New year, new everything

Jumbo squid are washing up in California and the Maritimes, armageddon is impending.

Nasty end to a fun year: Whoah, what a rude end to last year. It was just like a cheezy Kevin Bacon movie with lots of action and then a cheque got signed and it all went away. The mess is gone now and after all, it's only money :)

Anyways, this year is starting off really fantastic so far. Business is good and I am still sunburnt and chilled out. My productivity is through the roof and I don't know what word is the opposite of procrastination but that's where my head is at. I'm in an urgent rush to finish as much as I can as quick as I can so I can go surfing again.

Talk about a productivity boost. I guess that's the carrot part and the other messy thing was the stick.

Highly recommended reading: I read a lot of books about mental attitude and stuff like that. Some of them are cheeze (Robbins) some of them are sleepers (Chopra). The best book out of the whole lot so far has been a book called "Learned Optimism" by Martin Seligman. This is probably the first book anybody should read before setting out to motivate themselves to do great things. This guy is actually a behavioural scientist and the book isn't a motivational book - it's about learned helplessness and behavioral modification therapy. This book is especially relevant if you have kids or employees and you need to leverage their self esteem into success. This isn't a one time fat guy who drives a helicopter telling you about how great you can be if you visualize stuff in black and white - it's a review of animal and human behavioral experiments over the past few decades by some of the worlds leading behavioural scientists..

The bottom line is that for kids, success in a small area of their lives like hockey gives them the attitude to handle major challenges. For adults, success and control in small areas and a sense of control give you confidence to conquer much larger unrelated challenges. Small successes breed a sense of control which leverages your overall ability to control large successes.

Fun in the snow: On a different note, I am starting to snowboard again this year so drop me a line if you want to come up for a weekend and ride. We will be doing a bunch of skidoo excursions in Feb if anybody wants in as well - rentals are cheap around my place.

Oh yeah - this is my favorite news piece of the week.

One more thing - If you didn't cough up even a little bit of money to those who need it DO IT NOW. You would have to be the most selfish asshat to enjoy a house and food and deny somebody else the same luxury when you could have done something.

If you haven't or don't do something to help local or international charities this year, you should be ashamed of yourself - I don't care how broke you are.