A Reminder of Progress

Welcome everybody to another episode of Halftime Talks. My name is Rahim Rasul, and you’re listening to the podcast where we recognize that in the middle of your game of life, whether you’re up by 10 or down by 20, we all need halftime talks to uplift us, inspire us and challenge us to bring that level of performance you and I both know it’s gonna take to win the game.

So it’s another episode halftime talks, we’re here again. In a way we begin when we’re here again is with a little bit of appreciation. What I would love to appreciate today, I spent the weekend looking on YouTube, and I was able to see different masters. This different masters in their own unique discipline and craft, and had something in common. You could see the glaze take over their eyes as they entered in a whole different zone that that pure, sublime zone where they’re able to fully express themselves in their crafts, be it with food, physicality, or just sheer fun to look upon. Masters at work is not just a beautiful thing, but it’s one of those things that I love so much.

So to all you guys shooting to be experts, it’s not just what you do, but how you do it. And that’s my appreciation the things that have brought us here together as listeners and even me as the voice. I don’t take attribution to this as much as it flows. And ultimately, what we’re here for, collectively together are to not only just take ideas to places that we traditionally don’t look at them, but to find ways to incorporate them into our process. Sometimes the bulk of the information that we’re asking for is already alive and vital living within our blind spots, but we’re so prejudiced to our own beliefs and processes and hopes and expectations that we don’t look what already exist and utilize the power that that can have in any given moment.

So in today’s episode, it’s an extension of a previous one I just did smelling the roses. And I don’t want to say this is one of the ways in which I do, but it’ll give you an insight into a little bit how I think, and it may plant a few seeds or create an opportunity for you to reach that similar place. So without further ado, like let’s get a mind right. Take a few deep breaths. Grab a PIN pad. Take some notes.

In the introduction, I mentioned that this episode is an extension of a previous episode where we talked about the sheer simplicity of smelling the roses. I want to go a little bit deeper and beyond, not necessarily as a how to but a reflection of one of the processes that I do on a yearly basis to cultivate that feeling, to cultivate that feeling of like sincere appreciation of progress. A lot of times we we look back into the past, and we walk through and peruse the garden of the past to cultivate feelings of self condemnation. What I am implying or suggesting is that we peruse the garden of our past and those delicate memories that we’ve accumulated as opportunities to rejoice.

An exercise that I participate in each year is I go to a downloaded file on my hard drive, and it’s something I. It that was revolutionary at its time, something that seemed light years ahead of what anybody else considered possible. Yet today, we’ve we’ve gone even beyond that. And that thing that I look at each year is Steve Jobs, 2007 presentation of the iPhone. Now I’m about to play a few clips for you from that presentation, so you can get a sense of what I’m talking about. How radically transformative things can be how much they can speak to the needs, the feelings, the demands, the imaginations of a moment.

Yet we can allow time to proceed, yet forgive the revolutionary Ness. Yes, that is a new word that our past answered. And as we continue to progress and move forward and develop in advance, that sense of awe the magic of what we had live sometimes evaporates. So let’s listen to a few of these clips, and I’ll be back on the other end.

Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything. Well today we’re introducing three revolutionary products of this class. The first one is a widescreen iPod with touch controls. The second is a revolutionary Mobile Command and the third is a breakthrough internet communications device. So three things, a widescreen iPod with touch controls, a revolutionary mobile phone and a breakthrough internet communications device, an iPod, a phone and an Internet communicator. An iPod, a phone. Are you getting it? These are not three separate devices. This is one device, and we are calling it iPhone today. Apple is going to reinvent the phone. We’re going to show you a software, breakthrough, software that’s at least five years ahead of what’s on any other phone. IPhone runs OS 10. I’m an artist right now, well, how do I scroll through my list of artists? How do I do this? I just take my finger and I scroll.

That day, Steve Jobs was right. Phones were forever changed, to the point now is it even fair to consider it just the phone? If you heard in the audio, you heard these really authentic cheers and and screams and in fits of joy as features once only imagined, and honestly, probably not imagined up to that point yet by the most of US, but these leading edge engineers, software developers, programmers brought it to that stage that day, and while I pulled together just a few clips throughout that whole presentation, I am constantly struck by all The features that have become so commonplace that received the same, if not more, cheers, scrolling through the contacts, watching movies on the phone, watching YouTube on the phone, the internet.

In a non text based browser. The reason I wanted to share this episode, the primary reason I want to share this episode is because so often our minds fall into a mode of comparison that looks at where we are and where we want to be and we feel an absence or emptiness or incompletion. The sun is always chasing a horizon. If we use that future point to say where we’re not we’ll never be there like the rainbow and the leprechaun. It will always evade us. But if we stop, if we turn around and we look how far we’ve come, we can begin to appreciate how far we’ve come and what we had to solve to get to this point.

Because one of the tenets that invigorates me is understanding that even this point here, that I’m living right now was once a dream. And so to the fearless the adventurers and explorers, those leading on, living on a leading edge, thank you for your contribution that has got us thus far, and thank you for the imagination that will continue to propel us forward. I’m not sure what your version of this Steve Jobs iPhone announcement is in your life, if it’s looking through a photo album, if it’s finding that letter that you wrote in your elementary about what you wanted to be when you grew up, it’s relishing this journey now we sit in 2019 2020, 2021, whenever you decide to listen to this, and our phones are now bona fide tanks.

It’s a megapixel. War, it’s a camera. War, it’s a screen war. It’s a foldable, it’s an artificial intelligence. But let’s not forget how far we have come in such a short period of time. I hope you got something out of this. I hope you can find ways to savor the progress, to relish the distance that you’ve come so far. It’s hard to believe that at one point we were all just a blank canvas and a dream, as J Cole would say, just $1 and a dream, we can make anything. So until next time, I’m Rahim Rasul, thank you for listening, thank you for caring, thank you for showing up and thank you for consistently coming back.

Make sure you go to iTunes, subscribe, rate and review. You could also do that on Spotify. I think we’re on Pandora as well as long as well as Google podcast. Subscribe, rate and review, share with a friend. The more who knows, the more we grow, and we Definitely want to do that. So until next time, peace,