Pizza Challenge: Can You Eat an Entire 24" Pizza?

Welcome to another episode of Halftime Talks. My name is Rahim Rasul, and you’re listening to the podcast that recognizes that in the military 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 it’s gonna take to win the game.

I appreciate you guys rocking with us for another episode. Make sure you go check out our whole catalog. These are evergreen episodes, meaning that the content doesn’t get time dated, and you can benefit from checking it out. And so in the spirit of appreciation, I couldn’t think of a better way to begin today. I want to truly appreciate it’s a concept, but a concept that I’m sure we can all appreciate the yin and the yang of things, the complimentary parts, the pieces that fit in, the grooves that are exposed for every question as the answer. Husband have wife friends have friends. It’s these two things that come together that sometimes appear as the opposites, but ultimately, work better together.

Come on, we have it. Peanut butter and jelly. Come on, we have so many milk and cereal, these things that fit together and form a synergy that will be otherwise impossible without each other. And I appreciate that. I appreciate that from the love of my life, the things I love in life, and the things that really ultimately magnify me. I like to think that we have a really good episode on hand today. I know you’ve seen the title and you’re asking yourself, What does this pizza challenge have to do with anything? But in life, sometimes we bite off a little bit more than we can chew, and we see some obstacles that are impediments on the way to everything that we want to be and we have to understand that in order to get there, you got to go through some things that are a little bit outside of your scope of comprehension.

And so in this episode, we are going to dive in hopefully share some ideas that will make you think a little bit different. So in the meantime, I need you guys to strap in your seat belts. I need you to get your mind right and your body right. If you need to take some notes, be a mental notes, just prepare, because it only takes one idea to set off a cascading revolution. Here we go. The one thing that I love so much about this podcast is that, you know, you guys buy into the world view that I construct, just like a movie. You can suspend that disbelief and just play along.

And this is one of those lighthearted, cool, cool idea episodes where you just suspend your disbelief long enough to to gain the lesson or the insight which I want to provide. So the first thing I’m going to ask you to do is construct that image of that moonshot that you want to create in the world, that big blue sky project that’s been sitting on the back burner only there’s been a challenge, and that challenge is the resource, that resource that stands in the way that, if it were solved, it could expedite its creation. Now also for a second, imagine I was a magical genie, and I could just grant the wish of the user, and now that roadblock no longer exists.

So But guess what? I have a I have a I have a contingency, and there’s a cost, playfully, I want you to to eat a 24 inch pizza in order to do it, and it’s all yours. But there’s a few rules that I have. A few stipulation is, is you have to eat it in one city, and you can’t leave this room without eating the pizza, and also, if you regurgitate it, you’re lost. So now you’re faced with this dilemma, how do I approach this? Is this impossible? How do I go about I’ve never eaten this much. I’m not a world class eater. These are some of the things that begin to go across your mind, like, how do I consume what appears to be an impossible task?

Do I try to. Head straight on into the fire and see what I have or do I have to think differently. So how many times in our life are we faced with an impossible task, something that we can’t conceptually wrap our minds around it. In this case, wrap our mouth around a 24 inch pizza. Typically, we see 12 inch this piece is enough to feed a family, and I’m asking you to eat it in one sitting. And then suddenly, the light bulb moment hits, and we say to ourself the name of a childhood story or a phrase and an anecdote we’ve heard so many times before.

The question goes, How do you eat a 24 inch pizza, or more commonly put, how do you eat an elephant? We eat it one bite at a time. I didn’t say how long it would need to take to finish it that wasn’t within the rules. And sometimes the way that we frame the rules of the game of our life is that we create these assumptions. The assumption is that you need to hurry up and eat it, or you need to eat it in one continuous motion. You’re allowed to take breaks, but you’re also allowed to consume it over a longer duration of time than mentally you would give your permit yourself permission to initially, we look at these tasks and we tell ourselves, man, that’s too big.

But ultimately, think about it, you’ve probably eaten more pizza than just a 24 inch pizza this year. And guess what? You weren’t asked to do it immediately. You could take your time with it. And that’s one of the misconceptions that we have about the goals. The big goals is that we can chunk it out into sections, consume what we can consume, do what we can do in the meantime, and follow up and keep showing up and keep showing up and keep showing up till that whole dream is accomplished. Now that level of impatience, that level of impatience that says it should already be done, or it shouldn’t take this long, or I can’t see beyond the impossibility of this, and I need it now, dissuades us from what we can accomplish in the long run.

And I’ve said this on a previous episode before, but Bill Gates has famously said, and I want to say is credited with Bill Gates, people tend to underestimate what they can accomplish in the long run and overestimate what they think they can get done in the short term. It’s not just about big goals. It’s not just about goals that might seem impossible, but long term goals are great. These big goals are great because in aiming high, we challenge ourselves to see beyond the assumptions that had previously held us back. Now the smaller goals can be can be completed in shorter intervals. But the long term goals have to be broken down into a subset of smaller goals.

And that’s the beauty of small goals like that, because it comes with their own advantages. It gives you something concretely to focus upon. All I have to do is do this within this segment, set the next stage up within that segment. And guess what? That big capstone project, that big vision project, which I spoke about at the beginning, that is how you accomplish it. There isn’t this one humongous obstacle standing in our way. And if there is, that obstacle is our self, not only just ourself, but our beliefs and assumptions that we have about what it’s going to take as we give our goal. And our big ideas and the big projects, the time allotted that it may require, and break it down into the smaller subsets.

Everything is accomplishable. I’ve seen it. One of my goals is to transcribe over 1617, journals that I’ve written over the past 1212, plus years. My goal is mid 2019, and if I attack it bit by bit, it’s no longer inconceivable, incomprehensible. It becomes probable. It not only becomes probable, it becomes inevitable. So when I ask you the question, can you eat a 2224 inch pizza, while your initial answer may have been, I don’t think so. I hope now you’ve activated the muscle within your mind that lets you know not only is it probable and possible, but it’s inevitable. So good luck to you begin to change the way that you see these big elephants or these big projects, and understand that it’s your approach, it’s the way that you see it which is separating you from acquiring it.

So thank you. My name is Rahim Rasul peace. If you enjoyed this episode, you should also check out Episode 113, underperforming voice in episode number 114, mediocrity, monster. Our entire library is available on our website, halftimetalks.net as well as the iTunes podcast library. While you’re on there, do us a favor, SUBSCRIBE and leave a review. Not only would we love it, but it would also make our podcast more findable, discoverable for other people, like you who can gain benefit from the podcast. So until next time, go out there in the second half of the game and play to win peace. PS, make sure you tune in next week where we’re going to be talking about, God bless the BS. You.