Episode 113: The Days Are Long, the Years Are Short: Reflecting on Life and Business

In this episode, we’re getting real about time—the way it moves, the way we experience it, and how we can make the most of it. The days might feel long when we’re caught in the grind, but the years fly by in the blink of an eye. Together, we’re diving into how to step back, reflect, and live more intentionally in both life and business. Whether it’s setting purposeful goals, embracing the messy middle, or celebrating the little wins, we’re here to remind ourselves (and you!) that life is happening for us, not just to us.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode

• Why reflecting on your journey is essential for growth.
• How to recognize the moments that matter and make them count.
• Practical tips for balancing long-term goals with being present in the moment.
• Stories and lessons from our own experiences as entrepreneurs navigating this fast-paced world.

Take Action

• Grab a notebook or your favorite journal and jot down three moments from this week that you’re grateful for—big or small!
• Reflect on your long-term goals. Are they aligned with the life you want to create?
• Share your biggest takeaway from today’s episode on Instagram and tag us @ThePursuitofBadasserie!

Join the Conversation
Let’s keep this dialogue going! We’d love to hear your thoughts on living intentionally and navigating the passage of time. Connect with us on social media or leave a comment on our website.

Subscribe & Review
Don’t forget to hit subscribe so you never miss an episode. If you love what you’re hearing, leave us a review and let us know how The Pursuit of Badasserie has helped you live with more intention and focus.

Let’s make today count!

P.S. Happy 2025!

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Read the full transcript of this episode below:

 

Lynn Howard (Lynn Howard)

There’s a lot of wasted time, regardless if we’re efficient or not, I feel like the days aren’t as long because there’s lots of things to be able to pack in to kind of take that length away.

I don’t know. It’s insane though because time isn’t going faster.

Amanda Furgiuele (afconsultingteam21@gmail.com)

I mean that’s what they tell me but I don’t know. I used to blame it when I lived in Hawaii.

used to blame it on the fact that the seasons never changed and so it felt like yesterday was the same as today because it was always 85 and sunny.

oh, correct. sad. And now I’m like, nope, it’s still not that because now that I live in a place that has at least some semblance of weather changing, still the years go by super quickly.

The days are long, the years are short and that is the understatement of the century or the understatement of 2024 as it comes to a close.

Lynn Howard (Lynn Howard)

No, it feels like the century. Yeah. What do you guys feel? Do you feel like the time is just like drifting away?

You know, I like to talk it up though to a life well lived and like full of lots of cool things to be excited about and to keep us engaged in life.

And you know, I feel like, and I know not everybody can say this, even if the time is slipping away, and I feel really blessed that, even in the bad ones, that for a long time now, I’ve really practicing presence has been a part of my being.

And I feel like sometimes I’ve lived a lifetime in a week, but a year. And I think that that also has something to do, not just with like how much we do and how much we get done and how many things are on our plate and how much life we live.

but also like that aspect of practicing presence that it just makes it feel even fuller, living like a full life.

I think that that’s really important because if you’ve had the whole year go by and you don’t feel like you’ve lived but you feel like you’ve just went through life, then that makes me sad for you because it’s a very different experience to feel like you’ve lived, right?

Life is happening for you, not to you.

Amanda Furgiuele (afconsultingteam21@gmail.com)

I 100% there’s a quote that I every year I see it pop up this time of year and it always hits me the same every year like don’t live the same life over and over 75 times and call it a life like that and it comes so easily that you’ll just look up and like, oh, another year has passed and all the goals I set last January are still the goals I want to reset because I didn’t ever,

or do them and I never got around to this. I never did that. And, you know, you get to this, and this isn’t necessarily an entrepreneurship thing.

However, I notice it with my friends who are not entrepreneurs, that they’re living every single day with this idea that I’m going to retire and then I’m going to live my life.

And then they get to retirement and something happens, they don’t have the money or they’re not well enough or whatever.

I’m like, what? I don’t want to wait until I’m 70 or 80 or however old people retire these days before I start living my life and achieving the things I want to achieve because I would rather do it at any point while I’m living it and do it now rather than wait because there’s no promise later.

There’s no promise that next year we’ll be able to do I’ll have the money or next week I’ll, when the kids get out of school or when I have made this much amount of money,

or when, you know, the economy has settled down, like, then I’ll do stuff. And inevitably, something else comes up, and you can’t be promised that that ever is going to happen.

You can’t be assured that whatever is in your mind that’s just stipulation is ever actually going to come to fruition.

And so, this time of year is always the time I start thinking, I look back on, did I live in my purpose over the course of the year?

Did I actually live the way I wanted to live or was I just going through the motions? And I’m not saying that Lynn and I never go through the motions that there’s never a time that we are just like getting stuff done for the sake of having to do things.

I’m not saying that we are perfectly always living in the moment and living our life to the fullest. That’s not practical currently.

Check back next year on that. But I think both of us really strive to do the thing now and not

Lynn Howard (Lynn Howard)

thing in there that is interesting because it was something I was reflecting on. I reflect on a lot and we talk a lot around just going through the motions and you know I realized I was actually when reflecting in my ear because I think especially because we have we have multiple things going on at once.

Everybody does. You have your life, you have your business or you have a profession or a job, you have your friends, you have maybe a partner, maybe kids, like so there’s all these different aspects that are going on and I was identifying the moments in the year that I absolutely went through the motions in one aspect because maybe I was focused in another aspect maybe it was even my mental health at the time or the reason why I was going through the motions or the reason why that was successful and I was like all in um

and it’s fascinating to me to like actually take an assessment of like to see like you know we’re we’re never one in its entirety because we’re complex human beings and so we have we we have this where um where sometimes we want to mask that oh everything is this way in our life but that’s not true and it’s been something I think you know you know obviously those that are in the US we’re recording this right after Thanksgiving um uh because we like to we like to box it all out so we can get done and there was a lot of conversation around being thankful and reflection of the year and all that and and I was listening to uh some individuals and just like how everything was monotone one tonality and that’s

It’s it’s not the case with life. It is there’s there’s all these different flavors and ways we show up and we can show up one way.

It’s kind of like having a fixed mindset or growth mindset. We’re not one of all. We have fixed with some things, but we might be primary growth aspect.

And so when I was in reflection of like, okay, where did I just do the process? And to me, that is for me, that’s just going through the moves, just doing the process, going above and beyond, not actually investing in the time, and looking at the results that were received absolutely reflect when I just went, I was still doing what we said we were going to do.

It’s one of our launches. I was still doing what we said we were going to do, but I had no capacity to go above and beyond that because of other things on my plate.

And it’s interesting when we can have like real talk around this of like, we have this conversation when you are out here about that.

And, you know, to watch our year and like where, how much we’ve done and how much we’ve accomplished and how much movement we’ve made.

And it’s nothing to balk at, that’s for sure. But at the same time, and this is my high D, right?

I know we just got done recording discs. So, like how much more I could have done, where I could have like, where I could have not, just went through the movement because of my energy, my capacity, whatever was somewhere else.

Or even again, being proud of like the effort and the processes that we do have, you know what I mean?

Amanda Furgiuele (afconsultingteam21@gmail.com)

Oh, absolutely. This is always the time of year that I love. back and I said that I don’t celebrate how far I’ve come but I and I’m not berating myself but there is a little bit of like what else could I have done if I hadn’t done this ridiculous thing of going through the motions or hamster reeling this one thing or wasting my time where I thought it was productive but I didn’t actually do the analytics of it and like it turned out to be a waste of my time and energy if what could I’ve accomplished if I hadn’t done those things if I had stayed focused or I had stayed hyper focused on one thing or another and so it really it’s not that I’m trying to do that as a way to berate myself for not having achieved what I want to do achieve it’s more of how can I use that information and how I handle certain situations or challenges emotional or physical or whatever how can I use that information and do better next year and doing better doesn’t necessarily mean one thing being more productive.

or another. It could just be that I want to do better at one specific aspect. Maybe I want to be a better leader, maybe want to be a better, better, you know, manager of my team.

Maybe I want to be more efficient in XYZ, or maybe want to maybe we’ll publish our third book already.

We could think, basically done anyway. So there’s lots of things that come up when I look at this time of setting goals.

It’s not just about what I haven’t achieved or what I have achieved. It’s sort of taking stock of what I can do better and what that will mean when I put it into action.

Lynn Howard (Lynn Howard)

It’s important for us to reflect on how we were, what we’ve accomplished, how we were not our inactions and interactions, the cause and the fact, in order to be able to set ourselves up for I think that that is extremely important.

know, we’ve had some, we’ve done a lot. of work this year for reflecting on our, obviously on our personal businesses, for those of you that don’t know, we do have personal businesses as well as the badassery brand.

And yeah, on the badassery brand, you know, we invested in buying into a well-known individual to help us with our processes.

And, you know, we believe it’s really important to invest in ourselves. And I feel like this year was a level up.

We’ve invested in ourselves before, but this was a level up because of, you know, Jasmine Sar is a big name, and it was great to be able to be in a program with her and learn so much from her.

To, I think, though, that that was really cool to realize, like, we weren’t too far off from what she was suggesting, what she was doing by cleaning up our processes, being able to go

create the SOPs and the frameworks behind the scenes to have our team copy paste, the movement that we’ve received in our launches, in our exposure, being able to host the Finish Strong Start Fresh Summit, which was huge to have all those individuals from all of the world, a part of a 10-hour marathon it felt like.

You know, it’s been really cool and setting ourselves up for our first live six-day, I like to call it e-prey, implement in Bangkok six-day, like get done and it’s implemented in six days with the photoshoot and all that, let us know if you want to hear more about All the things this year that we’ve

really set ourselves up to up-level their brand, up-leveled the frameworks that we’ve had. Lizzie, I mean, we have a great team, but Lizzie, our online business manager is like making sure that we are getting everything written now.

You know, it’s so great to have such a great team and a great leader on our team as well.

And Lizzie has been key to make sure that, hey, are we missing anything? What else do we need? Yeah, it’s been a lot of learning, a lot of ups and downs, a lot of things where we didn’t hit the numbers that we wanted, but we ain’t mad at it, we’ve learned a lot.

But in other areas where we’ve blown our numbers out of the water and it’s been incredible, it’s just been a really interesting year to watch.

And so many people would like, I was reflected on this too, is like so many people would have given up so many different points of the year.

And would have been Like, nope, that’s it. I’m done. I’m going to change. I’m going to change. But to say hyper focus in on one thing, maybe add one or two things onto it.

Everyone’s well, but hyper focus on one thing, keep rinse and repeat, recalibrate. And, you know, next year is just going to be what we’ve really set ourselves up for next year to be absolutely our best year yet.

Amanda Furgiuele (afconsultingteam21@gmail.com)

You know, I know everybody, we’ve got everybody, but there’s a large group of people like, oh, 2024 is going to be my year, 2025 is going be my year, 2020 was going to be my year.

Lynn Howard (Lynn Howard)

Those people who said 2020 was going to be their year. Sorry, folks. That definitely wasn’t the case.

Amanda Furgiuele (afconsultingteam21@gmail.com)

I think a lot of people have said at this time of year, they say, this next year is going to be my year.

And I always kind of chuckle at that because it’s not magically going to be your year because it’s your favorite number or it’s

it’s a particular Chinese sign that’s your sign or and that’s because I’m not particularly woo-woo but whether or not next year is your year really depends on the action that you’re putting in and that happens right now it happens everything you did in 2024 is the action that you put in to set yourself up for 2025 and so on and so forth in subsequent years and I absolutely agree with you that there’s been a lot of foundational things that have been set up or changed or adjusted or tweaked in 2024 that will lead to a really great 2025 and I know that we’re going to have a great 2025 not like tuning our own horror like oh we’re going to be swimming in like nine figures and everything’s going to be amazing we’re not saying that there aren’t going to be struggles in 2025 because I can already say there’s going to be some struggles and we put in the action and the work in 2024 to set ourselves up for success in that way and ultimately we have to be responsible for what

that turns out to be. And all of us do, if you are hoping to have 2025 be your year, then I really, really hope that you put in the work of 2024 and that you continue to put in the work because it does take work.

Even when you have those windfalls where suddenly you have this influx of whatever followers or funny or whatever, there’s still work that goes into sustaining that and making it scalable and sustainable long term.

I absolutely looking forward to 2025. I think it’s going to be some pretty amazing things are going to happen.

Lynn Howard (Lynn Howard)

I mean, yeah, we’ve been building the foundation and making it stronger. So it is great. And I think that you brought up a good point is, you know, every once in a while, the overnight successes do happen.

But those that have long-term success are, and like meaningful success are those and continued success. Because let’s take the lotto for example.

All those people that win the lotto, happens to them, they’re broke, typically, statistically, they’re less fortunate after they’ve spent all the money in the whole, not all of them, because they don’t know how to handle it.

They don’t have the fundamentals the of understanding. It’s like, although I think it’s gotten better, but even like back in the day, with the pro players, the pro football, the pro basketball, the pro baseball, and more so, the pro, I mean, it was all of them, but it really was the pro football got it a lot, where they didn’t know how to handle their money.

So they were out like spending for all their homies and their parents, and like, because they didn’t have the fundamental knowledge that the basic framework.

And so they ended up putting themselves in a situation, and this is no shade. This is, I saw it with military when we were in Saudi, all these ex military people.

while now making bank, and they just didn’t have the fundamentals and the foundations. It’s like the overnight success when you don’t know how to handle it, or don’t know how to make it last.

Then you’re constantly just utilizing it above and beyond your means, and we are advocates of building the fundamentals and those foundations to make sure that you have a stable platform to grow and launch off of.

When doesn’t mean brand new, it just means like your next step, right? We definitely this year, the first couple of years of us working together, we’re kind of like, let’s write some books, let’s make some impact, let’s do this, let’s sort of podcast, let’s create some of our programs, and then when we really like buckle down to our signature program, the B.A., the badass amplifier, and then sort of building things around that, it’s definitely really in the conception of it, it’s only been a year

and a half and so this next year is really like in the trajectory of is absolutely going to to be a very different year just because of everything that we’ve invested and put in and we have social proof as well which you know hopefully you know you’re listening to us in our process that there are things that you can apply to your own particular business or way that you some of the things that we have some of our own personal goals that we have on our list.

Amanda Furgiuele (afconsultingteam21@gmail.com)

Yeah it’s you know I was speaking to my son about what’s going to happen in the new year and all the things and I’m like isn’t it exciting not to know some things because trying to instill this idea that not knowing is really okay you don’t have to know every single tiny bit of every day that goes by and isn’t it exciting not to know isn’t it exciting to have the potential and the I’m sorry.

certainty. And a lot of times I would say that isn’t fun, like it’s not fun not to know where your next meal is coming from or like where you’re going to sleep that night and those kinds of things aren’t fun when you don’t have the answers.

But if you set yourself up right and you have the foundations and fundamentals that we’ve been saying that you have that action, you’ve got all the things ticking in the right direction, it becomes really exciting and becomes that unknown becomes much more exciting and much easier to take in because you’ve set yourself up for success rather than just hoping, I hope it works out, but I’m excited.

It’s gonna be a good year.

Lynn Howard (Lynn Howard)

I agree, 100% agree. We want to hear all about your goals. What do you say 2025? What’s gonna be different?

habits are you going to adapt that are going to be an asset versus hindrance to your success to your

and accessibility, to your clarity, to your movement, to your growth, to the ability of you having presence in your life and in your business.

So please drop us a comment, let us know. We are really thankful for, I know we said this in our Thanksgiving one, but we are thankful for all that have played a part in where we’re at today, not just in this past year, but in our careers in our lifetime, because we have learned so much from the external of what to apply, how to apply, and which is absolutely directed our internal beings, right?

so we appreciate, we appreciate the audience, share a podcast, it’s one of our goals. We’ll be letting you know our we’re trying to list our goals out as soon as we have them official, but one of them is a book, probably a couple of books.

But we’ll be letting you know, and we’re going to need your help, because you can’t do it all enough.

Amanda Furgiuele (afconsultingteam21@gmail.com)

If you want to go far, go with others. You want to do it fast, do it yourself. And I think we’ve proven in last couple of years that the way to go is to go with others.

And thank you guys for being on the journey with us. We hope that your 2025 is going to be amazing and incredible and that you set yourself up for every success that you want in your life.

Lynn Howard (Lynn Howard)

Yeah, take some time to reflect on 2024, find the good, find the lessons. Don’t sit in it, but learn from it, and figure out how to move you forward the best way for the right reasons for you.

Until next time.

Amanda Furgiuele (afconsultingteam21@gmail.com)

Get after it.