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Good morning, and welcome to Morning Cereal!
Pull up a stool, grab your favorite cereal, and let’s kick-start your day with a spoonful of inspiration, nostalgia and personal growth. Join your host, Shaen Inglis, as he highlights the music, movies, and moments that made the 80s, 90s, and 2000s unforgettable—kind of like digging for toy at the bottom of the cereal box. Each episode, Shaen also reviews a chapter or so from top wellness books, offering practical insights to help you set a positive tone for your day. Start your mornings right—no cartoons required!
Follow and subscribe to the Morning Cereal podcast and visit our Life Happens, Live Balanced channel and our website at shaeninglis.com to check out and follow our other podcasts. You can also follow Shaen @ShaenInglis on Instagram, YouTube, etc. Feel free to share the Morning Cereal with someone who could use a little fun and motivation to start their day right.
Hello, Hello and happy Thursday to you- the day after Christmas! I can’t believe Christmas has come and gone. I hope you and your family and friends had a fantastic holiday season - no matter what you're celebrating I hope you got to spend some really good time with loved ones along with some likely well needed rest and relaxation as well. If you're really lucky maybe you even have the rest of this week off to sit around the house and get a little extra time with the family, building legos, eating leftovers and probably cleaning up a little bit too.
Well thanks for joining us again. And if you joined us for the first and second podcasts on December 2nd and 3rd, I wanted to make sure you were aware that you’re not going crazy and you haven't missed anything. Because this is indeed the third podcast- so you’re in the right place at the right time. We just skipped about 3 weeks in-between the 2nd and 3rd episodes and a lot has happened in that time since those first, what were really test episodes, and I’m not just talking about the Winter Solstice, Hanukkah, Christmas, and all that good stuff, but we’ve been busy climbing the learning curve of producing, editing and distributing the podcast, including all the supporting business framework, etc. We also have spent time nailing down some of our other podcast to really try and pull it all together and do this right for you. So, thank you for hanging in there with us.
From this point forward we should be pretty consistent with providing daily Morning Cereal podcasts for you on a Monday through Friday schedule. So, I’m really looking forward to getting in a good grove and delivering some great content to you.
That said, let’s go ahead and jump into today’s episode with today’s quotes. That’s right I said quotes, plural. I will provide a fun nostalgic quote from the 80’s, 90’s or 2000’s and then a second quote to tease our book review later in the episode. I’m counting on at least one of the quotes speaking to you and helping jump starting your day in a positive direction. So, let’s get on with it.
[TODAY’S QUOTES]
• Alright, the first quote is from Ferris Bueller Days’ off, hopefully you have the day off too, here it is, ”Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” That’s some sage advice from young Ferris in 1986.
• And today’s teaser quote from the book review is, “Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain – and most fools do. But it takes character and self-control to be understanding and forgiving.” We’ll unpack that here in a minute during the book review segment, but first let’s jump into our usual dose of nostalgia and fun facts from this day in history.
[HISTORIC NOSTALGIA]
• Today’s nostalgic and historic news facts are for Dec. 26.
o And we’re going to begin all the way back in 1903 when, near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, the Wright brothers made their first successful sustained flight when they glided 120 feet over 12 seconds.
o Then in 1925 in NYC, that’s the year Madison Square Garden formally opened with an NHL game
o In 1973 the horror classic The Exorcist was released in the United States.
o In 1982, Time Magazine named the personal computer as the “man of the year.” Interestingly, the personal computer was named person of the year again in 1999.
o In 1991 Mikhail Gorbachev resigned as President of the Soviet Union, effectively dissolving the USSR and marking the end of the Cold War era.
o In 1993, Schilinder’s List opened and eventually wins Steven Speilberg his first Oscar.
o And finally, 1998, my beloved Spice Girls scored their 8th No. 1 Single in the UK with their song ‘Goodbye’
[BIRTHDAYS]
• Okay, moving on to birthdays, Happy birthday if today is your birthday. You share a birthday with:
o [Beginning PLAY]Lars Ulrich, he’s the drummer for Metallica and he is 60 years old today.
o Kit Harington, best known from his portrayal of Jon Snow on Game of Thrones is 37 – My wife and I keep talking about rewatching that series b/c it was so good.
o Ozzie Smith – the famed major league baseball shortstop, he’s 69
o And do everything man - Jared Leto he’s 53 today –
o And finally, Chris Daughtry of American Idol fame is 46 – so happy birthday to everyone
[MUSIC/MOVIES]
• Now to my favorite segment of Morning Cereal, the music of the 80’s, 90’s and 2000’s:
o [3:05 PLAY] Here is the #1 song from this date in 1992. This is an iconic ballad from the late, great Whitney Houston and remake of Dolly Parton’s original from 1974. This song was #1 for 14 weeks, which was a record at the time. This takes me straight back to highschool.
o [BEGINNING PLAY] And finally, this was the anthem for the number #1 movie on this date in 1997. That’s Celine Dion’s, My Heart Will Go from James Cameron’s Titanic. That is also a top 5, top 10 movie of mine. This movie is still number 4 on the alltime gross box office list at just shy of $2.3BN.
What a great episode so far, my family and friends will note what a good day it is for me to mention both the Spice Girls and Celine Dion in one episode. I have an eclectic music library and I’m a fan of both of them.
[BOOK REVIEW-800 words or less]
Okay, let’s tap into some self-motivation in the book review segment of “Morning Cereal” where we take a few moments to reflect on lessons learned from the current book we’re reading. We are reading through Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People.” This is a timeless book, that is consistently on every must read lists because it’s packed with rock-solid advice and actions for all of us to use and build healthy foundational concepts to live by.
We are still in Chapter 1, entitled “If you want to gather honey, don’t kick over the beehive.”
On the last show we discussed how criticizing or ridiculing people generally creates negative outcomes. First, the person you are criticizing will more than likely just dig deeper into their position and become so entrenched they will not see your perspective. And secondly, criticism towards others won’t accomplish anything positive, it’s not generating a positive environment, and most likely will create more negativity towards ourselves. Our takeaway was to take a deep breath and a moment before throwing negativity out there in how we talk to, communicate or treat other people.
That brings us to today’s reading where we are nearly to Carnegie’s Principal Number 1. But before we get to that, Carngie continues to hit home on how dealing with people is a learned and a practiced skill that we as individuals should hone. We all know people that we would like to change or to regulate, but Carnegie suggest that we should first start with ourselves. I think this is a natural course of thought for us. I say that because I know as we raise our children, and teach them how to react in certain situations, we tell our children that they can only control themselves. Right, but somewhere along the path to adulthood, we start to think we should be in control other people too. In fact, at times we start to hold others to a higher standard than we hold ourselves too. To this point, Carnegie quotes the famous Chinese philosopher Confucius, saying, “Don’t complain about the snow on your neighbor’s roof when your own doorstep is unclean.” Or perhaps a more recent saying capturing the same point, “People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones,” or “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.”
So the point is to start this improvement process with learning to controlling ourselves. And neither Carnegie, nor I, are not suggesting its easy to always take the high road. In fact, Carngie gives a couple of examples about himself and Mark Twain who found it hard to control the impulse to throw out some negativity. There is a funny quote from Twain that he wrote to a young editor, and I’m picking it up in the middle of a sentence here, but Twain said this about the young editor , “…and see that the proofreader retains his suggestions in the mush of his decayed brain.” And in another note Twain wrote, “The thing for you is a burial permit. You have only to speak and I will see that you get it.” If only we still spoke like that still today, right. However, in todays terms, what Twain essentially said was, “I will end you, test me.” If you didn’t know, a short temper was a known character trait of Mark Twain’s. The good news is that Twain’s wife never sent the nasty letters and the other good news is that we are in good company if we aren’t always perfect, and lose our cool at all times.
However, to win friends and influence people, we do need to have a clear sense of who we want to be and how we want to react. And part of that is understanding how other people interpret what we say and the perspectives from which they interpret it. Carnegie says, “let us remember we are not dealing with creatures of logic. We are dealing with creatures of emotion, creatures bristling with prejudices and motivated by pride and vanity.” So we need to learn to communicate and act in and around other people’s prejudices and motivations.
Carnegie speaks of Benjamin Franklin, founding father, inventor, etc., that Franklin was tactless in his youth and he also had to learn the art of dealing with people – but he did so and in a major way which helped him achieve the great diplomatic heights we are all aware of. When asked of his secret to success, Franklin replied, “I will speak ill of no man, and speak all the good I know of everybody.” Now, up to this point Carnegie has spoken to the fact that most people have to learn the art of dealing with people. But just as important as learning the skills, is having the self-control to utilize and implement those learned skills. Carnegie says, “Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain – and most fools do. But it takes character and self-control to be understanding and forgiving.”
Again, we as readers are pointed to the fact that we need to rise above our emotions, rise above a particular situation and take a measured approached to our actions in how we speak to others, in how we treat other people. Thomas Carlyle provides a good quote for us to end on and ponder today, he said, “A great man, or woman, shows his greatness by the way he treats little men.”
Alright we’ll pick it from here tomorrow and I promise we’ll finish chapter 1 and get to Carnegie’s Principal number 1.
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Ok – Go out there and have a great day! You’ve got this! Have the courage to just keep swimming. Remember Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans – So, make those in between moments matter. Have a fantastic day!