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Mon 9/1: Bike, 16 miles Tue 9/2: Bike, 7.5 miles Wed 9/3: Bike, 10 miles Thu 9/4: Bike Fri 9/5: Bike Sat 9/6: no Sun 9/7: no Mon 9/8: no Tue 9/9: Bike, 10 miles Wed 9/10: no Thu 9/11: Bike, 10 miles (a.m.) Fri 9/12: no Sat 9/13: no Sun 9/14: Bike, 10 miles Mon 9/15: Bike, 9 miles (a.m.) Tue 9/16: Bike, 10 miles (a.m.) Wed 9/17: Bike Thu 9/18: Bike Fri 9/19: no Sat 9/20: Bike Sun 9/21: Bike Mon 9/22: no Tue 9/23: no Wed 9/24: Bike 10 miles Thu 9/25: Bike 10 miles Fri 9/26: no Sat 9/27: no Sun 9/28: no Mon 9/29: Bike 8 miles Tue 9/30: no

Of course, creating a Personal Mission Statement for yourself is a serious undertaking, which must be approached with thoughtfulness, introspection, patience. It usually takes months of thinking and rewriting to develop one that you are comfortable with. OR you could just go to this site and click and it will create one for you. ;) You now have a possible starting point for your personal mission statement. To find happiness, fulfillment, and value in living I will: LEAD a life centered around the principles of honesty, patience, and humility. REMEMBER what’s important in life is family, friends, sincerity, sense of accomplishment, and peace of mind. REVERE admirable characteristics in others, such as being patient, proactive, wise, sensitive, creative, and compassionate, and attempt to implement similar characteristics in my own life. RECOGNIZE my strengths and develop talents as a person who is a communicator, diplomatic, sincere, imaginative, insightful, and empathic. HUMBLE myself by acknowledging that I can be procrastinator, unmotivated, and disorganized and by constantly striving to transform my weaknesses into strengths. ENVISION myself becoming a person who: - my family members think is compassionate, patient, and dependable. - my friends think is creative, patient, sensitive, and witty. - my coworkers think is proactive, dependable, self-reliant, and wise.

I’m exploring the FranklinCovey.com web site. A bunch of essays are freely available here: Knowledge Expo These two seem to relate most of Habit 2 well: Center on Principles by Stephen R. Covey and Moral Compassing by Stephen R. Covey This is a good explanation of Habit 3: First Things First by Stephen R. Covey

I’m still reading Stephen Covey’s The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. A quick summary of Habit 2: Attend your own funeral. First creation, second creation. Difference between leadership and management. Finding one’s center. Personal mission statement. Rescripting, a work in progress. Importance of visualization.

The #1 habit of “highly effective people” according to Stephen Covey is “Be Proactive”. This makes a lot of sense to me. I believe I am already very aware of this principle, but there are probably numerous ways I could take it to heart which I have not yet tried. The basic point of this chapter is that our freedom to choose our own actions is what makes us uniquely human. Most animals are wired up like this: (stimulus) -> (response). If an animal can be trained, that is still a pretty direct response to a stimulus. Humans are unique in their ability to decide on a different action (or no action) to a given situation. We are wired up like this: (stimulus) -> (filter: beliefs and values) -> (decision) -> (response). This is similar to something else I wrote in 2001. ...

This author has put his finger on exactly what bothers me about most “self help” literature. There is a fundamental difference between building a strong character and just putting on a happy face and “thinking positive”. As my study took me back through 200 years of writing about success, I noticed a startling pattern emerging in the content of the literature. Because of our own pain, and because of similar pain I had seen in the lives and relationships of many people I had worked with through the years, I began to feel more and more that much of the success literature of the last 50 years was superficial. It was filled with social image consciousness, techniques and quick fixes–with social band-aids and aspirin that addressed acute problems and sometimes even appeared to solve them temporarily, but left the underlying chronic problems untouched to fester and resurface time and again. ...

Remind me to replace this with a real weekend report. Friday: trick knee, no exercise. Sat. Knee not as bad, went swimming for exercise, dinner with D and C Sun. knee is OK, but dealing with scope made it hurt again, and favoring it now gives me twinges in the other one. Got scope out, saw mars with unicorn and kitty.

Wednesday: Up early to go to Sacramento. Picked up Bruce, got to Sac office about 9:30. Worked on fetch finishing touches with Bruce. (Make that “offered moral support while Bruce did 90% of the work.”) Fired off questions to Dan, Hugo, etc. about how things should go. Managed to get some time with Michael, Stacy, and a bit with Hugo, Dan and Tommy. Attended the Wednesday Sac meeting. M came with us to the office and we took off at lunchtime to meet M’s parents, brother and brother’s fiance, and about 945281 people who are old friends of M’s folks. Had Chinese… got there just in time for starting on the soup. The place we went is about 35 min from the office to the East, so it was a long lunch. ...

For those who didn’t quite read all the details of our trip, we are now proud owners of a timeshare known affectionately as Hilton Grand Vacations Club on the Las Vegas Strip. Here are some facts. Our fraction of the property is based on a 1-bedroom suite occupied for 7 days. It’s not a specific assigned week, it is based on a reservation system, first-come first-served. We have the option to take a smaller suite for a longer time, or a larger one for a shorter time. If we go at an off-peak time we can have 14 days instead of 7. The cost of this timeshare property is a little less than a new car. We will probably pay it off in 3-4 years. After it is paid off we can use it forever, we just have to pay a yearly maintenance fee of $480 (kind of like a condo association fee). The 7-days (or 14 off peak) can be used at the home resort, or any resort in the Hilton Grand Vacations system, such as Florida (beaches, islands, disneyworld), Hawai’i or Scotland, or a couple other places. We can trade with other timeshare owners using a network called RCI. Because Hilton properties are quite desirable, we can trade our 7 days for 10 days most anywhere else on the network. If we decide to take shorter vacations, we can reserve in smaller blocks (2 or 3-day minimum I think). We can also decide to fold our points into Hilton Honors program and get “normal” hotels instead (or air fare or rental cars or a combination of things.) They gave us 9.9% financing which is not bad, but I still want to refinance with our credit union. Our property is 10 acres, and is located on the strip across from Wet ’n Wild, between Circus Cirus and Stratosphere. 0.00406% of 10 acres is 176 square feet. Therefore, property in Nevada is about US$100 per square foot, if purchased with a resort already attached. This makes the sale price of the entire resort by the developers about $450M. So, the only thing left to decide is, where are we going on vacation next year, and who should we take with us?

Friday: I think we got Chevy’s food. Not much going on. Saturday: Pedalled in the morning. Went to dinner with helenschappell and wschappell, had a good time. Went to Mudd’s and had a great dinner, and went back to their place to play with kitten. We did our best to tire out the little ragamuffin, but he dozed for 15 min and was playful again. “I got my breath back, it must be a new day!” Returned home and reassured our kitties that they are still the only ones in our lives, despite the Interesting Scents. ...