker doing routine work that he perceives as mundane and monotonous is likely to do whatever minimum he needs to do to get his paycheck. He’s likely to think from day to day or week to week and spend his salary as soon as he gets it.
The supervisor may think in terms of months; lower management may think in terms of a year; middle management in terms of a decade; upper management in terms of a generation; the CEO in terms of a lifetime; and a visionary in terms of a century or even a millennium.
In other words, the farther you go up the corporate accountability ladder, the greater the space and time horizons will be required in your mind, and the greater and longer your vision and resultant goals.
Take a visionary CEO like Elon Musk, for example, who has a vision beyond his to-do list and what others thought was possible – a vision that extends beyond a decade and his generation and into the century and possibly millennium in which he lives.
The question is - how big is YOUR vision?
I often say that if you would love to:
- Make a difference in yourself, you need a vision at least as big as your family.
- Be a leader in your family, you need a vision at least as big as your community.
- Be number one in the community, you need a vision as big as your city.
- Be number one in the city, you need a vision as big as your state.
- Be number one in the state, you need a vision as big as your nation.
- Make a national impact, you need a vision as big as the world.
And, if you would love to make a global impact, you need an astronomical vision, which is the biggest space and time horizon there is.
The magnitude of your space and time horizons determines the impact you have in this world.
Seneca, the Roman poet and politician, said that you measure an individual by their most distant ends - the ends of what they see in space and time in their lives.
There is no doubt that the internet has broadened your capacity to make a global difference. If you are inspired to do so, you have this readily accessible tool to help you expand your space and time horizons globally and do something online that leaves a legacy beyond your life.
Immediate gratification is not the same as long-term vision. Immediate gratification can cost you the quality of your life.
Individuals who are addicted, compulsive and impulsive, and who seek immediate gratifying behavior, usually have to hit bottom before making a change. Compare this with individuals with long-term visions who tend to adapt resiliently to challenges and keep expanding.
So, what is it that expands our space and time horizon?
If you think about looking across the ocean, the farthest horizon you can see, the point at which you lose sight of things, that would be your SPACE horizon. Your TIME horizon would be the planning objectives that are at the boundary of what you can objectively perceive.
When I first started my speaking career, I couldn't see or visualize all that I have gotten to do thus far in my life because I wasn’t thinking on that large a scale. However, each time I achieved a goal or milestone, my space and time horizons expanded. As such, I started giving myself permission to work locally, then citywide, statewide, nationally, internationally, and globally in the world. I was then able to have longer timeframes and think of things beyond my lifespan in terms of what I would love to accomplish as a legacy.
If you expand your space and time horizons, you also expand your potential in life.
I was once told by Ed Tullison, a mentor I studied under when I was about 20 years old, to never live where I couldn’t see the farthest horizons. In other words, not to allow somebody else's space and time horizons to constrict mine. I loved this so much that I made sure that my homes and offices have been at the top of buildings or mountains or out at sea, so that I never have anything blocking my view.
I'm a firm believer that you are wise to make sure that you give yourself permission to expand and not shrink, and to radiate and not gravitate.
This leads me to something that I mention in almost every presentation I do - human values.
Every human being lives by a set of priorities, a set of values. These are areas of your life that are most to least important. Whatever's highest on your values is most likely an intrinsic value that your identity revolves around, and that you are spontaneously inspired to act upon and fulfill.
As you go down your list or hierarchy of values, they become less intrinsic and more extrinsic, and tend to be derived from external sources and require external motivation to get you to complete them.
I use the analogy of a young boy who loves video games. More often than not, he won’t need to be asked to play the video game – he will do it spontaneously because it’s important to him. Each time he conquers a level, he likely feels inspired to move on to the next level and tackle even bigger challenges, often by finding innovative and creative solutions to help him to achieve.
Now what if he was faced with a task that wasn’t as high on his list of values, perhaps cleaning his room? In that case, he’s likely to procrastinate and might need external motivation in the form of a punishment or reward to get the job done.
In other words, you’ll tend to need extrinsic motivation, reward and punishment associations with things that are low on your values.
It’s also wise to consider that if you need extrinsic motivation on the outside, you're not going to do as well as when you're intrinsically driven from the inside.
Extrinsic motivation is a symptom and not a solution for maximizing human potential in life.
As I often say, I'm not a motivational speaker. Motivational speakers typically use rhetorical persuasion with rewards and punishments to get individuals to do things, and end up pushing them uphill all day long.
I have no interest in that. I'm an inspired educator who teaches individuals how to live inspired lives by finding out what's intrinsically important to them and highest on their values, and how to organize and structure their life accordingly to fulfill them.
It's for this reason that I have the free confidential Demartini Value Determination Process available on my website – a powerful tool that can help you identify the difference between what intrinsically drives you and what has to be extrinsically motivated, if you haven’t already done so.
It's been shown that intrinsically driven individuals go farther, expand more and do more, and have more achievements in life than individuals who need to be motivated.
You might have seen this play out at work with team members or employees that you continually need to motivate, who are not engaged, and who tend to do the bare minimum to get by.
The bottom line is that if they can't see how their job duties are helping them fulfill what's really important to them, they will likely procrastinate, hesitate and frustrate, not to mention require extrinsic motivation to get the job done.
That’s not the wisest way to run your business.
However, if you find somebody who's engaged at work, and who can see how their job duties are helping them fulfill their highest values in life, and who works, not just for a paycheck from the company, but because they can fulfill what's meaningful to them, it’s unlikely that you’ll need to motivate them.
McGregor in the 1960s called them Y individuals vs X individuals. Y individuals are intrinsically driven, and X individuals are individuals that need to be repeatedly motivated.
The X individuals who require motivation often tend to look for immediate gratification, have short-term time horizons, want to take a break every hour on the hour, take every available opportunity to go on vacation, and tend to be the ones looking for a bonus package or additional benefits.
In other words, X individuals are likely to look for what they can narcissistically get out of their job, instead of what they can do to make a difference that also brings intrinsic fulfillment in life.
Contrast this with Y individuals who are likely engaged and inspired by their careers, who love what they do and are grateful that they also get paid to do it.
You’ve probably encountered employees or business owners who are engaged, inspired, present, grateful, and enthused. These individuals tend to magnetize business and people to them.
When you're that way, you draw opportunity to your life, but when you're not, you push it away. Nobody wants to push individuals uphill all day long. No one truly wants to do business with someone like that.
It is unwise to live your life with a shrinking mentality, and wiser to have an expanded mentality.
Identifying your highest values is therefore crucial if you would love to expand your space and time horizons.
Just like the young boy I mentioned earlier who, when he finishes his video game, will likely want to move onto a more advanced and more expanded game that's more challenging.
In the same way, when you do something that's high in your values, you’ll tend to want to go and pursue challenges that inspire you, to conquer them, and not to give up.
You’re also likely to see challenges as feedback to help you master the game. However, when you're not engaged in the game, you’ll tend to see setbacks and challenges as failures, and won’t want to pursue them.
Individuals who know their highest values, who structure their life accordingly, and who set objectives that match their highest values, are the ones most likely to expand their space and time horizons.
Any time you set a goal that's aligned with your highest values and you achieve it, you tend to want to achieve even more expanded goals and keep aiming higher.
When I first started writing books in my early twenties, as an example, as I completed the first book, I already had the next one ready to go into my mind. When I finished that one, I had the next one ready too.
To sum up so far: you tend to spontaneously keep expanding your space and time horizons, do something bigger or greater over a longer period of time, and have patience and perseverance when doing something that is aligned with your highest values
When you do something that's high in your values, you create eustress by pursuing challenges that inspire you, instead of distress by trying to avoid challenges that don't.
Eustress tends to be wellness-promoting and occurs when you're doing something that you love – something that is inspiring yet challenging, and something that supports your values. Eustress essentially means “true stress” and is often a confirmation that you’re on track with what is most deeply meaningful and inspiring to you.
Distress, on the other hand, can be illness-promoting and often occurs when you are living a one-sided life.
Distress essentially means “divided stress” in that you might be looking for a positive without a negative, pleasure without pain or ease without difficulty.
You might also be injecting other people’s values into your life and doing what you feel you “should” do instead of what is deeply meaningful to you. In that way, distress can actually assist you in your journey of being accountable and authentic, and help you get back on track to what's true for you. It serves as a feedback response.
Individuals with big visions who plan ahead, set goals and have bigger space and time horizons are highly likely to achieve more and have less distress in life.
The research also shows that the pro-inflammatory cytokine responses in their body are lessened. So, even if they work 18 hours a day towards their objective, they tend not to get distressed because they’re doing something that's meaningful.
I'm a firm believer in prioritizing your life, delegating lower priority tasks, and getting on with the highest priority actions so you can automatically expand your space and time horizons.
You build incremental momentum each time you achieve something, and tend to want to achieve something even greater as a result.
That's why fulfilling intrinsic values are way more important than extrinsic values, that inspiration within is way more important than motivation from without, and that being authentic, which is in your highest values, is way more powerful than being inauthentic in your lower values.
In that way, you are more able to live by design instead of duty. As I often say, if you're not master planning your life and organizing how you want your life to look, you're going to let other individuals do it for you.
Everyone around you has their own set of values and constantly tries to fulfill their highest values.
As such, they’ll tend to love you according to their own highest values and try to project what they think is important onto you.
So, if you have an individual that has a high value on education, they might try to show their love by making sure you're educated. Somebody else may think about health and try to get you to exercise more or eat better. Others with a high value on children might encourage you to start a family or spend less time at work and more time with your children.
Everybody around you has a unique hierarchy of values, and they all project that onto you.
If you, in any way, put them on a pedestal and try to inject those into your own life, you’ll cloud the clarity of what's really important to you, devalue yourself in comparison to them, and may even try to imitate them, which is suicide and death if you will, to your own identity.
You’ll also be second at being somebody else instead of first at being you.
Whenever you compare yourself to others, you depreciate yourself and shrink your space and time horizons.
You’re not here to compare yourself to others. You’re here to compare your actions, in your own daily life, to your own highest values.
In other words, how well are you living according to what you feel is most inspiring and meaningful to you? And doing that in a way that serves other individuals. You’re not here to sacrifice for other individuals, but to serve other individuals, doing what you love in a way that fulfills what's important to them in an equitable and sustainable fair exchange manner.
You can see this in action with individuals like Elon Musk, because they're doing things that inspire them. They're looking for problems that would be inspiring to solve on the planet.
The magnitude of space and time in your life is based on how big a problem you are willing to take on and solve in the world. And if you're not solving a problem, you're not likely to have fulfillment in life.
Prioritizing your life and sticking to high-priority is essential.
What’s interesting is that when you’re not engaged in high-priority actions, your blood, glucose, and oxygen go into the amygdala, which is a subcortical area in your brain. This area is involved in impulses and instincts, which are the two primary distractions that keep you from living by what's highest in your values. So if you’re not living by priority, you're more vulnerable.
In other words, if you don't fill your day with high-priority actions that inspire you, that are deeply meaningful, that are most important to you, your day fills up with all these lower priority “distractions” that individuals try to project on you, and it wipes out the day and makes you feel less important and devalued.
You’ll also tend to look for immediate gratification, and that's a shrunken space and time horizon.
Individuals with small little timeframes don't go as far in life. Those individuals who delay gratification, have a bigger space and time horizon and are most likely to be more, have more and do more in life.
To sum up:
Everybody has a unique, but average time and space horizon in which they live.
Anytime you live congruently in your highest values, your space and time horizons expand.
Anytime you live incongruently or down in your lower values and you try to be somebody you’re not, your time and space horizons shrink.
Immediate gratification is a shrunken space and time horizon.
At the same time, a long-term vision is a broadened space and time horizon.
If you would love to expand your space and time horizons for a more powerful life, it is wise to:
- Know what your true highest values are and give yourself permission to live congruently according to whatever they are;
- Structure your life by priority and do the highest priority daily actions that also serve the greatest number of people that also compensate you financially in return in fair exchange; and
- Fill your day with high-priority actions that inspire you, instead of with low-priority distractions that don't.
- Delegate whatever actions are lower on your priority list to those that would love to do the actions and that have them high in priority on their list of values.
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