How to start a restaurant and live to tell about it.

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Delancey : A Man, A Woman, A Restaurant, A Marriage by Molly Wizenberg, Simons & Schuster, 2014.

I try to remind myself periodically that every single business, whether part of a chain or not, large or small, scruffy or classy, is the product of someone’s vision and hard work.  There’s a couple in our church who recently opened a franchised consignment women’s clothing store, and it was quite a process, from obtaining a location to getting a small business loan.  (For instance, the man had quit his job so that he could concentrate on opening the business, but the bank wouldn’t give him a loan unless he had a job.  But his job was going to be the business.  I think he had to go back to work to get the loan so that he could then quit.  Or something like that.  It was incredibly complicated.)  Once the store actually opened the real work began.  It seems completely impossible to me; I guess I’m just not all that entrepreneurial.

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What do you need to form a habit?

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A time, a place, and a plan.

This principle is courtesy, once again, of Josh Waltz, the pastor of my church.  The study of habits is really big right now, with the trend bookended by, of course, two books.  Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit was a great hit three years ago; I quote from it fairly extensively in the chapter on habits in my own book.  And tomorrow Gretchen Rubin’s new book Better Than Before:  Mastering the Habits of Our Everyday Lives comes out.  I can hardly wait to read it!

One of Duhigg’s best insights is the idea of so-called “keystone habits.”  In my book I said that for me a keystone is getting up in the morning when I wake up instead of just lying there.  This morning I did indeed get up at 5:00, and, while I wouldn’t say that the day has gone perfectly, I’ve certainly been more productive than usual.

No habit exists in isolation.  My habit of a weekday 45-minute walk can’t take place unless there’s time for me to take it, which feeds right back into my getting-up-when-I-wake-up habit.  And since I’ve strengthened the habit of cutting out most of the added sugar from my diet I’ve felt much more alert and willing to get up in the mornings.  That difference makes me wonder if I’ve been going around with blood-sugar levels that have been just a bit high most of the time, which can’t have been good.  Since my higher-than-expected A1C levels at the end of 2014 I’ve been very, very motivated to keep things under control.  It wasn’t enough for me to just say, “Sugar isn’t good for anyone, so I need to just cut most of it out.”  No, I needed a scare.

Just because it’s mid-March instead of New Year’s Day doesn’t mean you can’t start a new good habit.  (It helps most of us to think in terms of doing something good rather than not doing something bad.)  What can you do today to build a positive structure into your life?

It’s How You Think that Counts

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Telling Yourself the Truth by William Backus and Marie Chapian, Bethany House Publishers, 1980, most recent reprint 2000.

I read this book about 30 years ago when I was an adjunct professor at the  University of Colorado at Denver.  One of my assignments to my freshman comp class was to write a book review, and one of my students wrote about this book.  It’s funny how vividly I remember discussing its ideas with her and how little I tried to put them into practice!

The premise of this book is so simple as to seem simplistic:  change your beliefs, your thoughts, so that you are telling yourself the truth, and your life will change.

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Keep on doing . . .

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. . . the small things.

I know.  I’ve written on this subject before.  And I hope this particular story doesn’t come across as trivial.  It struck me as an interesting object lesson, so I’m passing it on.

The picture is of the diamond stud earrings that Jim bought me for our 12th anniversary.  (Diamonds for the dozenth, you see.)  [Please note: When we moved this site to a new platform I lost a lot of images, including this one–and I’m too lazy to take a new one!] I must admit that I did sort of tell him that I wanted these.  Anyway, they’re very beautiful, and I wanted to wear them all the time, but I also wanted to be able to wear my regular earrings, so the only solution was to get another set of piercings on my ears, which I did.  It took quite awhile for the new holes to heal, but I persisted.

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The Power and Danger of First Impressions

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Blink:  The Power of Thinking without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell, Little Brown & Company, 2005.

There’s so much to say about this relatively short book that I’m going to have a hard time keeping this post to a reasonable length.  If you find yourself interested in the book already, then maybe you should go out and get it and not bother reading about it.

Still with me?  Okay.  You may or may not be familiar with Gladwell, whose other books are well worth reading also.  I will probably have a post later on about his newest one, David and Goliath.  He can probably best be described as a social psychologist.  The premise of Blink is that we are constantly making decisions and coming to conclusions that are intuitive and instantaneous, and that much of the time we’re correct when we do this but there are solid reasons why those instincts can lead us astray.

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The Myth of Control

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The Surrendered Wife:  A Practical Guide to Finding Intimacy, Passion, and Peace with a Man by Laura Doyle, Simon and Schuster, 2001.

I’m going to have to rein myself in on this post because there is a lot to say about this book’s ideas.  Where to begin?  I guess with a description of my initial reading of it, more than ten years ago.  A woman I greatly admired and respected mentioned it, saying that her husband had suggested she read it.  “How come?” she’d asked him.  “I don’t boss you around!”  And he’d said, “Well . . . ”  She seemed to think that it had indeed had something to say to her.  So I got it, and read it, and was indeed quite struck with it myself.  I wish I’d paid a little more attention to it at the time, but I guess it’s never too late to learn.

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Three Things I Learned . . .

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. . . from a performance of the Cirque du Soleil.

As a Christmas gift this past year, my dear sister-in-law Carol gave us tickets to see this group.  A very enjoyable outing, with the added bonus of some penetrating insights which I now share with you:

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You know what you know . . .

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Bible, Open, Book, Religion, Holy. . . because you believe what you believe.

Sounds as if I got my terms mixed up, doesn’t it?  But I didn’t.  I first heard this statement many, many years ago from the evangelist Bill Rice III, son of the founder of the Bill Rice Ranch in Murfreesboro, Tennessee.  (The BRR is a Christian camp that began primarily as a ministry for deaf children, brought about because the Rices’ daughter Betty was deaf.  As far as I can tell from the website, it’s still going strong today.)  It wasn’t original with him at all, but it stuck with me from that sermon.

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Shaming never works . . .

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. . . It’s only inspiring that works.” (Amit Sood, Professor of Medicine, Mayo Clinic)

I caught this statement on a radio segment about keeping New Year’s resolutions.  It aired sometime in January, I think, and now I can’t find it, but I was so impressed at the time that I looked it up to be sure the quotation was correct and to get the name of the speaker.

What do you think?  Do you find that you try to shame yourself or others into doing the right thing?  What kind of results do you get?