Greatest. Day. Ever.: How to Make Every Day Your Greatest

Copyright © 2014 Roger Lajoie.

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ISBN: 978-1-4525-9095-0 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4525-9097-4 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4525-9096-7 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014901253

Balboa Press rev. date: 3/27/2014

Contents

Dedication

Introduction

Chapter One

Signs, Signs, Everywhere There’s Signs

Chapter Two

The Greatest Day Ever Is Today

Chapter Three

Habits – Make the Right Time Choices

Chapter Four

Step One: Set the Tone. Start the Day on the Right Foot.

Chapter Five

Step Two: Monitor Your Thoughts. Always Think About What You Are Thinking.

Chapter Six

Step Three: Get Spiritual Nourishment. Fill Your Mind with Positive Words.

Chapter Seven

Step Four: Count Your Blessings, Not Your Troubles. You Have More Than You Think You Do.

Chapter Eight

Step Five: Finish Well. End the Day on a Strong Note.

Chapter Nine

Stories to Keep the Inspiration Going

Chapter 10

Never a Good Time

Thoughts to Live By

Daily Spiritual Nourishment

Thank You

About the Author

Dedication

This book is dedicated to everyone who has supported my career and my life, especially Rita, Nicki and Ryan, the Greatest Family Ever, and to everyone I have taught or coached – I have learned more from you than I taught you. And also to my nephew Shawn, who is my mentor although he probably doesn’t know it, and the guy who has proved to me that this really is the Greatest. Day. Ever.

Introduction

This is the day the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it. – Psalm 118:24 (NIV)

There is nothing more important than what you are doing right now.

We become so occupied with what we have to do tomorrow, or next week or next year, that we often don’t pay attention to the present moment and let it slip away. We are so focused on what is coming up that we can’t embrace what is happening now in this very moment. We are so busy trying to live a great life, we’ve forgotten how to live a great moment.

Everybody wants to live a great life…but great lives are just made up of great moments, lived fully one after the other.

We all want to be successful in business, we all want to be healthy, we all want to have fantastic relationships, and we all want all of that right now. So – why are so many of us not living those great lives we want to live?

Many of us do the following every day of our lives (and don’t feel bad if this is a pretty good description of the rut you may have found yourself fallen into – you are not alone):

We get up really in the morning and leave our house which has a huge mortgage on it, wearing clothes we can’t afford but we need for our job. We then get into our cars which we haven’t paid for yet and battle traffic to get to our jobs which we can’t afford to quit because we need the money to pay for that big mortgage we have on the house, although we never have any time to be in it because we are always working.

Huh? Isn’t there something wrong with that picture? Far too many of us are living lives like that, or finding ourselves caught up in another kind of rat race, as the hours and days and weeks and years of our lives fly past us faster than we can keep track of.

But that’s the sad reality for many of us on a daily basis. So – just how the hell did we wind up getting into a mess like that? That is not the way we should be living, yet so many of us wound up in that endless cycle of chasing something (which most of us don’t know what), even though you would think we’d be smart enough not to. Surely we know that living a great life is basically just a matter of living every day to the fullest? Yes it’s good to be busy, but ants are busy, and what are they really accomplishing at the end of the day?

It’s not that we don’t have any information out there that can help us avoid traps like these after all. As a result of all of us wanting to live a great life since it’s the only one we get, there are thousands and thousands of books available that are written to help people have a better existence, be happier, be healthier and have more meaningful relationships.

Some of them claim you can change your life in 30 days, or even as quickly as 7 days. Permanent change usually takes longer than that of course. Making real and permanent changes to your life often doesn’t happen nearly that quickly, and in some cases, it doesn’t happen easily either.

If it was easy, everybody would do it. If we could do it quickly, we’d only need to read one book and we’d be on our way to the greatest life ever, and there wouldn’t be the demand there is for all those self-help books. Some people spend a lifetime studying how to live richer and fuller lives, but who has time to do that if you’re caught in the rat race illustrated above?

I consider myself a very fortunate guy for a lot of reasons. I have never participated in the rat race and never will. I found my passion when I was a kid, and that passion was for being a sports writer and broadcaster. I have followed that passion all of my life and despite very high odds (which I never paid any attention to), I’ve carved out a terrific career and life in which the kind of things I did for a living are the kind of things many other people do as a hobby. You know you’ve hit on something really good when you can look back at your career and say that honestly. I can.

I’ve read a lot of the self-help and other kinds of inspirational books that are out there and many of them have been very helpful in my personal pursuit of a better existence. Many of them are similar in nature and are saying the same things, but many of them also offer a lot of good information and provide motivation and advice that can indeed help people live better lives. They helped me stay on course and follow my passions and enjoy my life, that’s for sure. Learning is a matter of repetition, so the fact that some books are saying the same things is not an issue either.

These books helped me to do things in a different manner than many people have. There is a tendency for us to find a career we like and design our lives around it after we discover just what that career is. I went the other way – I thought about the kind of life I wanted to live and designed my career around that. I decided how I wanted to live, and then I designed a work career to fit that lifestyle. Maybe that isn’t the traditional way to do it, but it worked for me.

Therefore if you are looking for ways to navigate morning traffic and have the kind of life mentioned above, sorry I can’t help you. I’ve never lived that way. Never will either.

I am thankful for the many books I read and leading thinkers I have studied over the years who helped me avoid the trap and pitfalls of the daily commute and rat race. Even if you win the rat race, you are still a rat after all, so being able to find a way to embrace each day the way I do and design a life around a career instead of a career around a life, is something I give thanks for daily. My beliefs were developed in a large way from reading some great books on life management and self-help that got me thinking and got me going.

Some of them, however, really didn’t do a lot for me and I respectfully suggest, don’t do a lot for very many other people either. I am pretty suspicious, for instance, of a book that claims it can make you a success written by somebody that hasn’t had a great deal of success in their own lives. The do as I say, not as I have done mantra doesn’t work for me and I’ve read more than a few of those too.

I once read a book about how to be a media star (my vocation) as an example, written by a guy I know personally who has never held a media job in his life. I don’t know how that book did, but I hope it did better than that guy’s personal media career turned out. He was like those guys who tell you to buy real estate with no money down, but they’ve never actually done that themselves. Or like a stock advisor who tells you what stock to buy and promises to make you rich, but doesn’t have any stock of his own. In other words they may have gotten rich telling you what to do instead of getting rich actually doing what they are advising.

There’s something morally not quite right about that in my mind. If those books helped somebody that’s great, but for me some credibility is lacking there and I tend to tune those ideas out as a result.

Some of the other books out there present deep, complicated theories that you have to try and grasp in order to change your thinking and attract prosperity into your life and get out of ruts that you may be in. I tend to get a little fuzzy-headed reading some of these. Sorry, I only have a university degree and 30-plus years of business experience to draw on, guess I’m not smart enough to follow some of those! If you are, more power to you, but my experience has shown that the answers to some of life’s most complicated questions are often quite simple – in some cases, almost embarrassingly so.

But again, the mere fact that there are so many books on the shelves shows that we need a lot of help trying to figure out how to take an average life and turn it into a great one. Surely though, I have always thought, there must be a simple way of improving our lives without having to read hundreds or even thousands of life improvement books? I mean honestly, how much time does anyone have to really read and study life improvement – if you had to read every book out there on the subject, you’d be dead before you could finish all of them, or at the very least too old to be able to do anything practical with all that wisdom! That is the problem with gaining experience isn’t it – by the time we gain it, we’re too old to do anything practical with it! If you make a life study out of something, you run out of life before you can take advantage of what you’ve learned!

I am not going to make the audacious claim that this book can change your life. But I am going to claim that what I’m writing about here helped me live the life I wanted to, and I am living proof of that. Living a successful and happy life all starts – and ends – with learning how to live a successful and happy day. It is no more complicated than that. I have practiced what I am preaching here, in other words.

Here is the honest truth. No one book is going to change your life. You are going to change your life if you really want to, and hopefully some books can help you do it. And if you are really lucky, you will find just a few books that get you going towards making your life great instead of having to read 1,000 of them, or spend years in silence among monks meditating what the true meaning of life is. By all means read a lot (I did) because good uplifting material is never wasted, it fills your mind with great ideas and keeps you motivated. But life is too short for most of us to spend decades studying how to make it great…we’d like at least some of the answers a little quicker.

I have read hundreds of these books and I’m glad I did. These books have helped me garner a lot of information that I’m sharing in these pages, and I will likely read hundreds more in the coming years because you can never get enough motivation and inspiration on an ongoing basis. But my hope for you is that a book like this can make your road to discovering a great life that is uniquely your own a lot shorter than mine was.

Here’s the biggest thing I found out after nearly 35 years in a successful sports media career, and after having read more than 1,500 books of all kinds, and after many years as a teacher and life coach – a great life all starts with living just one great day at a time. If you can master living a great day, living a great life becomes easy and it all starts with good daily habits. It’s that simple.

It may take a long time to have a great and successful life, but it doesn’t take very much time at all to have a great day. You can decide to have a great day in seconds – really, you can. It’s entirely up to you, I know that for a fact.

Of course you cannot change your entire life situation so quickly. If you happen to be stuck in that daily traffic nightmare I mentioned, in a vicious cycle of just trying to survive like so many people are, you are going to have to invest some real serious time to break out of that rut (but you can and you will do it if you decide you really want to!). Like I mentioned above – you can change your day IMMEDIATELY if you really want to as well. All it takes is a little practice and a little thinking, and if you get in the habit of doing that every day, your great days will become great weeks which will become great months which will become great years which will become a great life.

I’ve lived a great life working in a career that is a dream job for me. I got to realize that in a profound way when I first started sharing how I managed to do that with students I’ve taught and people I’ve coached, and now I want to share how I did it with you too. That’s why I wrote this book. I am living proof it really is a matter of mind over matter on a daily basis, and that you can enjoy and appreciate your life more on a daily basis in mere minutes a day.

I don’t talk about my career and lifestyle to brag about it, I talk about it to make it clear that I’ve accomplished what I really wanted to in my own life. The biggest reason: it’s because of the way I’ve thought, my daily habits and my coming to appreciate every day that has been given to me. How can anybody be an expert on raising kids who has never had a kid of their own? They can’t. There is only so much value in teaching theory only, with no real-life experience. I know how to have a great day and design a life that makes sense for me because already done it. And I know I can help you do the same thing.

It’s sometimes overwhelming to even begin to tackle all that you need to do to live a great life, so I’m telling you to forget about all of that right now and concentrate on just one thing – making this the greatest day ever. That is where it all starts and ends; by forgetting for a moment all you have to do to live a great life, and concentrating only on how to live a great day.

I tell my students all the time to answer this question as honestly as you can: You can talk the talk, but can you walk the walk? In other words, talk is cheap. One positive action is worth 1,000 words.

I’ve walked the walk with this philosophy. I’ve had a great and rewarding career in sports media (which is more fun than real work is for me), but at this stage of my career, I want to share what I’ve learned with you on how to live a great day over and over again, regardless of what your career might be, or regardless of how good or bad it’s going for you at this present moment. Because I believe whole-heartedly that if you learn to totally embrace each day, you too can learn to follow your passions and turn your life into a great one designed just for you.

You can’t live yesterday, today and tomorrow all at the same time. Pick one. And since there is only today, then pick living today.

I have designed a daily program here, a very simple one, that you can follow or take