Why Are You Waiting with Jim Hacking 492

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What if you knew the day that you were going to die? What if you gave your life your best shot because you knew that your time was limited? What would you do differently? What would you change in your law firm? Who would you call to make sure you talked to today? 

In today’s episode, we’re sharing a presentation from Max Law Con 2022, where Jim gives his talk – “Why are you waiting?” Which encourages you to live today with the mindset of your finite time and asking the important question of how would you change what you do today? 

How would that encourage you to make decisions and say “No.” to certain things? How would it make you step up and say “Yes!” to other things a lot  quicker. What is important to you? 

Listen to this episode and be encouraged to move forward fearlessly. 

Episode Highlights:

2:00 Being present and in the moment

7:20 Let’s talk about saying yes and how every decisions is effected

9:30 We are a limited amount of time — Suppose this is the last year? the last day?  What would you do and who would you call? Why would you not do it today?

Remember that everything you are doing is important but remember that you only have one shot at your business, your life, your family  so give it your all and make it the best that you can. 

🎥 Watch the full video on YouTube. 

Jim’s Hack: Read Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

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Transcript: Why Are You Waiting with Jim Hacking

Unknown Speaker
In today’s episode, we’re sharing a presentation from Max law con 2020. To keep listening to hear Jim hacking as we share his talk, why are you waiting, you can also head to the maximum lawyer YouTube channel to watch the full video. Now let’s get to it.

Jim Hacking
Start close in. Don’t take the second step, or the third, start with the first thing close in the step you don’t want to take. Start with the ground you know, the pale ground beneath your feet, your own way to begin the conversation. Start with your own question. Give up on other people’s questions. Don’t let them smother something simple.

Unknown Speaker
To hear another’s voice, follow your own

Jim Hacking
voice. To hear another’s voice. Follow your own voice. Wait until that voice becomes a private ear that can really listen to another. Start right now. Take a small step you can call your own. Don’t follow someone else’s heroics. Be humble and focused, start close in, don’t mistake that other for your own.

Unknown Speaker
Start close in, don’t take the second step, or the third, start with the first thing close in the step you don’t want to take. That’s a poem by David White. And I

Jim Hacking
share it with you today to encourage all of us for the next two days, to be present to be here in the moment, with your friends, with your colleagues, all yearning to improve, all wanting to get better. I love this picture of Tiger Woods. If you can see, everybody is filming with their phones, except for the one fellow with a beer in his hand. He’s in the moment. He’s enjoying it. So I just put my phone away, I would encourage you to the extent that you can to put your phone away as much as you can, during this conference, I want you to be right here.

Unknown Speaker
Right now.

Jim Hacking
This is really, really hard to do all the time. It’s especially hard to do in 2022. And we can spend a lot of our time reminiscing on the past, I heard once that people with depression are focused on the past, and people with anxiety are focused on the future. So I encourage you, not just today, but throughout the conference. And as you leave, too. Don’t be asking yourself remember that one time, or thinking about wait until I get over there. My daughter Nora is famous for saying what are we going to do tomorrow?

Unknown Speaker
What are we going to do tomorrow. And I have found myself

Jim Hacking
sometimes doing what I call pre emptive living like getting so ready for tomorrow. That’s good. It’s good to plan. But we lose sight of the fact of being in the moment of being where we are. And so I think we have to operate on two tracks. The first track is looking to the future, and doing all the things that you’re going to hear about for the next few days about trying to improve things. But there is a real place for space, and to be here. Now this is gonna be a theme you’re going to hear throughout the conference. For me, one of the things that have really helped me with that is meditation. So most days, I’ll wake up in the morning early, and I’ll meditate just for 10 or 12 minutes. There are apps for that headspace is great. There are other free you can do all the free meditation in the world. And it’s really, really helped me to stay in the moment and to be a lot more grounded. And a lot Schiller, when riding that roller coaster of owning a law firm. One of the people that I’ve learned from is a guy named Jack Kornfield. And during my meditation, one of the things that he encouraged us to do is to just listen to what comes into our brain. When you’re quiet. You have lots of thoughts. And instead of chasing after those thoughts, you can name it. You can just say, oh, that’s anxiety, or oh, that’s worry, or oh, that’s me thinking about what’s for dinner tomorrow night. Just name it and let it go and just sort of let there be a parade of thoughts as you go through Pema Chodron talks about how thoughts are really just opinions. You know that we are so convinced at times that our thoughts are real and that everything we’re saying is 100% gospel fact, when in reality most things are just an opinion, and things that we think in our lives that are the worst things ever turned out to be really great for us, and vice versa. So Jack Kornfield talks about naming those emotions as they come through. So let’s be present together, I’m going to ask everyone to stand up for just a minute.

Unknown Speaker
And we’re going to take three breaths,

Jim Hacking
three breaths. And so let me show you how we’re going to do it. So stand with your, your feet, sort of at shoulder width, and stand straight and tall as if there’s a string in the center of your head, pulling straight up. And we’re going to lace our fingers, I’m going to practice at once, I’ll show you, okay, so I’m going to breathe in, and then pause, and then breathe out. Okay, and we’re going to do this three times. And the first time that we do it, we’re going to be thinking about ourselves, right ourselves. So

Unknown Speaker
we’re going to lace our fingers. Breathe in all the

Jim Hacking
worries, all that stress, all the things that are keeping us up at night, all the things that are making us sad, breathe it in. And breathe out joy and peace and serenity.

Unknown Speaker
Okay, now, for the second time,

Jim Hacking
we’re gonna do this to everyone in the room. And I know that there are people in this room who are suffering, and are having a hard time, and are really trying to do better and be better. And there are people who are sad, we had our mastermind for The Guild yesterday, and there are people who are really struggling, and really sad. So for this breath, we’re going to breathe in for all the suffering in the room. And we’re going to breathe out peace and love and serenity to each of them ready.

Unknown Speaker
All right now, for the last one, we’re going to do it for the world, right. And

Jim Hacking
so we’re going to think of our minds and the space that we’re taking all this in. And we have unlimited capacity to take in all the pain and suffering for the whole world. We’re going to breathe it in here. And then we’re going to breathe it out. And we’re going to send love and peace to all the people in Texas who are suffering everyone across the world who’s sad, who are really having a hard time. Ready. Last one.

Unknown Speaker
In Oh, thank you, everybody. Thanks for indulging me on that. All right. Now, now we’re gonna talk about saying yes, saying yes. And

Jim Hacking
every decision that we make is a sacrifice. Every decision that we make as a sacrifice, when we decide something, we’re deciding against many other choices.

Unknown Speaker
And the word decide comes from the

Jim Hacking
Latin decider, A and side is the important part of that word. And that’s to cut off. So we have words like suicide, homicide, genocide decide. So I really want you to focus on making decisions this week. And it’s okay that every decision that we make, we’re cutting off other opportunities, perhaps forever, when we marry a spouse, we’re saying to the rest of the world, I don’t want to marry you, I want to marry this person. And that makes that relationship that much more important. As business owners and law firm owners, we have to understand that we have limits, we can’t do everything. I really started to love this word finitude, which is the state of having limits or bounds. And there’s a real freedom and power and just acknowledging that we can’t do everything. So you’re going to hear lots of ideas. Over the next few days, you’re going to make pages and pages of list of things to do. I’m going to encourage you to do less, to do less, and to make better decisions. And to spend more time in your thinking chair with your notebook. Figuring shit out, instead of just doing things

Unknown Speaker
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Jim Hacking
We have a limited amount of time we have a limited amount of time as family members,

Unknown Speaker
law firm owners, human beings. I read a great book

Jim Hacking
down in the Dominican Republic this holiday break called 4000 weeks by Oliver Berkman. And that’s about what we get. If you live on average, you get about 4000 weeks. So every week that goes by, you know I’m 52 So I’ve had 52 times 52 weeks. So I think if you read that book, that you’ll see that there’s some really great lessons in there about the power of acknowledging that we don’t have unlimited capacity. So when I grew up, I grew up Catholic. And we spent a lot of time talking about death, a lot of time talking about death. So this was the hallway of the church where I would serve mass. And that little door down there is where you would go in to get ready. And you would have to walk by Jesus every day. And he was like this with his bloody rib. And it was scary as hell. But we talked about death a lot, a lot about death. When I was in fifth grade, or so my father and I, on Easter weekend, we had to take a movie Back to Blockbuster Video. And we were going up the hill from our house. And I said, Dad, did we actually bring the tape I think we might have forgotten it. So he pulled over, we were digging around, it had fallen in the back of the of the back seat. And then we went back up the hill, we got to the hill, the light turned red. And right at this moment, this motorcycle comes flying up the hill. And it hits these two old guys car and it drives the motorcycle came out the trunk. And my dad and I jumped out. And I was like 11. And there’s this dead guy there. Right. So I’ve always been thinking about and close to death. A couple years later, my father was in Lake of the Ozarks at the age of 41. And he had a massive heart attack. He took five nitroglycerin, trying to get his heart rate back. They defy him on the outside of a helicopter up to St. Louis University Hospital. And he had a quintuple bypass back when bypasses like they just stopped using pig vessels. And they just started using his own right. So I saw my dad who was like strong and built decks with by himself and he was just all muscle, he was completely weak as his chest plate was cut open. And so we were always worried about my dad dying. So that was when he was 41. That was in September of 81. In April of, of 82, I started having seizures, my hand would lock and my knees would lock and I would fall down. And then eventually they got worse and worse. And my parents thought that I had a brain tumor. So I spent two weeks in children’s hospital. And nobody knew what was wrong with me. For those of you who’ve heard me speak before, I think it was related to that incident that happened to me when I was a child. And I think that was all sort of psychosomatic stuff, because eventually outgrew it. But for two weeks there, I was getting spinal taps and all kinds of tests. And I thought I was going to die. So that was when I was 12. Later on in life, I changed religions and it became a Muslim. And in the slum, when somebody dies, the family members bury the body, right. And they wrap them in a white shroud. And so when my wife’s father and brother passed away, I participated in that ceremony. And it’s very powerful. It’s very powerful. And in Islam, also you have to get the body in the ground

Unknown Speaker
within the next day. So again, death around

Jim Hacking
wonderful book by a guy named Steven Levine called a year to live he and his wife administered treatment and palliative care to AIDS patients throughout the 80s and 90s. And he wrote this book called a year to live and he asked, suppose this was the last week I suppose this was the last day. Who would you call? What would you say? Why are you waiting? So when I read this book, I thought to myself, Boy, wouldn’t it be interesting if we all came with an expiration date? If we all had on maybe on our heel? Our expiration date if we knew the day that we were going to expire? And then I thought or wouldn’t it be interesting if somebody in a science fictiony kind of way came up with a machine that would tell you when you were going to pass away? Like you would know the date and the one thought I had a result those people would get to go first in line at Disney World, right because they only had a couple of days left. This is my friend Paul pesante. He was a mentor of mine, a lawyer, a law firm owner, very successful gotten multimillion dollar verdicts. On December 8 2014. Paul took his own life. His expiration date was December 8 2014. My wife’s good friend Rhonda Williams was the Assistant General Counsel at a company called SAVVIS. She was on her way downtown. She went out to her car. She was 41 years old, and she dropped dead right in the parking lot. This is Tyson’s old boss at Brown. He also took his life in October of 2020. So Tyson and I both have bosses and mentors who ended up taking their own life. Molly Bowman was a classmate of my wife and mine. And on my birthday, my 40th birthday, she sent me a message on Facebook at around 415 In the afternoon, wishing me a happy birthday and she said I hope this is your best year yet. So for those of you who I’ve wished Happy Birthday to, I always say I hope this is your best year yet because of Molly. About an hour later she has a quick trip I’m filling up her car with gas and some guy hopped up on any freezer something ran her over, and she died on her way to go pick up her kids from daycare. This last fall, Randy Gauri was the year behind me in law school. He was a multi multimillionaire

Unknown Speaker
offense, bestest litigation.

Jim Hacking
They named the whole lobby of the law school after him, he was younger than me. And two years ago, right after New Year’s, some crazy guy came into his house and killed him in front of his kid.

Unknown Speaker
And this is my dad. So

Jim Hacking
I do think that sometimes I work out some of my issues on stage. So I apologize for that. But this is my dad. And I told you, my dad had that heart attack in 1981, he lived another 40 years. And when I gave his eulogy last year, I was really grateful for the fact that we had received another 40 years with my dad, I mean, to think that his bypass lasted 40 years is unbelievable. And my dad had been sick. He had turned 80 in June. And luckily, we all got to tell him how much we loved him. I had everyone in the family wrote him a poem or a story about him. And we all read it to him. And then, as he got closer to death, the day before he died, and all of his kids, all of his grandkids, except for two, who attended by FaceTime, we all got to talk to him throughout the day, he was awake and asleep, awake and asleep. And he passed away the next day,

Unknown Speaker
at the age of 80. And

Jim Hacking
that was a really beautiful thing. And I hope that we all get that opportunity. Which brings me to the fact that we all have our own expiration date. And I’m trying not to be too morbid, but I did do something. So my sister Omer and I randomly generated dates in the future. And you have a date in the future, you don’t have to open it. I suggest you might not want to open it. But there is a date in the envelope in front of you. You can choose to open it, you can choose not to open it, I’m pretty sure and hopeful that the dates aren’t correct, right. But we did some in the next 20 years, some of the next 30 years and some of the next 40 or 50 years. So I offer that to you as a simple thought experiment, to remember that everything we’re doing is important, but we only have one shot at this life. So I want you to do everything you can to build the best practice, build the best life, build the best family that you can, and love everyone that you come across. Thanks, everybody.