Today we talk about; podcasts, musical maturity tastes, partisan agreements, and toys.  Hard to think of another ten-minute daily review that gives you more mental sauce. 

Pew Research Center writes about the similarities between Democrats and Republicans.  Relationships with family and friends are at the core of the similarities between Democrats and Republicans.  In conflict resolution negotiations, it is best to start with what we have in common and work from there.  What Americans have in common, according to Pew Research, is a love of spending time with; family and friends outdoors.  What we find fascinating about the research is what’s not on the list.  Yesterday we talked about living in a simulation, and what’s not on the list of things that give people meaning and fulfillment?  Social media.

Being outside with people something human beings have done for hundreds of thousands of years.  Know how long we’ve been on social media?  We didn’t want to look that up for fear of the social media and corresponding ads that would chase us down based on our search. 

Some of us volunteered at a summer camp for high school kids a few years ago.  One of the rules of this camp, the students went on for a week, was no phones.  These kids hung out with each other for a week, talked, looked each other in the eyes, were present, and the smiles were genuine.  If you want to know the extent of the potential damage; apps, phones, and social media can have on kids –spend a week with them outside without technology.

One day at camp, we took the students’ white water rafting, it was an all-day excursion, and we packed food to take on the trip.  Mid-way through the day, we stopped, made a small camp, and had lunch.  The kids made it through lunch in twenty minutes and had another thirty minutes to kill before we returned to the river—a bunch of kids on a river bank, without tech, waiting to head back out.  Within five minutes, someone started skipping a rock, which turned into a contest; several others joined.  Next, someone else started swinging on a tree branch, another played rock-paper-scissors, and within ten minutes, everyone was playing some made-up game.  Eyes up, present, laughing, engaged, and having fun.

This reminded us that when the head is down and on the phone, we are in the matrix—plugged into the machine, designed to keep us agitated and distracted to suck the life out of us as long as possible.  The longer the heads are down, the more the machine wins.

Yesterday we focused on Fighting Cancer; today, let’s broaden the scope and fight with discouragement.  This is the culmination of years of reading and internal research, making it difficult to source.  This short bump from us will help you think about a few ways to fight discouragement.

Like many other negative self-assessments and emotions, our step is always ownership.  Before you can change, you need to know where you are, accept it, and know you can move from that position.  It may take years of partial acceptance, blame, and other factors before you can hit the personal bottom; once you do, you know it, and there is strength in that reality. 

Now that you know, move away from anything and everything that will get in the way of where you want to go.  If it’s diet related, for example, get rid of junk food, all of it.  If it’s money related, take your credit cards and cut them up, or do what a friend of one of our writers did in college; take your credit cards and freeze them in a block of ice.  Do a little cleanup, eliminate as much wrong as possible, and fill it with good.  Diets suck and usually don’t work; instead of starting a diet, put good stuff in.  Give yourself a healthy protein intake goal and healthy fruits and vegetables instead of a “don’t eat” plan.  Also, if it is diet related, drink more water –trust us, if you have any diet-related issues, you aren’t drinking enough water.  Just Drink It!  Once you set the base, step two is more manageable.

Assuming you set a good base, work the plan.  Think back to projects you have accomplished and use what has worked before.  Automate everything you can; the less you have to think, the less will get in your way.  Fitness examples: get dressed for the gym as soon as you get up in the morning.  We have friends who sign up for fitness classes and will charge you for not showing up – that’s brilliant!  Do that too.

Don’t overthink or over-commit in the beginning.  Big goals are great, and many things out there will tell you to go big.  We agree; this is issue #77 of our newsletter in 77 days; we know Go Big.  If you are coming out of or what to overcome discouragement, you need a few smaller wins to gain momentum.  Focus on one thing you can do now and one more you can do tomorrow, and build from there. 

The base is set, and the daily work has begun; now, it’s just a numbers game.  Remember, you own what got you to the start of this, and you knew it would be a fight from the beginning.  The battle is what you take into every day and what will get you to the next day.  Don’t forget, in many cases, easy is what brought you to discouragement in the first place.  The fight and the confidence to keep up the fight will get you out.  Go from the exhaustion of “how did I get here” to the exhaustion of the end of each day knowing you “fought the good fight today.” 

You are stronger than you think!  These ideas culminate in hundreds of sources, but the spark to write about this today came from Rick Warren’s daily newsletter on discouragement.

We first looked at this list of podcasts a few weeks ago but haven’t gotten through enough of the recommendations to write about it yet.  The list is too good to keep hidden, so we point it out for you, and you can start to go through the list and let us know what we should listen to.  The Guardian selected the best podcasts of the week last week.  The first podcast on the list we wanted to listen to was Jack Whitehall’s Safe Space, and it forced us to re-start our on-again, off-again subscription to Audible.  We fired up the Audible subscription and listened to one episode of Safe Space, and it was a new spin on a podcast.

Whitehall digs for embarrassing stories and finds great guests willing to tell stories.  Whitehall is a standup comedian and TV star who includes plenty of self-deprecating stories in his standup and on TV.  Whitehall did several years on a Netflix series called Travels with My Father. 

David Brooks is a writer and someone we have been following for years.  He writes for the New York Times and is also a contributor to PBS News Hour.  If you are a group that writes about the news and alternative music while following another mid-life writer who you recently learned also likes alternative music!  Consider yourself mind blown. 

Brooks wrote Confessions of a Middle-Aged Fanboy last week for the NYT, and it chronicles his life as a serious journalist and political pundit who enjoys rock-n-roll, concerts, and even hip-hop!  In step with our philosophy of A Punk Rock Life, Brooks walks you through his love of music, the varieties of music, the time in his life he discovered the music, and most importantly, why he’s not concerned about how it looks to anyone else.  The power of music and what it brings is another way to tell a story, something Brooks is a master at.

Brooks has also authored several books; his last book, Second Mountain, is about what you do after achieving success and looking at new ways to contribute and define yourself.  The middle-agers in this office recommend it.

Brooks is a conservative and the weekly segment he does for the PBS News Hour is a discussion between a traditional and a liberal.  You can imagine how challenging holding on to conservative views has been over the last several years.  It is hard to defend conservative viewpoints, and Brooks does not pander to conservatives when they decide to redefine truth and decency.  Again, that’s punk rock to us – standing for something and staying with those convictions despite the goings-on around you.  Thank you, David Brooks and Rock On!

Words | Music | Art | Unknown

David Brooks recommendation.

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Thank you for spending a few minutes with us!

With A Shout Team