Of the thousands of radio commercials I heard as a kid (I was, and still am, an inveterate radio listener) there is one that still stands out loud and clear in my memory. It was for a product called “Carter’s Little Liver Pills.” I’m pretty sure the adjective “little” was intended to modify “pills” rather than liver. Anyway, the reason I remember the commercial so well was it’s wonderful tagline, “If life’s not worth living it may be the liver.”
When I started to work full-time at the age of 14, there was no such thing as job security. Feeling that I could probably find another job of some kind in a week, I set a target of saving enough money to cover my expenses for seven days. When I reached that, I then set one of being able to live for two weeks, then three weeks, a month, and so on until I had a nest egg sufficient to last me six months. I figured that in six months I could learn new skills which would help me find secure work. Had I started out with the goal of saving enough money to live on for half a year, I likely would have become discouraged and abandoned the process very early on. But by setting a short-term realistic target, and then setting another realistic target when the previous one was reached, I discovered the right way to set goals.
It’s interesting how habits are formed and what people sometimes read into them. Athletes are notorious creatures of habit, usually based on superstition, and coaches are sometimes even worse. When I started to play junior hockey in Toronto, the coach noticed that I always put a towel inside the knee of my right goalie pad. After getting new pads, without even thinking about it I put the towel inside the pad for a couple of games. Just when I stopped using the towel the team hit a bit of a slump, the main cause of which the coach figured was me; so he told me to put the towel back in my pad. I didn’t have the heart to tell him the reason I did it in the first place was because my landlady’s cat had urinated on the inside of the old pad.
As a teenager I worked a summer in Saskatchewan. One of the people I befriended lived on a ranch, and on a Saturday we accompanied his father to a livestock sale. I watched his father, seemingly just by glancing at them, buy about a dozen cattle. At the end of the auction the animals were grouped in herds according to buyer. It was clear my friend’s father had selected the cream of the crop, although that wasn’t obvious when he chose them from the original large herd. When I asked him on what he had based his selections he said, “I just use my judgement.” I asked him if he could explain that in a little more detail. “No,” he replied.
Back in the 60s, during a lull in a poker game at the Legion Branch in Morell, PEI, when everyone else had gone either to the washroom or the bar, I turned to my friend Al Baker, a perfectly happy lifelong bachelor then in his early 40s, and asked him why he never got married. “Well,” he said with uncommon candour, “anybody I ever wanted didn’t want me. And I always figured I’d be happier wanting something I didn’t have than having something I didn’t want.”
Because my formal education ended at Grade X, I was a provisional student in the course leading to the designation Chartered Accountant (now Certified Public Accountant). The provision was that if I failed an exam I was out, whereas other students could fail three times before losing their chance at becoming a C.A. Walking into the room to write my first exam, I was almost trembling with fear. Then I remembered President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s admonition that the only thing we had to fear was fear itself. Did I know enough to pass the exam? Probably. Was anyone trying to prevent me from passing? Definitely not. Was I writing the same exam as everybody else in the room? Yes. So, what was there to be afraid of other than fear itself? Nothing. (Yes, I passed.)