This week Bill Hughes continues his interview of Ray. Ray explains more about the luckiest people in the world. He shares how meeting new people continues to inspire him and the excitement of interviewing them on our podcast weekly. He also shares some of his stories from his travels and discusses some of the life lessons he learned from them. Find out more about what The Luckiest People in the World community is all about. Don't forget about our upcoming Friends Connection event coming up on November 6th, tickets are on sale now.
Guest Co-host: Bill Hughes: w.hughes@verizon.net
Transcription:
Kris Parsons00:02
Welcome to changing the rules, a weekly podcast about people who are living their best life and how you can figure out how to do it too. Join us with your lively host Ray Loewe, better known as the luckiest guy in the world.
Ray Loewe00:15
Good morning, everybody, and welcome again to changing the rules, changing the rules as a podcast where we try and showcase some of the luckiest people in the world. And remember, the luckiest people in the world are those people who take control of their own lives, design them to their own specs, and then live them under their own terms. And in the process of doing that, they take all those rules that they've been saddled with all their lives and revamp them a little bit so that they can make them work for them and not be restrictions and impediments to the life they want to live. So last week, we started doing something a little different. We have a co-host, co-host, Bill who's and say, Hi, Bill, hello, okay, and Bill decided to turn the tables on me last time. And he decided to interview me as opposed to letting me interview him. And we ran out of time because evidently, I have more to say than anybody wants to listen to. And, and so we're going to continue this week. So uh so Bill is a life planning consultant. That's not a good word to describe him, but it kind of does the best that we can. He is a coach, and he helps people revamp their lives and make themselves feel luckier and luckier. So Bill, thanks for joining us. And it's your show. So I'm, I'm at your mercy.
Bill Hughes01:50
Oh, that's good to know. Even though somehow rather, I think the tables will end up getting turned once again. I guess, continuing on in part two of this. Something has been coming up more and more frequently is this whole notion of changing the rules? So what rules can we be changing?
Ray Loewe02:10
Well, the rules you change are the rules that don't fit you. Okay? You know, rules do two things. They tell you what you have to do. And they tell you what you can't do. Okay, now, some of these rules are pretty good. Okay. You know why I thought this idea of quarantine during the heat of COVID was a pretty good idea. I mean, I don't I didn't want to go out there and catch it. So when somebody told me that was the rule, I decided that was my rule. But you know, there, there were some rules that were set up when we were back in elementary school that I've rejected over time, I had a teacher once upon a time who set a rule for me, and she said, Ray, you're gonna do fine in life, just spend a lot of time correcting your mistakes and your weaknesses. Okay, right. And guess what I did that for a while I accepted that as one of my rules. And I wound up with a whole lot of really strong weaknesses. But they never really improved, like my strengths did. So one of the roles I changed is, you kind of ignore your weaknesses, and you build on your strengths, and you ally yourself with other people who are really good at the things that you were not so good at. So the whole idea is you got to look at what works for you. And you got to look at what you're going to accept in what you're not going to accept.
ill Hughes03:33
So that gets to the whole notion of really changing mindset. It Yeah, it's this, this idea that, that you go along to get along, and then all of a sudden, one day, you realize that that's not in your best interest. I mean, even with the example that you gave, one of the things that people could, and I believe actually did do during the shutdown, and all the restrictions that were imposed on us, wasn't it, it caused us to become more introspective. And in that process, their mindset changed. How did yours change?
Ray Loewe04:13
Okay, well, let me give you an example of that. And one of the things that COVID did to us is said, Oh, we can't go out and meet with each other. Well, I missed that a lot. Okay, one of the things that seems to drive me that makes me happy and being happy is one of the mindsets of the luckiest people in the world, is that I like to go out and talk to people on a regular day on a regular basis. I need the feedback that other people give me, I need them to challenge me. I need to know what are they doing that I might want to steal from them and do too, okay. So one of the things that we did is we had Virtual coffee and cocktails. And it's still going on and every Thursday morning, a group of us that can be as few as three or four, or as many as 10 or 12. And we have a conversation now we just find out what other people's view of the world is. And we never know who's going to show up. And we do that for cocktails.
Bill Hughes05:23
And the interesting thing about that is that invariably, somebody shows up, that has an interesting story.
Ray Loewe05:31
Always. And, and, and it is amazing to me that it comes out of the woodwork. You know you sit there and you say, Oh, you know, it's gonna be boring, and they're never boring because people are never boring. And if you think about your friends, you think about the fact that all of a sudden, you're shut off from them, and you can't talk to them, and you can't reap the joy that they bring you. You got to do something. So we changed the rules.
Bill Hughes06:03
And then the other interesting thing about that, that I really appreciate is the fact that the randomness of it, the random folks that show up, you know, being locked away for a period of time, really, you don't realize how grateful we need to be with some of the random occurrences of people that come into our lives, and have the opportunity to change things. And so that that really gets to the whole notion of this community that we're building.
Ray Loewe06:34
Well, hopefully, okay, so let's back up again, a little bit, let's, let's talk about these podcasts that we're doing. Okay. One of the things about the podcast, again, is it's a question of bringing people into your lives, that have different mindsets and different ways of thinking about things. And you don't have to like everything they say. And you don't even have to listen to everything that they say but if you take the time to be observant at all of a sudden, you find out that there are a whole lot of people out there doing exciting things that maybe you want to do. Remember, last week, we talked about the barrier that you have of people expanding their lives and, and that some people just never wanted to leave their job because there was a comfort level, right. And a lot of that is because they didn't have the opportunity to talk to some of these people that are just doing incredibly interesting things. Okay. And when you do have the opportunity to do that, all of a sudden your life becomes fulfilled you steal things from other people.
Bill Hughes07:41
Borrow, I like the word borrow.
Ray Loewe07:44
Well, borrow is temporary, and there's nothing temporary about this.
Bill Hughes07:48
You're not gonna get it back, you're not going to get it back.
Ray Loewe07:50
Once I get an idea from you, Bill is gone. Right?
Bill Hughes07:54
Well, what makes you think mine aren't borrowed from somewhere else?
Ray Loewe07:57
Well, they probably are, and what's wrong with that. And the whole idea is that there are exciting things to do out there. So my wife, Sandy, and I decided early in the game that we wanted to do some traveling, as we got more time and I was able to step away from the financial planning business. And, you know, we started with a short bucket list. You know, we wanted to spend some time in Europe, we wanted to go down to South America a little bit. But the next thing we know is we're meeting people on these trips. And we met somebody who had been in Antarctica well guess what, we've been Antarctica now and up close and personal with a whole lot of penguins. And then you sit there and you say, Okay, I haven't been to Australia yet. And you talk to people that you meet along the way and they tell you how great a trip this is. And then the next thing you do is you incorporate it into your life. So people are really, really important part of being lucky, in my opinion.
Bill Hughes09:08
The other thing that you mentioned that I always brings back the story of the penguins, for sure. But it goes to something deeper because why don't you real quickly share that penguin story for a second for those that might not have heard it.
Ray Loewe09:23
Well, there are life lessons that occur on these adventures if you open yourself to them. And if you look, we were in Antarctica and Antarctica is an expedition type of trip and you're on a ship and you're based on a ship and what you do is usually early in the morning you get up and you get on a Zodiac and you go to some point on land and then you see things like penguins or whales or in some cases people that are stationed there and then you come back and you have lunch and you take a nap and you go out again in the afternoon and you can do this because it's light 24 hours a day, okay? So you're not impeded by anything. And most people took every one of these excursions because it's a pricey trip, you're going a long way. And one day, there was a couple we had dinner with the night before. And we noticed they weren't on the morning excursion. And I caught them at noon at lunch. And I said to where were you guys? And it was kind of a sheepish grin on people. And they said, Well, we looked at the hill, we had to walk up today to see the penguins we were supposed to see. And we didn't think we could make it so we didn't go. And I did this doubletake. I mean, that surprised me. And I didn't have to say another thing. And they came back and they said, Well, we made a mistake, we waited too long to take this trip.
Bill Hughes10:59
Yeah, that really that that that that particular life lesson, so to speak, I know had a big impact on you going even in this direction, because how many people that you worked within retirement planning that were putting things off until they had enough money?
Ray Loewe11:18
Yeah, and that's the tendency, you know, I'll do that after I retire, when I have more money and when I have more time. And the lesson that I learned here is that you're sometimes waiting until you have enough money means that you're not going to be able to do something that you really wanted to do. And the same is true with time. You know, unfortunately, this process called aging, which by the way, I think is the ultimate life sport is aging. Okay. And it does things to you, you know uh people have a stroke people get conditions, and they no longer can do things that they want to do. And part of feeling lucky is to head off regrets it's to head them off early. And to say, what are the things that if I didn't get a chance to do I would, it would bother me.
Bill Hughes12:14
Right, but that gets back to your list again to and taking the introspective time necessary to kind of figure out what, for lack of a better term what your bucket list is.
Ray Loewe12:24
Okay, so let's, let's take a minute and talk about planning here because there's no substitute to sitting down and spending some time planning. And I think the planning has to be kind of a quarterly thing. And it only has to take an hour or two each quarter, it doesn't have to be long. But somewhere you got to sit down, and you got to say, okay, based on what I know, now, based on my experiences, what do I want to do, okay, and make the list and you start figuring out what's important, what you're going to do and what you're going to put off doing. The second part of that option is to talk to a whole lot of people or read or do research of some kind, and start to figure out what are the things that you never thought you might do that might all of a sudden become interesting, and you add them to your bucket list so that your life keeps expanding, it gets larger and larger and larger the day you start to see your life get smaller, you're going the wrong way, you know, and this is like, you've got to grow and to be happy and to be content. And the day you start pulling in the horns is not a good thing.
Bill Hughes13:35
Right? Well, and that that gets back to going back in time a bit to some of the things that you've encountered. And one of those things that you encountered along that pathway was a coaching operation called Strategic Coach
Ray Loewe13:49
It had a very significant offer on a very significant part of my life. So uh So let me tell you another story. So we sat around, we used to go to Chicago every three months, and we'd sit around in a coaching group and we had a coach who would teach us some things, but the biggest thing that you got out of it is we had 35-40 people that showed up every time and you had discussions with them. So I'm sitting there with a guy sitting next to me who's a real realtor. And he declares that he's going to run a marathon and like a dummy. I said, Okay, you finish your marathon, I will go back to competitive swimming, which I had dumped for 30 years after college By the way, and I will win a national championship. Now I have no idea where that came from, except that I figured this guy would never finish this marathon. Well, to make a long story short, he finished the marathon and I had to go back and redo this part of my life. Now that was one of those life events that changed where you go because swimming right now is part of my regiment it's trying to stay in shape, trying to stay healthy, is part of that goal of reaching maybe 100. And whether I actually reached 100 or not, is maybe not relevant. But I want to have that in my mind. Like, that's part of what I want to do and, and the only way you're going to do that is to physically stay in shape and take care of things.
Bill Hughes15:31
And well there was more involved in it than that, too, because I know that even though people say swimming is like riding a bicycle, once you've learned it, you don't forget about it. At the end of the day, competitive swimming is another whole ballgame. So how did you go about the research necessary? And what steps did you end up taking a day to get yourself in shape to take care of that?
Ray Loewe15:55
I hate to work out, you have to understand that I am a potato chip and ice cream guy on the couch in front of the TV. And if I were left to what, you know, just felt comfortable during the day, that's what I would do. The fact that I decided to do this is the only way I'm going to do this is to mouth off, and then have accountability coaches. And you know, the value of an accountability coach when you say you're going to do something and you got somebody who's going to get on your case, if you don't, right, right. And, and the other thing that I did I know that I knew that I had to do was I had to go out and hire a coach, I wasn't going to do this on myself. So I actually found a kid's group. And I wound up working out with the 12 and 13-year-olds who I can barely keep up with, by the way. Right? Right. Okay. And you get that support group and, and again, that's part of a community about feeling lucky and being lucky. You have to have others involved with this if it's gonna make it work. So anyway, that's what happened and he every year, every five years, you become the baby and your age group, you get a competitive advantage because my wife wanted to travel and you can't work out with the same intensity when you're on the Nile River in Egypt. I would not want to swim in the Nile for anything, okay? And so you change the rules, and you figure out what's going to work for you to allow you to do those things that are important to you.
Bill Hughes17:36
Right, well, you know, that gets back to this whole thing too, because I know we spent quite a bit of time talking about getting things off the list as well as on the list and making sure that things get done before you can't do them. But you had another story to that kind of interested me it was I guess your trip to Africa and your plane ride.
Ray Loewe17:58
Oh, the plane that was not going to make it.
Bill Hughes18:01
Yeah, right. It was a 1940s vintage plane.
Ray Loewe18:05
Well yeah, you know, again, this is part of what you get if you keep your mind and your eyes open. And it took somebody else to pull this story out of me. But the fact is we're on a safari and I was excited about this and I think Sandy was excited and apprehensive about it because we're going to Africa we're going to see leopards and lions and rhinos and they're going to be up close personal so when we had to fly into Johannesburg to do this and we fly in a normal airliner you know we get there we're wandering around the terminal to get to meet our group and as we walk down the concourse, Sandy looks out the window and there's this old plane sitting there and the old plane is pretty old. And she says I hope that's not our plane that that that planes too old to fly it should be retired. So needless to say, we meet our group and the first thing our guide says is she says, Let me introduce you to your aircraft. And she points to this point. And she says, this plane flew magnificent missions during World War Two and we figure uh oh it all over you know, we're gonna die on this trip. And later she said this plane was commissioned in 1941, the year before we were born. But here's the end result of this the aircraft was repurposed. It was repurposed to do a job and it was repurposed based on its strengths. It was never going to fly across country or across the ocean anymore. Okay. But it was a wonderful plane for taking a small group of us and being able to see all the scenery below us. It was able to land in small spots. And we were told later that it could fly on one engine if it had to. And it could land on no engines if it had to. And the end result when we got back is the plane did a great job of doing what it was supposed to do. Now, I'm sitting in Chicago, talking to a friend of mine later, and kind of telling the story. And she said, you know, what a great parable, if you think about it as a parable, because here was an airplane that was, should have been retired. In Sandy's words it should have been retired, it was old, you know, what's it going to do anymore, but somebody looked at his strengths. And somebody said, you know, you can rebuild this, you can repurpose it, and this plane could have additional life. And that is so true of the luckiest people in the world, too. And they do this, they sit there and instead of saying, My life is over, I've reached a certain age, and I'm just going to coast, they look at what are the strengths in their lives that they had? How can they be repurposed? How can they still have a mission in life? And how can they still bring value to other people? And actually, that meeting in Chicago took that story, and it made it have meaning to me. And there's a wonderful part of my life.
Bill Hughes21:21
Well, you know, the thing is that it gets back to the fact that even if you think you, you can't, you, maybe you can, but the process is getting there working through some of the strange things that you can contribute back. I mean, we, the lady, the cupcake lady with is a great example of that. I mean, for all intents and purposes, wants to tell that a little bit.
Ray Loewe21:43
Yeah, again, one of our podcasts was a young lady by the name of Ruth. And Ruth had a major life event, she had a very strange kind of stroke, it was a stroke that occurred kind of paralyzed her in the back. And one day, she's down at the beach, and she's having a great day, and the next day, she can't move. And after months and months of rehab, and realizing she can't do her job anymore. Unlike others who would give up, Ruth sat down and said, What do I love to do, and what can I still do, and she loved to cook and bake. And she limited herself to muffins, soups, etc, she started a small catering business on her own, okay, and she took she repurposed her life, she's bringing value to people, she's making a living, you know, she's still got some ups and downs, figuring out where she's going and stuff like that. But again, it's this whole concept of, you don't have to give up when you get a certain age, you can still be good at something. And in some cases, you can actually be the best there ever was, right? Because we get rid of the junk,
Bill Hughes22:58
right? But that's a great example of the people that show up on those calls, for sure. And many of the people you individually isolate and identify and bring into the podcast. So I think that that that's really, the value of this community is expanding beyond what you might be, if you're a natural introvert, you know, being able to, to get additional focus, and begin to ask those questions.
Ray Loewe23:27
Yeah, and, and, you know, part of what we're doing here, what we're trying to do is start with the podcast and say, you know these are 20-25 minutes long, occasionally go longer or a little shorter. But the idea is, meet somebody who is happy with their status and life who's going forward, regardless of their age, okay? And take a listen to it and say, Is this me? Are there things in here that I can use that would motivate me, and help them or use them to help expand your life and where you're going, and we do one of these a week I, I'll tell you a Bill, they're the most motivating things in the world. For me, when I get done with one of these interviews, I am so excited, I can't sit down for a while. Absolutely, and, and coffee and cocktails. And then the other event that we're trying to do is we're trying to do some Friends Connection events periodically.
Bill Hughes24:22
And we have one coming up. And we have one coming up.
Ray Loewe24:26
And we're going to have coffee together at a roastery of one of our friends and members. And he's going to show us how he roast coffee. And more important though, it's a chance to sit there and talk to people that we haven't seen face to face for a while. Right? And we got terminated from a trip that we're going to take to Greece before this COVID thing that we'll be back because again, the whole idea is how can we meet exciting people, whether we know them already or they're new or their a friends of friends, and use their database use their experience to expand our lives. And that's what this is all about. The whole idea is to live life to the fullest, to feel great about it to be happy to know that you're bringing value to other people. And that's the mission of what we're trying to do. And so join the luckiest people in the world.
Bill Hughes25:25
Absolutely. Thanks, Ray, yeah
Ray Loewe25:27
We're done.
Bill Hughes25:28
We're done for the time being.
Ray Loewe25:31
Okay, so we're gonna come back next week. And Bill is still going to be our co-host. We're going to have a different guest, hopefully, next week and we're going to get a different, luckiest person in the world. And we're going to get their perspective on life and where they're going, and we're going to see what we can steal. Absolutely. All right. So Taylor, sign us off, and we'll see you all next week.
Kris Parsons25:56
Thank you for listening to changing the rules, a weekly podcast about people who are living their best life, and how you can figure out how to do that too. Join us with your lively host of Ray Loewe, better known as the luckiest guy in the world.