Ah, isn’t that just like life - to throw you mixed messages and confuse the hell out of you?

Here are a couple of thoughts for you:

• If a person is telling you to spend to help the economy, check to see if that person works in retail
• If a person is telling you to save to help yourself, check to see if that person is a banker (or a relative waiting on your will!)

Rules of thumb:

• A recession is a GREAT to buy (notice I didn’t say spend) - because you obviously can get better deals and get more bang for your buck
  • Many millionaires are made (or embellished) during a recession
  • This is the best time to buy low and sell high when the economy recovers
• This of course only applies if you have at LEAST 3-6 months of savings reserve, otherwise you are in ‘survival mode’ 
  • If you don’t have that reserve, you can’t afford to be wealthy
  • Remember that during a recession, many people who lose their jobs will not find comparable replacement work for up to a year (in some cases longer) - so even 3-6 months is not much of a safety net

So, do what’s right for you and your family.  Screw the economy.  You can’t save the economy if you can’t save yourself!  Right?

How do you survive a depression?

• Get ahead of the curve
  • The government economists announced just this month that it’s official - we started a recession 12 months ago!
  • If you needed the goverment to tell you that to start getting your house in order - you’re screwed.
  • It’s too late to get your house in order.  Well, if you have a job/income, it’s not technically too late, but the impact you can make now is greatly reduced.  It’s simply harder to put $200 towards that nagging credit card now than it was a year ago (but DO IT anyway!)
• Tighten your belt until it HURTS - then tighten it some more
  • Bye-bye satellite/premium cable and watching/recording more tv shows than a person should watch
  • Bye-bye eating out - hello making your own fries out of those round, brown dirty vegetables
  • Enjoy holidays and birthdays for what they are - a chance to show/tell people how you value them and to spend time with them: gifts are cool unless you give them with a sinking feeling in your stomach while hoping that the electricity stays on another week until you get paid.
• Get back to basics
  • Drop the electronics and teach yourself and your kids how to play cards
  • Check out recipe website (we like allrecipes.com) and find amazing meals you can make from scratch - it’s not as tough or time consuming as you think, plus in a recession, the one commodity we all have is TIME
  • Do reasonable repairs yourself - it’s just not that hard to fix the little things, and hey, now that Survivor 54 is over, you have time.
• Read my article from Nov 2007 about Getting Your House in Order for more tips/thoughts.

Recessions are toughest for those who didn’t see it coming and plan ahead.  If you missed the first train, I hope you’ll be on the next.  Those on the third train out will be pretty miserable.

Here’s to personal growth in a recession!

The goofy premise of the movie is that two brothers (the same dudes who played the Mooses - or is it Meeses - in the animated Brother Bear movie) can’t afford their insatiable beer drinking habits so they resort to tricks.  They drive up to Lake Elsinore to the brewery and work their way into the customer service line.

There they present an empty Elsinore beer bottle - with a mouse in it.  The exchange goes something like this - “Yo ay, we heard like ay that if you find a mouse in your bottle of beer you get like a free case of beer ay.  So we’d like our free case of beer.”

So here’s what happened to us.  We open a twelve-pack of Coke and there’s a sealed Coke - empty.  Julie calls Coke and say something like “Yo ay, we got like this empty can, but like it’s never been open ay and my husbands head is going to start doing like the Exorcist ay if he doesn’t get his Coke.”

Lo and behold, Coke sent us coupons for 3 free 12-packs.  Wow ay.

But you should also know that many ‘extraverts’ are not truly extraverts, but introverts with low self-esteem who try to overcompensate.  You know the type - they seem to fit the extrovert pattern, talk, talk, talk - but the talk is one-sided and at some point you begin to wonder if their ears are for decoration or purely function as glasses holders.  Right?  Think Del Griffith (John Candy) in Planes, Trains and Automobiles.  Chatty Cathy doll.  That’s not extraversion - that’s loneliness and fear.  Here’s a little tip to help you recognize the difference if you suspect you have encountered a ‘Del’.  During your ‘conversation’ say the strangest word that comes to mind - say, gopher, for example.  If they effortlessly and without pause jump into a story about gophers - run!

And who was stuck in Wichita with Del but Neal (Steve Martin).  An introvert who just wanted to get home to his quiet family.  Who just wanted to quietly read his newspaper.  A true introvert hillariously paired with a masked introvert with gopher-syndrome.

Carl Jung, the father of modern personality studies coined the terms extravert and introvert to describe the two polarities of energy in personalities.  Meaning: extraverts gain energy from the outside world and lose energy from the inside world and introverts are, as expected, the opposite.

Personally, I am extraverted.  I gain energy from sharing experiences with people - and I want to hear their experiences as much as I want to share mine.  For me, learning (and teaching) happens in those shared experiences.  Too little interaction sucks the life out of extraverts like me.  Think Tom Hanks in “Cast Away” whose extraverted character brilliantly survives an island marooning by mimicking - in great detail - a relationship with a stray volleyball he named ‘Wilson’ - right down to the problem solving of breaking up, reconciling then letting go.  It was only when he lost Wilson that Tom Hank’s character quit and let his paddles go.  Now don’t pretend that you didn’t cry when Wilson ‘died’ and Hanks gave up and drifted on alone. ;)

And when I am working late at night or mired deeply in a multitude of projects to the point that my social interaction is weakened, this blog becomes my ‘Wilson’.  You’re not saying much back to me (that I can hear anyway ;), but I’ve painted a little face on my computer screen and pretend that my stories affect you and that you have stories to share back.  And no, I am not on medication, but thanks for asking…;)  That’s extraversion.

Introversion is just the opposite.  I know many people that enjoy company and conversation, but love the opportunity for aloneness to recharge and process their thoughts privately.  Too much interaction sucks the life out of them.  And remember, introverts can be chatty too.  The difference is that they won’t chat as long.  They will tune out mentally and at some point physically as their energy drops and they will process the thoughts that were generated later - alone.

So define yourself and learn how to recharge yourself by recognizing where you derive your energy.  I’ve had many deep conversations about life, politics, religion, you name it with both types of personalities - and for me, the extravert, I go home charged.  So charged that I can’t sit still.  I have to re-digest what I’ve learned with my wife and at some point near exhaustion, I finally retreat with the information and examine it internally.  Introverts skip the whole re-digesting part and likely put the information away until they have the energy again to examine it.

Problem solving, by the way, takes both extraversion and introversion.  We need extraversion to publicly challenge our assumptions (introverts hate this) and collect enough information.  And equally, introversion helps us to step out of the chaos that is life (extraverts hate this) and correct our course.  Introversion is a skill everyone should have at least to a small degree.  Yet, society will tell you that introversion is negative.  Bunk.

And this all begs the questions - which are you - introverted or extraverted?  Do you sometimes feel stuck in Wichita with Del or are you more likely to feel marooned with Wilson?  And how has this polarity affected your relationships?  Can you think of times where you’ve socially been paired up with someone similar to you - you probably gained energy from this.  And how about those times when you are paired up with the opposite personality - a draining time?

The net gain here is to identify your energy source and recognize the energy needs/abilities of those around you.  When you are feeling adventurous, sit down with an opposite, but when you feel like you are battling for energy, find your comfort zone with a like-minded person and recharge.  This information should help you improve both your personal and professional relationships.  Many marriages have been saved with this knowledge just as many businesses have grown faster than believed possible with it.

Now if you’ve been with me a while, you know I love my kids greatly.  And you also know they can frustrate their parents with the best of them!  But I operate under the unbiased assumption that my kids are not special by birthright.  I know, hard to believe a parent thinks that way, but it’s true.  Smart is just knowledge, not ability.  See my Secret to High IQs article if you need more thoughts on that.  What I do teach them is that their knowledge, opportunities and how they use those two can make them special.  And it works - see Is Competition Healthy for Kids?

What I won’t disagree with is that our kids have an overdose access to knowledge.  Somebody once told me that learning from me is like trying to drink water from a fire hydrant, and that’s true but I’ll tell you, kids are adaptable.  They will drink as much knowledge as you give them.

The other day, Julie and the kids came home from the beach with a rare sea turtle that had predatory injuries as it tried to make it’s way to the Gulf Stream.  So they brought it home, we scoured the internet and nursed/exercised it until we were able to deliver it to a wildlife rescue the next day.  We learned not only about sea turtles and the Gulf Stream, but of course it was another opportunity to learn team work, nurturing and unselfishness - teaching opportunities.  If you are a parent, you know this and hopefully you both find and take advantage of these opportunities often.  Kids learn more and much faster than most parents believe.

Occasionally I am given the opportunity to show what I’m talking about and without fail, it blows people away.  I can’t tell you how many times friends and family members have come up to me and said, ‘You know I just don’t think he/she is ready to tie their shoes and I’m ready to throw in the towel.’

Hmmm….what to do?  I know for a fact that this 5-6 year old can tie their shoes and I can teach them in 20 minutes.  And I don’t intend to get them to mimick, I mean teach in such a way that they’re doing it weeks and months from now.  Now, I can’t guarantee you anything when they hit their teens - I can only do so much!

An opportunity like this becomes multi-tasking for me, because as much as I want to teach this child to tie his/her shoes, the bigger joy for me is teaching the parent how to teach and what their kids are capable of doing.  That is the gift that keeps on giving.

So how do I do that?  First off, I cut the bs.  Stories have a place in teaching, but not for simple tasks.  This is a job for mechanics and memory.  Most people want to teach something about a rabbit jumping through a hole - I don’t.  I show them, ‘hey, you have to make this loop so that the knot will hold, but still allow you to untie them easily.  Besides, we have to do something with all of this shoelace to keep you from falling on your face in front of pretty girl/handsome guy!  See how that works?’  And they laugh - and learn.

And it always amazes me that we double task our kids.  How did our teachers teach us the planets?  ‘My very eager mother, blah blah blah’.  Right?  My thought goes like this - I can teach my kids that sentence but then they have to translate upon memory which of course takes longer.  Just teach them the planets - then they only have one thing to remember.  Plus, they might be distracted by the silliest of things…”my very eager mother…chased me around the house last night yelling at me to clean my room!  Ahhh, I hate cleaning my room AND the planets.”

Another example is bi-lingual teaching.  If you want fluency, then you want to teach your kids to ‘think’ in their second language - not translate.  So you don’t show them the French word ‘rouge’ and follow by saying ‘red’ and connecting those two ‘words’, instead you teach them the same way you taught them their primary language, say ‘rouge’ and point to something that is rouge.

So to wrap up, how it is I teach so effectively, it’s like this - I keep it simple and here’s the big key, the key that burns it into memory - repetition and praise.  I’ve tought many kids to tie their shoes in 20 minutes and it’s a very active 20 minutes.  We start with the base knot.  Then I untie it and make them repeat it. We probably do this 20 times - the first few times they giggle and laugh because it seems silly to them to have to repeat this rather simple, single task.  But then, they get what’s going on and they start burning it in.  Repetition.  Then we move to the next step but every single time starting with the base knot.  You build the pyramid and everytime, start at the base and move up 1 platform every 3-4 times or so.

Now, older kids will fight this sometimes.  That’s ok.  Praise them more and turn it into a challenge.  Kids can’t resist a good challenge.

Behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner said that there are 5 main obstacles in learning:

1. People have a fear of failure
2. There is a lack of directions
3. There is also a lack of clarity in the direction
4. Positive reinforcement is not used enough
5. The task is not broken down into small enough steps

Skinner suggests that with all of the obstacles out of the way any age appropriate skill can be taught using his 5 principles:

1. Have small steps
2. Work from most simple to most complex tasks
3. Repeat the directions as many times as possible
4. Give immediate feedback
5. Give positive reinforcement

Don’t take my word for it - give it a try and remember a couple of things: it usually works, the younger the child or the longer you’ve been using this method the better, so don’t give up - takes breaks until you get the feel for it - once it clicks, you’ll be glad you did it.

Everything is always okay in the end, if it’s not okay, then it’s not the end.

Experience is something you don’t get until just after you need it.

For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism.

For every problem there is one solution which is simple, neat and wrong.

Friendship is like money, easier made than kept.

Bravery is being the only one who knows you’re afraid.

Character is what you are. Reputation is what people think you are.

Depression is merely anger without the enthusiasm.

Don’t argue with a fool. Spectators won’t be able to tell the difference.

Don’t cry because its over, smile because it happened.

Don’t let yesterday take up too much of today.

“Well, you see Norm, it’s like this. A herd of buffalo can only move as fast as the slowest buffalo. And when the herd is hunted, it’s the slowest and weakest ones at the back that are killed first. This natural selection is good for the herd as a whole, because the general speed and health of the whole group keeps improving by the regular killing of the weakest members.”

“In much the same way, the human brain can only operate as fast as the slowest brain cells.  Now, as we know, excessive intake of alcohol kills brain cells. But naturally it attacks the slowest and weakest brain cells first.”

“In this way, regular consumption of beer eliminates the weakest brain cells, making the brain a faster and more efficient machine. And that, Norm, is why you always feel smarter after a few beers.”

I’ll drink to that.