Creating Your Own Reality

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It used to bother me when people would say things like “Tim is in a world all to himself” or “Tim lives in a fantasy world” or “He’s always so lucky, but some day his luck will change”.   Up until the point those comments started bothering me, I really did live in a fantasy world and in my fantasy world every fantasy I dreamed came true starting in High School.  You see everything in my life was created in a thought or a dream so when I had great thoughts and great dreams that is exactly what my world was made of, when I started listening to people make comments like I mentioned earlier, I started thinking that maybe they were right, the minute I started thinking that way, I got exactly what I was thinking of.

I have spent alot of time analyzing my 51 years of life here on Planet Earth, especially with the trials and tribulations of the past three years.  I had to find out why 48 years were about as perfect as a life could be and then the last 3 years were as ugly as life could be.  I say ugly only because they were so dramatically different then the first 48, while it wasn’t great it was a lesson I needed to remind me about how powerful our thoughts are and why it is so important to create your life as you want it and not by what others may think is right for you.

So let me tell you about the reality I created the last 51 years, including the last three which were also my creation.  Growing up in Crystal, Minnesota I was always fascinated with all the things you could do in life, I wanted to experience everything.  In the fourth grade our class took a field trip to the North Hennepin Post Newspaper, I thought the News paper business was really cool after that visit, so I went home and started my own neighborhood newspaper.  The first paper I created was on a manual typewriter with 5 pages of carbon paper(for those who don’t remember, carbon paper was something you could put between two pages of paper and make a copy of the first by either pressing hard with a pen or typing), because I was trying to make so many copies, my fingers got very sore from trying to slam down the keys so it would go through all 5 copies.   Later, I graduated to a printing press that I found in the Montgomery Ward catalog.  I remember sitting in front of the TV with a TV tray watching the Batman TV show and setting type letter by letter in my little printing press.  It was a fun little operation and I had several subscribers both in the neighborhood and at school who were willing to pay 5 cents a copy.

My next dream come true was when I decided after spending time growing up at the Terrace Theater in Robbinsdale it was time to open my own theater.  I loved the theater business from time my mother started working at the Terrace when I was 2 years old.  I was at the Terrace alot and took my time to learn how they did everything including getting to spend time with the Union Projectionist in the projection booth learning how to run the projectors.  So in the 5th grade, I opened the Hollywood Chief Theater in my basement showing silent films I took out at the public library on my Super 8 projector.  This venture was so succesful that I opened a second theater in my backyard, called the “Bike-In” theater which was created by stringing a large white sheet between two trees and pointing the projector out the back window of our house. 

Moving on to 6th grade, I decided that it was time to get with the latest technology after seeing my favorite disc jockey from my favorite radio station at the State Fair broadcasting live.  You guessed it, I signed on my own radio station WTIM using at first a CB radio and broadcasting the latest top 40 hits so all the kids in the neighborhood could hear them on their walkie talkies.  Later that same year, I found a kit at an electronics store called Lafayette Electronics for an AM Transmitter so I could broadcast on real radio.  The kit was very specific that your antenna should not exceed the 12 inches of wire that came with the kit, well I would have no part of that because I needed the whole neighborhood to hear me so I strung a 50 ft antenna from my house to the highest point I could climb to in one of the trees in our backyard.  I guess this radio empire was the beginning of my mini-media empire, because the next thing I did was buy an FM transmitting microphone from Radio Shack, now I was big time, AM and FM.  But that was just the start, 8-track tape players were all the rage and I was fortunate enough to get an 8-track tape recorder for Christmas that year which led the way for me to open up yet another business I called Sound Dynamics.  Today that business would be highly illegal and would be called Tim’s Pirate music company, I had no idea that I was pirating music by buying a vinyl album, recording it to 8 track and then selling to my friends.  I did quite well with this business adding cassette tapes to my 8 tracks.  So by the time I had graduated 6th grade I was operating 2 radio stations, 2 movie theaters and a record company.

I went to Hosterman Junior High in New Hope Minnesota for my next three years of school.  Alpine skiing was huge back in the 70’s and I loved watching the Olympics and the coverage of skiing including the local ski show hosted by local weatherman Barry Zevan.  I went skiing for my first time in 7th grade and by the end of the first day, I was skiing about as good as most of the people on the hill at Snowcrest ski area in Somerset, Wisconsin.  My dream was to become a ski racer and have all the girls admire me especially petite blondes which I decided was what would be the perfect fit for me.  At that time, Cooper High School had a ski racing team , the High School was for grades 10 to 12 while the junior high was 7 to 9.  I  heard that you could be on the High School ski team if you were good enough in 9th grade so I convinced my friend Steve Banker to try out for the team with me.  Steve and I had skied together quite a bit with the boy scouts, so what the heck, I thought we should give it a try.  And just as I had dreamed it, Steve and I made the ski team as 9th graders and by the time we were in 10th grade we were co-captains of the Cooper High School ski team.  Now you tell me that you can’t create exactly what you want.  I went from never having skied to the captain of the High School team, my first year in High School, pretty powerful life creating powers I had and you have as well.

While I loved sports, the media bug was still in my system so I started a film company to make ski movies.  I learned to ski backwards so I could ski down and look up the hill to film my friends.  I learned how to edit film, sync sound from a cassette recorder and eventually made 3 feature length Super 8 films with sound.  My friends hated my new film company because we would take a trip to Montana or Colorado to ski and I would spend half the time making them film me or letting me film them crashing off jumps and cliffs.  It was quite the deal for a junior high kid and it was exactly as I dreamed it would be.

Once I made it to Cooper High School my thoughts turned to having the greatest High School experience ever.  My favorite TV show was always “Leave it to Beaver” and I always wanted to be just like Wally, so while I continued to ski race, my real passion was Baseball, Blondes and good grades while having the greatest high school experience ever.  I had always loved baseball but was never able to keep up with the star athletes from my junior high days but after buying a book called “Show the Coach” and attending a summer of Baseball Camp, I was the starting 3rd baseman for the Cooper High Junior Varsity team and wouldn’t you know it just as I had dreamed not only was I the starting 3rd baseman but I had the perfect coach in Ted Leuer, who recognized how much attention I paid to playing the game right.  For the next 3 years in high school and 1 year of college I played and enjoyed baseball more than I had ever dreamed of.  But the point is I dreamed it and knew it would happen exactly the way I wanted it to happen and it did.

As for the Blonde, my bride of 30 years plus walked into the Terrace Theater in the Summer of 1974 and I saw the vision of the woman I had always dreamed of.  It took me almost a year to convince her to go out with me but just as I had dreamed and thought about constantly, we went out for 5 years and got married and moved to South Dakota where I had the job I had been dreaming of, I was morning disc jockey and Basketball Color announcer for the radio station.  I was living the dream and things only got better.   I dreamed of waiting about 8 years to have kids and knew that I wanted 1 son and 1 daughter which is exactly what we ended up with.   I won’t bore you with all the details but for the next 20 years, I got the houses I dreamed of, the cars I dreamed, travelled all over the world to every place I ever wanted to go, built multiple companies that I had dreamed of.  I even played a half season of 40 plus baseball.  During those amazing 48 years, I can’t tell you how many times things would happen exactly as I had dreamed they would or thought they would.

So what about the last three years ?  Well, I dreamed about those as well.  Unfortunately, I forgot how powerful my dreams and thoughts were.  I can tell you when it all started, I had paid off everything, I had zero debt, I had a ton of money in the bank, things were going incredible.  I can actually remember the exact moment that my thoughts changed to thoughts of what has happened the last three years.   I was on a Northwest Airlines flight flying from Minneapolis to San Francisco, sitting in First Class enjoying my status and thinking about how fortunate I was to have had all my dreams come true, then a thought popped into my head, a thought like I had never had in my whole life, “What if I lost it all ?” started going through my mind, which was something I never, ever would have even considered.  Things got weird after that thought popped into my mind, about an hour out of San Francisco, the Captain came on the PA system to tell us that the plane had hydraulic problems and we were going to have to make an emergency landing.  The minute I heard that, the thoughts of doom and disaster just got worse.  We dumped fuel and as we landed in San Francisco, fire trucks raced down the runway beside us.  The Captain had done an incredible job of landing the plane and nothing serious happened to anyone but my thoughts of loss grew stronger each day after that event.   As time went on, I noticed I had started to worry about crazy things like the election between Bush and Gore, my thoughts of impending disaster continued to grow leading up to the morning of September 11, 2001 as I sit in my home gym riding my Lifecycle watching Good Morning America as I saw the second plane, crash live on TV into the World Trade Center everything changed and for some reason from that day forward I was never able to get 100% back in the groove.   I had thoughts of my business failing, of losing my home ,of losing my cars and losing everything I had worked for my entire life.  It was at this time that I should have thrown myself into the good stuff like I have for the past 6 months.  I had created my own reality and what I had worried about starting in 2001 came to pass in 2009.  Talk about a wake up call !   Thoughts really do become things and that is why it is so important to choose them carefully.

Today,  I am seeing signs of the thoughts I had six months ago coming true, I dreamed of the perfect opportunities coming my way and sure enough they are, on a daily basis.  But the most important thing I have learned through all of this is that we really do create everything that happens in our lives.  It is easy to create exactly the life you want and it is just as easy to create exactly the life you don’t want.  It’s your choice, choose the good stuff or worry about the bad stuff.  I can tell you I am done with the bad stuff and totally focused on the good stuff including getting in the best physical shape of my life.  It’s kind of funny on this physical shape thing because, I have watched what I have eaten in the past in many attempts to lose some weight but for some reason over the past 9 years it never worked well.  Now that I am back in the “Groove”,  40 pounds has effortlessly dropped from my body primarily because I knew it would and visualized myself being in the best shape of my life for the 35th Class reunion of Cooper High School Class of 1977.  I will have a lot more to report on creating the life I have always wanted to live and boy do I intend to live, for at least another 70 years !  I hope you will consider my story and take some time to thing about the life you want for yourself, think about the good stuff and don’t ever, ever worry about anything bad.  Speaking of the Cooper High School Class of 1977, it was the greatest group of people I have ever met, and I spent most of my life telling the world about these special people.  I know many of them, maybe without knowing it have created exactly the lives they have wanted.  A few worried about things they shouldn’t have and have had to deal with the reality that brought them but I hope they have found what I have in the power of creating your own reality through visualizing the good stuff.  Thanks for spending a few minutes with me, you know I have been thinking of you.

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