Good morning.
And welcome to morning cereal
Okay, good morning
and welcome to Thursday.
Well, in the event you didn't know,
today is the first of May, it's May Day.
So let me be the first
to welcome you to it.
And in the event you didn't know
what May Day was celebrating,
well, it has its roots
in the European Festival,
marking the beginning of summer
and doing some
dancing around the May Pole.
And in the US, May Day
has come to celebrate
the return of spring,
but it also has its roots
in celebrating and supporting laborers
and the working class and
improved working conditions
for them as well.
So May Day has come to mean
a lot of different things.
Likewise, May is chock
full of days to celebrate,
including Anxiety Awareness Month,
Mental Awareness Month,
National Barbecue Month,
Better Sleep Month, I can support
all of those causes for sure.
And today alone
celebrates School Principals Day,
Blessing Day, Couple Appreciation Day,
National Day of Prayer,
National Phone and Sick Day.
And believe it or not, I've only
scratched the surface
of all the days I can mention right now.
However, I'll finally just
add today is Global Love Day.
We are all in this together,
which is a perfect
transition to our quote of today,
which emphasizes the interconnectedness
of all of our human experiences.
It's from iconic country
singer, Tim McGraw, who said,
quote, "We all take
different paths in life,
but no matter where we go,
we take a little of each other
everywhere," end quote.
Well, today's news facts
and birthdays are for May 1st.
And we're gonna start back in 1840,
when on this day, the Penny Black,
that was the world's
first adhesive postage stamp.
This stamp was issued by Great Britain.
However, the stamp is
not considered to be rare
because there were over
68 million of them printed.
And apparently 5% of
them are still surviving.
1840, that's a long time ago.
Well, we're gonna jump up to 1931,
when on this date, the
Empire State Building
opened up in New York City.
And at the time, it was
the world's tallest building
at 1,454 feet.
That was until 1970,
when the tallest buildings
became the World Trade Centers,
measuring in at 1,792 feet.
However, today, the
tallest building in the world,
today is the Burj Khalifa,
which is in Dubai, and it's 2,717 feet.
That's 163 floors, people.
I'm not even sure I'd
wanna go to the top of that,
let alone some of these
pictures I see of people
hanging off the top of it.
More power to them.
Well, the last fact
for today is from 1939,
and that was the first
appearance of Batman.
He appeared in the
detective comic book, number 27.
Well, happy birthday to you.
Today is your birthday.
You share a birthday with
just country singer, Tim McGraw.
He's 58 today.
And the number one song
on this date back in 1988
was "Wishing Well" by
Terrence Trent Darby.
Now, Terrence was up for
the best new artist Grammy,
but he ended up losing to Jodie Watley
at the 30th Annual Grammy Awards.
And even though
Terrence has since released
upwards of 12 albums,
"Wishing Well" was
his only number one hit.
And at the time, the song held the record
for the longest chart
climb to number one,
after being on the charts for 17 weeks
before it reached number one.
Well, get this, the current record is
held by "Glass Animals,"
the song "Heat Wave,"
which took 59 weeks to
reach the number one spot.
Well, good news is you
don't have to wait at all
for today's book review.
We're doing it right now.
We are reading Stephen R. Covey's
"The Seven Habits of
Highly Effective People,"
and we are in Covey's second chapter,
"The Seven Habits in Overview."
And this is where Covey is discussing
how important and
influential habits are in our lives
with habits being
defined as the intersection
of knowledge, skill, and desire.
Right, we all know this though,
growing from dependence to
independence to interdependence.
And these habits can be highly effective
when properly implemented in our lives
and properly balanced,
as we learned a lot about yesterday.
Well, speaking of yesterday,
we began Covey's
sub-chapter, "Three Kinds of Assets,"
and we learned a little
about the three assets
Covey speaks to being physical,
financial, and human.
And recall, Covey tells us that we must
maintain these assets
to keep them in proper working order
and at their highest effectiveness.
So yesterday we ended on the human asset,
which Covey says is the
most important, quote,
because people control
physical and financial assets,
end quote.
So Covey gives a couple examples
regarding of how the P slash PC balance
or the golden eggs in the
goose fit into our lives.
For example, in a marriage,
if two people are more
concerned about the benefits
in a relationship, the production, right?
The golden eggs, more so than preserving
what built that marriage and that bond,
then Covey says, quote,
"They often become
insensitive and inconsiderate,
neglecting the little
kindnesses and courtesies
that are so important to a deep
relationship," end quote.
And when this happens, Covey believes
you'll often see them try to manipulate
and control each other,
focusing on their own needs,
justifying their positions
and looking for
wrongness in the other person.
Quote, "The love, the
richness, the softness
and the spontaneity begin to deteriorate.
The goose gets sicker
day by day," end quote.
And in another example,
Covey turns to the relationship
between an adult and our children.
Children are very vulnerable
and they're very
dependent on us from a young age
and an adult could
easily take advantage of this.
If they are not careful to put the work
into the production capability,
the goose working on
communicating with their children,
relating to your
children and listening to them,
parenting can go wrong
if you have the golden
egg mentality, right?
You're getting only the results you want.
This would be more of an
authoritarian parenting style,
having things your way all the time,
trying to get the results that you want.
Or if you're more of a
permissive parenting style
where you just want to
be liked by your child,
those are the golden eggs also.
And all that can happen
while neglecting the goose,
which is building that trusting
relationship with the child.
Covey gives us a great
real world example of this
that makes this much more clear.
So let's say you want your
kiddo to have a clean room, okay?
To have a clean room.
A clean room would be the P, right?
The production, the result.
That's the golden egg.
But secondarily, say you want your kid
to be the one to clean the room, right?
Your kid is the PC, the
production capability.
They're the goose.
They're the asset that
produces the golden egg,
which would be cleaning the room.
Covey says if you have production
and production capability balance,
your kiddo will clean
the room cheerfully, quote,
"Without being reminded
because she is committed
and has the discipline to
stay with the commitment,"
end quote.
Here, Covey gets a little robotic saying,
"Your kid is a
valuable asset at this point
because she is a goose that
can produce a golden egg."
However, on the other hand,
if our only goal is getting the golden
egg of a clean room,
quote, "You might find
yourself nagging her to do it.
You might even escalate your efforts
to threatening or yelling.
And in your desire to get the golden egg,
you undermine the health
and the welfare of the goose,"
end quote.
Covey's point, we must maintain and
invest in our assets,
whether they be physical,
financial, or human assets.
Those are the gooses that
produce the golden eggs.
We must take note to always keep balance
between the production,
the result, the golden eggs,
and the production
capability, the assets, the goose.
All right, well, tomorrow,
the second to last
sub-chapter of chapter two and part one,
which is entitled Organizational PC,
which is organizational
production capability.
Okay, deep breath.
May is here, people.
Let's make it a great one.
I could have turned that
into a dad joke saying,
"May kid a good one," but
I didn't, I'm above that.
So thanks for joining us today.
Come back 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.
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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.