The half day plan

I get the feeling sometimes that others have the impression of me as being a terminally happy person. I had to pause a few seconds after writing this…I can’t write and laugh at the same time. I do rant some here about the media and how I see us as being led around by the nose, but I don’t write much about things I don’t like. Well, let me just say that 1) there are tons of things I don’t like and 2) I write about them all the time…I just don’t publish them. Sometimes I read the posts to my wife and daughter, but most of the time I just keep it to myself. I guess I just fail to see what good can come out of my telling the world about something that drives me nuts!

When you start talking about things that you hate friends will come out of the woodwork to participate in a communal bashing. I can’t speak for others, but this only winds me up. It creates a mob mentality and makes me do and say things that I often later regret. There are some things you just don’t need to give a name. But one thing I have discovered is that when I come back a few weeks (or even days) later and read something I wrote about one of the worst days of my life, it will seem almost trivial; unimportant in the scheme of my big picture. Now aren’t you glad you didn’t say what was really on your mind?

When I sold real estate every day I had a little trouble learning to control my anger. Every salesperson has to learn early on that there is a certain group out there that thinks they can abuse you simply because they are making you money. They want to be sure that you “earn” your paycheck and the easiest way to accomplish this is by being difficult. I developed my own system for letting problems roll off my back, but it was a system that I had to think about every day. I called it the half-day plan. If a problem arose in the morning I would not try to solve it until at least after lunch or later in the day. If something went bad in the afternoon I let it ride until the next day. I thought about the problem, I just didn’t act on it.

To some this may seem like I wasn’t trying; I wasn’t “taking the bull by the horns”. But what I learned is that a large percentage of the end-of-the-world dilemmas would solve themselves in spite of me! Often my actions only made things worse and I ended up like a teenager texting…”hey”…”hey”…”what’s up?”…”nothing, you?”…”nothing”…”cool”. Just and endless volley back and forth that accomplished nothing and wound me up! I’m not saying to not dial 911 when your heart is doing flips, I’m just saying let some things solve themselves. The better you become at not sweating the small stuff the larger this category will become.