Real Joe

He will never have true friends who is afraid of making enemies. - William Hazlitt

I think this has been a problem for me at times. Maybe not making enemies exactly, but letting people know when I’m mad or irritated about something. Yet I know that when I finally learned to fight fair with my wife, we grew closer. There’s no reason to expect that this wouldn’t happen with friends, as well as my siblings, although as the quote implies, it wouldn’t guarantee it.

Gratitude, Day 3
Practice Gratitude for the people who love you or like you. Don’t be concerned about how many there are, or how nice or attractive or helpful they are. Just focus on the simple fact that there are at least a few people in the world who love or like you and be open to Gratitude for that.

I’m most grateful for my wife and kids. I know they love me and most of the time, they like me, too. I know my mother, brother and sister love me, even though we’re not very close. And I’ve got a decent handful of good friends who I know like me, as well as a network of colleagues and business associates who also do. I’m rich.

Update on Day 1: Food
I’m grateful we have a decent bagel shop in town

Update on Day 2: House
Although our house is almost 100 years old, it sits on a foundation and basement that’s about 35 years old since it was moved in the 60s. I like it that we have a big, clean basement with enough room to play ping pong.

Gratitude, Day 2
Practice Gratitude for the fact that you have a house, an apartment, or a tent that shelters you from the elements. Practice Gratitude regarding the comfort it provides you.

I really do like our house. It’s old. It’s big. It’s not a classic Victorian, but close enough. It’s got a great screen porch, a garage, and a big attic — none of which our other two houses had. It has radiator heat, which is really nice in the winter. We spent a lot of money on it the past few years - new roof, new furnace, new water heater, new siding - as we plan to stay in it a long time. It keeps appreciating, too, which I appreciate. It feels like an old friend now. With the new siding, roof, and a little landscaping, it’s now even looking better than when we bought it. I’m very lucky to live in it.

Update on Day 1: food
Robbie has a knack for making ‘refrigerator stir-fry’ and last night she did it again. Yum. After ping pong, my daughter and I had a piece of her birthday pie… peanut butter cup chocolate with whipped cream. Rich, luscious stuff.

I’m thinking about doing a ‘goals thing’ for a month to test the idea of doing goal setting within a blog.

Yesterday, I did my morning meditation for 15 min, sports psyching exercise for 20, started Day 1 of my gratitude program, played Ping Pong with my daughter, and played no racquetball — all things that I’ve been thinking about and wanting to somewhat do but that take some self-discipline to do regularly.

I’m not going to have trouble with playing Ping Pong. My daughter got the hang of it quickly, surprising herself and me, and the glow in her eyes when she said goodnight and made a racquet swinging motion tells me that she’ll bug me to keep playing regularly and that I’ll have fun doing it. Heck, I’ll even be able to practice my ball concentration.

There are a few other things, I’m trying to do more of, too: lifting weights, reading a novel, SOSs, and I can’t remember what else. Sheeeeit, it sort of seems like a lot… am I Mr. Self-Improvement these days, or what?

I’ve used some of the Covey tools in the past to help with this goals stuff: mission statement, of course, but also the weekly Compass for role-based goal setting and the monthly log for tracking my performance on certain ‘habits’ I’m trying to create. The Compass has worked well for me for years. I tried to switch from a paper Compass to a Palm-based one the past 6 months but the software sucks and I’ve quit trying to make it work for me so I guess it’s time to switch back. And I never got the hang of the monthly log, so maybe I’ll just use a simple spreadsheet and see if I can make it a one-click button to upload it as HTML. If I can figure this out for me, then I’ll see if I can figure out how to invite other guys to do it via Real Joe, maybe in small groups. Hmmmmm.

The more we do, the more we can do; the more busy we are, the more leisure we have. - Hazlitt

I don’t quite get all of this but I know there’s something to it. I’ve heard the saying, “If you need somebody to get something done, ask a busy person” and that sort of makes sense to me, since many busy people are organized. But many busy people are busy with unimportant stuff or stuff that’s not in synch with their values or goals — “Climbing ladders that are leaning against the wrong wall” as another saying goes. The ‘leisure’ part of the quote doesn’t seem helpful at all.

I installed a little toolbar on my browser called Alexa. One of the nifty things it does is rank the website you’re currently viewing against all the other sites on the net that it knows about. For example, AOL.com is 14, CNNFn is 634, Motley Fool is 1,033, Blogger is 8,014, Utne Reader is 42,372, MN Public Radio is 144,426, Mental Game is 1,216,931, The Contented Cow (a local pub) is 4,009,868, and my wife’s soon-to-be-retired website is 10,313,114.

Real Joe is 1,449,517.

The other thing that it measures is the number of links into a site. So by my linking to the sites listed above, that adds one to their total, whenever their spider gets around to cataloging my blog. For example, AOL.com has 13,406,126 links in, CNNFn has 804,436, Motley Fool has 248,074, Blogger has 979, Utne Reader has 6,001, MN Public Radio has 5,687, and Mental Game has 91.

Currently, I don’t have ANY links to my site. I’d like to get my ranking under a million by April 1 and to do that, I’ll need to get other sites to link to me.I’ll have to brainstorm on which ones to approach first, as well as put up a page on my own site to reciprocate for those who ask for it.

Catch on fire with enthusiasm and people will come for miles to watch you burn. - John Wesley

This is why my wife Robbie is successful in her business. And though I definitely feel on fire with enthusiasm for Real Joe, I’m not as good as she is at putting myself “out there” in a way that others can see my enthusiasm. So this week, I’ll put on my promo hat and get rolling on this. Publish a new edition of Fresh Joe, get a Joe-to-Go mailing list going, and package up the essays into a quarterly newsletter that can be downloaded and printed.

The book How to Want What You Have by Timothy Miller has a chapter on practicing Gratitude, developing it as a skill. Since I’m working on the mental skill of relaxation this week, I thought I’d try his 14 day program for practicing Gratitude. It’s one of his three strategies (the others being Attention and Compassion) to help combat the instinctual Desire for More. Who knows, it might help my athletic performance, too.

Day 1
Practice gratitude for the food you eat, regardless of whether it is special or routine. Don’t alter your usual eating habits.

As I write this, I’m drinking a very good cup of coffee at my favorite coffeehouse. I’m fortunate to live in town that has a place that makes good coffee, as there are plenty of towns where they still put the pot on a hot plate and burn the shit out of it.

I ate a fiber bar this morning, like I do every day. It’s not great tasting, but it’s not terrible either and I’m fortunate to have something like this that helps give me enough fiber that helps prevent colon cancer. It helps keep me, um, regular, too. I wash it down with some lots-of-pulp orange juice which we now buy in a jug. It’s sort of expensive, but it’s one of the little things that we splurge on, since our grocery bill is minuscule compared to when all three boys were living at home. I really like the taste of fresh-squeezed oj, and though this stuff is not as good as actually squeezing the oranges myself, it’s close enough and a helluva lot more convenient.

At least I’m consistent. I couldn’t get back in the groove yesterday morning and lost my final racquetball match, playing poorly once again. Ah, well, now I have a good reason to start and maintain this mental exercise program that’s laid out in the book Sports Psyching: Playing Your Best Game All of the Time, by Thomas Tutko.

Part of the book is a six week, 20 minutes/day mental exercise program that’s designed to give you the basics. So today I started with the muscle relaxation exercise called “Let go.” I’m supposed to do it every day for a week. Putting this down in writing and publishing it in my blog is a way of making more of a commitment to it. It’s a little harder to abandon a goal if I’ve let others know about it.

Part of working on this plan for me means playing less racquetball. Less practice, fewer games. Robbie thinks I’ve been too obsessed with it lately, and she’s probably right. As long as the weather’s still decent for XC skiing, I’ll do more of that. And start playing ping pong with my daughter. And staying on my weight lifting program. And swimming and walking and dancing with Robbie. We’ll see how I do.

When you cease to make a contribution, you begin to die.- Eleanor Roosevelt

The book that this quote is taken from puts ‘making a contribution’ in the context of ordinary day-in and day-out interactions with people, not some big picture thing like my trying to make Real Joe into a sustainable business that makes a cultural impact. For example, I never think of how I could make a contribution when I play racquetball. It seems absurb, initially, but maybe not. In any case, we’re celebrating my daughter’s birthday today by going up to my sons’ apartment in the cities and having dinner, cake and presents before they settle into watch the Super Bowl. I’ll try to be more aware of how I could put myself in the frame of mind of ‘making a contribution’ there.