Good morning.
And welcome to morning cereal
Okay, good morning
and welcome to Thursday.
I know I don't need to remind you that
it's Valentine's Day
Eve, so check your to-do
lists.
Your cards, chocolates, flowers, dinner
reservations, jewelry, cars,
however you do it, you have
less than 24 hours to get it done.
And if you're single this Valentine's
Day, that's even better
because today is National
Self-Love Day.
So if I were you, I would just take today
and tomorrow, along with
the rest of the weekend,
and make it a four-day weekend to just
really enjoy some me time.
But if you are looking for that someone
special, you also
have less than 24 hours.
No pressure, but good news.
Today is also National
Wingman Day, so call up your goose.
And please tell me you all
know that's a Top Gun reference.
Anyways, call up your goose, find a
piano, and sing your little hearts out.
Okay, let's go ahead and jump into
today's episode with today's quotes.
One fun, nostalgic quote, and then a
second quote to tease our
book review later in the
episode.
Hopefully, one of these quotes will speak
to you today and
jumpstart your day in a positive
direction.
All right, the first quote is from the
author of the Peanuts
cartoons, Charles Schulz,
and he said, "Friendship isn't about who
you've known the longest.
It's about the friend who comes and
stands by your side in bad times."
And these types of friends are hard to
make, so hold on to them.
And today's teaser quote from the book
review is, "Few people are logical.
Most of us are prejudiced and biased."
And as usual, we'll go ahead and unpack
that here in just a few
minutes in the book review
segment, but first, let's jump into our
usual dose of fun and
historic facts from this day
in history.
Today's news facts and birthdays are for
February 13th, and there's
a lot of interesting news
facts for this day, so hang in there with
me, but we're going to
start all the way back
in 1633.
That's when Galileo arrived in Rome to
face charges of heresy for
advocating the Copernican
theory, and that theory holds that the
earth revolves around the sun.
It's witchcraft, I tell you.
And then in 1866, Jesse James, he held up
his first bank, stealing $15,000 from the
Clay County Savings
Association in Liberty, Missouri.
And in 1891, American artist Grant Wood,
he was born near Anamosa, Iowa.
You would know his most famous piece of
the farmer and his wife
standing in front of their
home with pitchforks
and not a smile to be had.
If you're watching on YouTube, you can
see it right here over my right shoulder.
But I've got a buddy that's from Iowa.
My wife went to school in Iowa, and I've
got some in-laws that live there as well.
And I can confirm that they do smile in
Iowa, but it usually has
to do with the Hawkeyes
mining.
Then, in 1945, Allied planes began
bombing the German city
of Dresden, resulting in a
devastating firestorm
that destroyed the city.
Then in 1960, France detonated its first
atomic bomb in the
French-Algerian Sahara Desert,
becoming the fourth nuclear nation.
Then skipping all the way up to 1996,
that's when Death Row
Records, they released rapper
Tupac Shakur's fourth studio album, All
Eyes on Me, and it was
to be his final release
during his lifetime.
Then in 1997, the Dow Jones Industrial
Average first eclipsed the 7000 mark.
It closed at 7,022.
And at the time of this recording, the
Dow was at over 44,000.
Then in 1998, you might remember the
Austrian downhill skier
Herman Maisers crash at the
Olympics when he flew 30 feet in the air.
Then he smashed through two fences at
approximately 80 miles an hour.
Luckily he walked away
and he won gold days later.
Then in 2000, that's when the last
Peanuts comic strip was
published in newspapers.
It was just hours after the death of the
creator Charles Schulz.
Then in 2004, the universe's largest
known diamond is discovered.
It's called BPM 37093.
And it's a white dwarf star about 50
light years from Earth,
so not enough time to get
it for Valentine's Day.
The star was nicknamed Lucy after the
Beatles song Lucy in
the Sky with Diamonds.
And there's a lot of science around this,
but as a white dwarf star starts to cool,
they begin to crystallize.
And scientists believe that about 90% of
Lucy's mass has
crystallized into diamond.
That diamond has a radius of 2,500 miles
or 5,000 miles side to side.
All right.
Well, happy birthday of
today's your birthday.
You share a birthday with
football player Randy Moss.
He's 48.
British singer Robbie Williams.
He's 51.
And singer Peter Gabriel.
He's 75.
And the number one song on this date in
1981 was Celebration
by Cool and the Gang.
Okay.
Although I always enjoy and love
highlighting the songs from
the 80s and 90s, some of them
have a very personal
story attached to them for me.
And this is one of them.
I've loved music from a very young age
and my mom made me my
very first mixtape when
I was three or four years old.
And that tape only had two songs on it.
There's one on each side to make it
easier for me to work the tape.
And one of those songs was
Celebration by Cool and the Gang.
So this song goes back to my very first
memories and I still have the tape.
It was also the song to open up the
dancing at my wife and
I's wedding reception.
So this is a special song
with happy memories for me.
And in 2016, the song Celebration was
inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame.
Well, the number one movie on this date
back in 1993 was Groundhog Day.
Remember this movie?
You remember this movie?
Do you remember this movie?
This movie starred Bill Murray and it's
about a weatherman that
relives the same day over
and over again.
And apparently the first choice to play
the lead role was for Tom Hanks.
But Hanks turned it down and then Michael
Keaton turned it down as well.
Finally Bill Murray received the role and
he also received
rabies shots because he was
twice bitten by the
Groundhog during the filming.
It was not yet confirmed
if he was twice shy though.
It's a thinker.
And while you're thinking about that,
let's move on to some
personal growth in the book
review segment of Morning Serial.
This is where we take a few moments to
reflect on the lessons
learned from the current book
we're reading.
And currently we're reading through Dale
Carnegie's How to Win
Friends and Influence People.
It's a timeless book that is consistently
on all the must read
lists and it's packed
with rock solid advice and actions for
all of us to use and
build healthy foundational
concepts to live by.
Yesterday, we began chapter two entitled
Assure Way of Making
Enemies and How to Avoid It.
But Carnegie started this chapter by
admitting we can all be wrong at times.
But sometimes we are
right and we know it.
And the art in the
conversation is how we go about it.
And Carnegie began this chapter by
telling us that we won't make much
progress with people
if we approach a conversation telling
them we are going to
prove them wrong or change
their mind.
Instead, we should disarm them by telling
them perhaps we could
be wrong, as we often
can be, and that we should examine the
facts, make ourselves
open to where the facts take
us, and generally that will open the
other person up to the same.
Carnegie understands that we will come
across situations where
we just plain old know that
we are right.
There's just no question about it.
And Carnegie tells a story to illustrate
what can happen if we
just bluntly tell the other
person as such.
In this story, a lawyer is presenting his
what is clearly an
important case before the
United States Supreme Court.
And the case was actually Lusgarten
versus Fleet Corporation.
And it obviously involved an important
question of law as well
as a large sum of money.
Well, one of the judges asked the lawyer
a question that may
have been rhetorical, but
he asked how long the statute of
limitations was
questioning, quote, six years.
Is it not?
End quote.
And the lawyer stopped
and stared at the justice.
And he just replied, quote, Your Honor,
there is not a statute of
limitations in admiralty,
end quote.
As the lawyer told his story to one of
Carnegie's classes, he recalled the
courtroom fell silent
and it felt like the
temperature fell to zero.
And even though the lawyer was correct,
the law was on his side
and he spoke better than
he had ever spoken before.
He made the mistake of publicly telling a
very famous and intelligent judge that he
was wrong and therefore his argument
ended up not being
persuasive and he lost the case.
Carnegie reminds the reader here that we
humans can be a flawed bunch.
He says, quote, Few people are logical.
Most of us are prejudiced and biased.
Most of us are blighted with preconceived
notions with jealousy,
suspicion, fear, envy
and pride, end quote.
And because of this, most of us don't
want to change our minds
about anything from religion
to our haircuts to our favorite actors.
Carnegie is making the point that we are
often stubborn, making
changing other people's minds
very difficult.
And that is no
different in today's world.
And it might actually prove even more
difficult today based on the
current sociological norms.
But if you insist on changing people's
minds, Carnegie suggests
you read this paragraph
every morning before breakfast.
It's an excerpt from James Harvey
Robinson's book, The Mind in the Making.
Here's the excerpt.
We sometimes find ourselves changing our
minds without any
resistance or heavy emotion.
But if we are told we are wrong, we
resent the imputation
and harden our hearts.
We are incredibly heedless in the
formation of our beliefs,
but find ourselves filled
with an illicit passion for them when
anyone proposes to rob
us of their companionship.
It is obviously not the ideas themselves
that are dear to us,
but our self-esteem which
is threatened, end quote.
And this excerpt goes on to talk about
how important
something to which we associate
as ours is to us, like my house, my
dinner, my family, my
country, my God, my way of thinking,
and my beliefs.
And Robinson says that if anyone so much
has questioned
something that we hold so dear,
that we quote, "seek every manner of
excuse for clinging to
it, and that our so-called
reasoning consists of finding arguments
for going on believing
as we already do," end
quote.
Carnegie immediately follows this with
another passage from
psychologist Carl Rogers' book
on becoming a person, quoting, "I have
found it of enormous
value when I can permit myself
to understand the
other person," end quote.
Rogers asks the question, quote, "Is it
necessary to permit
oneself to understand another?
I think it is.
Our first reaction to most of the
statements which we hear from other
people is an evaluation
or a judgment rather
than understanding of it.
When someone expresses some feeling,
attitude, or belief, our
tendency is almost immediately
to feel, that's right, or that's stupid,
that's abnormal,
that's unreasonable, that's
incorrect, that's not nice.
Very rarely do we permit ourselves to
understand precisely what
the meaning of the statement
is to the other person," end quote.
There's a lot to digest
in these last two passages.
What we are learning though is that it's
difficult to change
someone's way of thinking and their
beliefs.
They are deeply held and associated with
their self-esteem and as
such, people will cling
to them, even unreasonably.
So we need to artfully approach these
conversations and looking to
disarm and with perspective
of the other person.
Okay, well, another heavy one today, but
join us again tomorrow as
we near the end of chapter
two and we hear some classic Carnegie
stories about overpriced
curtains and we get some
more advice from Benjamin
Franklin's autobiography.
Take a deep breath.
It's going to be a great day today.
Go out there and meet
the obstacles head on.
Thanks for joining us today.
We'll see you back here
tomorrow and have a fantastic day.
Don't forget to follow and subscribe to
the Morning Serial
podcast on the One Life
Live It channel.
You can find more episodes and videos by
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website at Shawningless
and at Shawningless.com, where you can
also follow our other
podcast, the Mr. and Mrs.
Inglis podcast and the
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In these other podcasts, we'll dive
deeper into everyday issues,
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well-being, business and finance, and we
welcome special guests too.
So join us.
It'll be a good time, I promise.
Thanks again for listening.
Have a fantastic day and
we'll see you tomorrow.