FUN FIRST!

Daily Encouragement for Better Living

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MAY, 2009

It's May Day. There is a tradition on May 1st to leave a basket of goodies for someone on their step and run away without being identified as the secret giftgiver. A simple fun way to brighten someone's day and brighten your own in the process. Leave some May baskets today. Maybe you can't leave the physical kind but you can do something kind for someone. Pay them a compliment, leave them a piece of chocolate on their desk, take them to lunch, anything that let's them know you appreciate them. Then, instead of waiting till next year, make it a habit. See what little things you can do for people everyday. You'll have tremendous fun doing it. Making every day May Day will make you happier year round.
Saw a funeral procession yesterday where the casket was being carried on a horse-drawn coach. It was so cool I almost wished I was dead so I could have one too. That's the problem with impulses. Often, they're great- a true inspiration. Other times they're really, really stupid. That's why even the best-seeming impulse needs to take a quick trip through the reason machine before you act on it. I think I'll take a carriage ride while I'm still in the full upright position. Something tells me it'll be a lot more fun.
MineThat Bird won the Kentucky Derby yesterday. His odds were 50 to 1. Not many people expected him to win. The people who did and placed a bet on him made a lot of money. The horse racing world is constantly providing evidence that what most people think about your chances of succeeding doesn't mean anything. Horses don't read the odds. They don't decide they've lost before they start. Only humans make that mistake. Take a lesson from Mine That Bird. Go out and run your race today like you expect to win. Ignore what anybody else thinks about you. Give it all you've got. Find your opening and blast through it. You can learn a lot from horses. I learned that from my daughter Teresa. Today's her birthday. Thanks for the education T!
"Being on the tightrope is living. Everything else is waiting." (Karl Wallenda) I love this quote. Talk about passion. What's living for you? How much time are spending on living? What do you need to do to increase your living time and reduce your waiting time? Get to it!
I have a confession to make. I started getting up earlier and I'm enjoying it. This is one of those standard motivational guy things but I've always resisted it. It didn't seem very Fun First-like. The idea is to use the extra early time to work on the things that are most important to achieving your goals. Accomplishing something significant early has a strong positive impact on your whole day. I was doing fine before but the early starts have really got me rolling. Don't get me wrong, I still use snooze. [See July 2007 Archives] My wife's still too cute to abandon at the first sound of the alarm. I haven't given up the most important thing for something of lesser importance. I just start the whole process sooner. It's given me new energy. It may work for you too.
In her book Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life, Winifred Gallagher says "if you don't choose a target, your brain will choose one for you " so it's important to choose what you want to think about. She says when the brain is not deliberately focused it tends to dwell on bad news. This isn't good because she says research shows negative feelings shrink your scope of vision and limit your options for acting. Negative thoughts actually prevent you from seeing your options. Focusing on compassion, joy and gratitude expand your mental horizons. Pick the positive to think about and you'll see life offers a richness you haven't seen before.
I drove my wife's car the other day. As I walked toward it I noticed she had a sign on the windshield that said "FUN." "That's cool," I thought. "I wonder where she got that." When I got inside the car I found the answer. She'd been to a friend's mother's funeral last week. She took the "FUNERAL" sticker they give you for the procession to the graveyard and folded it so to the outside world it just said "FUN." Pretty slick. With enough creativity, you can find the fun in just about anything.
When one of my sons was 3 or so, my wife informed me he had taken up urinating outside in the yard. Thinking myself extremely clever, I explained to him that it violated sanitary codes. I told him this elaborate sewage system had been built by plumbers like his grandfather to dispose of bodily waste and that going outside was bad for public health and illegal. That should take care of it, I thought. Not too long after, my wife called to tell me he was still urinating outside. He simply would take the pot out of the potty seat, carry it outside, urinate in it, bring it inside, and dump it in the toilet. So much for clever. I had to resort to the direct method. "Don't do it outside." No matter how much we like to think otherwise, clever seldom beats direct when you're trying to get a point across.
Trying is common to success and failure. If you try, you might succeed or you might not. Not trying can only lead to failure. Success requires trying. Next time you're tempted not to try something because you're afraid it won't work, remember that if you don't try, you guarantee it won't work.
Shortly after seeing Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs for the first time (I was probably 4 or 5), my friend Kim and I were blissfully pretending to be two of the Dwarfs. (We apparently weren't interested in being Prince Charming. Probably because he had to kiss a girl.) At one point, we lined up to go off to work ("heigh ho heigh ho it's off to work we go") in the mine. I slung my little sand shovel up onto my shoulder in carefree Dwarf-like fashion and accidentally smacked poor Kim on top of the head. [He'd gotten a little too close to me in heigh-ho formation.] He burst loudly into tears and was really wailing up a storm. My mom came running. "What happened?" "Mark hit me on the head with a shovel!" While this was clearly the truth, the image it conjured up in my mother's mind was far different than the reality of what actually had occurred. Suffice it to say, I soon joined Kim in the wailing up a storm department, though it was my bottom rather than my top that was hurting. Mom was never in danger of joining the "my little baby would never do anything wrong"club. She preferred to err on the side of assuming I was to blame. Unfortunately, that was a pretty good assumption. I think the shovel incident is the only time the assumption was in error. Happy Mothers' Day!
Peggy Noonan in her eulogy for Jack Kemp said: "He had the power of the happy man." The power in happiness is that it tends to make other people happier when they come in contact with you. While I've met a few people who have remained steadfastly unhappy in the face of my incessant happiness, most people leave me at least a bit happier than before. Since most people want to be happy, they tend to be drawn to happy people because of the contagious nature of happiness. If people are thinking, consciously or unconsciously, that you are happy and that they can catch it from you, you are going to start drawing people to you. This opens a lot of exciting prospects for you and them.
In response to Saturday's email about success requiring trying, I received this question: "How would you respond to the person who quotes Yoda 'Do or do not. There is no try.'" My response: "Try you must or do you will not." I think Yoda's point was when we say we'll "try" the connotation often is that we expect to fail or, maybe even more, that we don't want to expend the effort to actually succeed. In that circumstance saying "I'll try" is shorthand for "I'm not really good enough to do this so I'm just going to pretend like I'm trying to do it." This is not trying. This is defeatism.
"For every minute you are angry, you lose sixty seconds of happiness." (Ralph Waldo Emerson) We all have things that make us mad. The trick is to manage anger so we only lose a couple of seconds of happiness not a whole minute . . . or hour . . . or day . . . or life. Here are a few things that can help: 1) Accept the fact other people are not going to do what you want them to do. Defeated expectations ignite anger. Stop expecting people to live according to your plan. 2) Avoid things that aggravate you if at all possible. I don't watch the national TV news, listen to politicians talk, or play golf. These things frustrate me. I haven't been able to successfully apply suggestion #1 to politicians so I avoid listening to them and to news reports about them. As for golf, I haven't been able to apply suggestion #3 to golf. What's suggestion #3? Accept the fact you are not always going to do what you want to do -- like hit the little ball in the air, in the desired direction, to the desired location. Grr! I just lost ten seconds by simply thinking about golf!!
It's a beautiful morning. Sunlight is playing across the plants and grass. Lighting-up some places while others remain in shadow. The birds are singing and the puddles formed from last night's rain are glistening; reflecting the sky and tree branches above. People are sleepily walking to work without the rush and hustle you see a bit later in the day. It's a wonderful scene and I didn't have anything to do with creating it. I didn't direct the sunlight where to shine, or put the plants or trees in their spots so they'd show the contrast of light and shadow. I didn't tell people when or where to walk or at what pace to amble by. I didn't make the rain that made the puddles. I had no control over the creation of the scene I'm observing. I just made a choice to stop and observe it. What I see is God's work in nature combined with the product of countless individuals' free choices (where to put the plants and trees, what path to take to work). We don't have control over all those other people's choices or whether we can see the sunlight or not. All we can do is decide how we are going to deal with them. Personally, I like to enjoy the show.
"My life is an indivisble whole, and all my attitudes run into one another; and they all have their rise in my insatiable love for mankind." (Mahatma Gandhi) Wow! An insatiable love for mankind. How many people have that? Not enough. True love is addicting though. Once you start living it for one or two people you get the urge to add more. The desire grows exponentially. If you devote yourself to love, in it's true self-sacrificing, totally giving form, you'll find your desire for love will never be satisfied. You'll exhaust yourself giving it away but you'll still be filled with it yourself. It's the coolest thing there is.
Do you absolutely crack yourself up? Laugh uproariously at your own jokes? We all need some good laughs. It's a lot easier when we don't have to rely on someone else to get them. It helps if you can take amusement from your misadventures. These will happen without any effort on your part so they are a ready source for laughter. You just need to be prepared to greet them with a proper lack of seriousness when they pop up.
I heard this old joke again today. A guy walks into a talent agent. The agent asks: "What can you do?" The guy says: "Bird imitations." The agent says: "Nobody wants bird imitations. They're a dime a dozen. Get outta here!" The guy says: "Ok," opens the window, flaps his arms, and flies away. It's a real challenge to hear somebody out. We hear the start of their story and immediately put them into a little box in the mental storeroom of stereotypes we've collected. If you do this, you won't learn anything and you might miss something spectacular.
It's Monday. Do you wish it were Friday? You don't really. That's wishing your life away. You really just wish Monday felt better. Here's a plan: First, make a quick list of some fun stuff you're going to do this week. If you discover you aren't going to be doing anything fun this week, change that. Think of some quick fun you can have. Call someone who makes you laugh. Decide to make a chocolate shop detour after work. Plan a quick walk in the woods (or just around the block). Alone or with a friend. Be creative. Misery and Monday don't have to be synonyms.
"You are the stupidest, ugliest, most worthless person I have ever known!" Have you ever said that to anyone? No? Chances are you've actually said it (or some variation) many times -- to yourself. While basic civility restrains us from insulting other people, no taboo prevents us from cutting ourselves to shreds. It's time to revoke your self-abuse license. If you wouldn't say it to somebody else, don't say it to yourself. You deserve as much respect as the next person. Next time you insult yourself, wash your own mouth out with soap. Or, maybe, get a little feisty: "Hey! I'm not going to take that from you!" Just decide to break the pattern and speak to yourself with respect and admiration.
Is there really such a thing as delayed gratification? We think of it as putting off a pleasure now (ice cream) in favor of some other good down the road (losing weight). It's the whole work before pleasure thing. But are we actually delaying gratification? Aren't we just gratifying a different desire? The desire to be thin, or tough, or virtuous, or thought virtuous by the people seeing us not eat the ice cream? It's not a question of gratifying or not gratifying so much as a question about our desires. What do we want? I think we are always gratifying our current desire, whether it's ice cream, building a friendship, or avoiding some kind of pain. If you develop an understanding of your purpose, have a passion for it, and set goals for living it, your momentary desires will tend to be consistent with it as well. If you don't do these things, your momentary desires may have you watching a lot of Gilligan's Island reruns.
It's common to ask kids what they want to be when they grow up. [Meaning what job do they want to have.] This has a couple of problems. [The most fundamental one being: Why grow-up?] It's too limiting. Kids are going to have a lot of dreams and aspirations. Why give them the idea its the job they take that's most important. A better question is: who do you want to be when you grow up? What character traits do you want to make up your core as a person. An even better question is: who do you want to be today and what are you doing to make yourself that person? You might want to have your own answer to this question ready before you pop it on a kid. It could be a bit awkward if you don't.
"Don't be distracted by criticism. Remember the only taste of success some people have is when they take a bite out of you." (Zig Ziglar) You gotta love Zig. Your critics might take some bites, but you'll only be devoured if you give up and start gnawing on yourself.
What's the best thing about your best friend? [or spouse, or child,or anybody else for that matter] This is a fun game to play. Take someone you know and start thinking about all the things that are good about them. Kind. Strong. Smart. Funny. Beautiful . Great Voice. Solid Right-Cross. Whatever. Just pick a person and go through everything you can think of about them that's good. Then, try to decide which one thing is the best. It's fun. It doesn't really matter if you can pick a "best" or not. The pleasure's in the search. Do this for a different person everyday and see how much happier it makes you. Thinking about our friends' strengths helps us relish their presence in our lives.
"Of course, you know, there are no pancreas." So declared a co-worker to a gathering of lawyers, bankers, and others of that ilk. Then, in apparent reaction to the befuddled looks of the crowd, he said it again. "There are no pancreas." Even now, this makes me laugh so hard that it hurts. If he'd said what he meant, "There are no panaceas" (solutions for all problems or difficulties), probably no one would remember it today. But saying "pancreas" (a gland situated near the stomach that secretes a digestive fluid into the intestine and also secretes insulin) made it immortal. The word "pancreas" makes me laugh every time I hear it. Always be open to the possibility that your mistakes may have a greater positive impact than your best laid plans. Life is funny that way.
Nobody landing on the beach at Normandy, or scrambling from his chopper in the Central Highlands, or entering an Afghan cave was thinking about being remembered on Memorial Day. They were focused on their mission and getting their comrades and themselves back alive. Many did not make it back. Today is a hoilday we wish we didn't have. Let's pray for the day no one knows anyone to remember on Memorial Day. But, until then, remember we must.
"The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook." (William James) Ah, yes. Overlooking. Mistakes. Shortcomings. Insults. Slights. So much to overlook. The rest of us are out here giving you plenty of chances to be wise. Pretty swell of us, eh?
"The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of childhood into maturity." (Thomas Henry Huxley) This can be tricky because the spirit of childhood is imaginative, carefree, and fascinated. Maturity tends to be care-full and bored. The best way I've found to maintain the spirit of childhood is to hang out with children and watch and listen to them play. If you don't have any children handy, read Dr. Seuss or rent a Veggie Tales DVD or something else geared toward little kids. Anything that brings back the feeling of carefree joy and fascination with the world around you. If you're not fascinated, you're probably not going to be very productive. Solutions are the child of fascination and imagination.
"I think you're better than you think you are." Bill Parcells (a football coach, in case you didn't know) often said this to his players in trying to get them to perform at their highest level possible. It's a good attitude to have toward the folks we interact with. Letting people know we believe they have the ability to achieve what they want is a big boost to them. We all are tempted to doubt that we can measure up. Having someone else seeing the ability to excel in us can give us the strength to push on and do so. Don't hold back. Your encouragement may be the torch that ignites their success.
In Blink, Malcolm Gladwell recounts a study that indicated facial expressions actually cause feelings as well as reflect them. Researchers were studying the different types of facial expressions and what muscles were used to make them. They practiced making expressions in the course of their study. During a period where they were practicing sad faces, they each eventually realized they felt terrible at the end of the day. The face, it turns out, is an equal partner in the emotional process. If you make a point of consistently putting a happy, confident expression on your face, you'll feel happier and more confident.
Placing blame is dominant in our culture today. We seem to believe that once we've assigned blame, we've solved the problem. We can spend a lot of time and energy fighting about who failed to let the dog out, but the house is going to stink until somebody cleans it up. Blaming is not solving. It doesn't create peace. It doesn't bring happiness. It doesn't undo what's happened. It doesn't get the dog poop off the floor. Here's my challenge. Today, be countercultural. Don't blame anybody for anything. See if you can go the whole day without blaming anyone for anything even in your thoughts. Not your spouse. Not your kids. Not other drivers. Not your boss. Not your co-workers. Not even yourself. Instead, look at what you can do to make the situations you face today better. Then, do it. You'll be surprised how much more joy you'll experience. But if you don't, don't blame me. At least not until tomorrow!!
The Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz was full of bluster when Dorothy first encountered him but the bluster vanished, revealing its underlying fear, pretty quickly. The Apostles lost their bluster pretty quickly, as well, upon Jesus's arrest. What they thought was going to happen didn't happen. Instead, something bad happened. Jesus was put to death. Even after He rose from the dead and appeared to them, they were in kind of a daze. Happy but confused. When He ascended, leaving them again, they were back to being afraid, as well, as confused. In other words, they were ready. Having had their expectations defeated, fearing for their lives, and not knowing what the next day was going to bring, they were ready for God to move. At that point, in that room, the Holy Spirit came to them and the Cowardly Lion disappeared. They were no longer afraid or confused. They left that room and changed the world. Today, Christians commemorate the events of that day, Pentecost. The big question is whether we leave our commemorative services today with the same power of the Holy Spirit and sense of purpose the disciples left that room with. Will we allow the Holy Spirit to bring change to the world through us? Or, will we say "No thanks. I think I'll stay in this room. It's too scary out there."