A winner as I define it is a person that wakes up every day with the intention of being a better version of themselves then they were yesterday.

What freedom looks like to me as I act out my day;

There is a thing that we spend 5 minutes maybe even as much as 10 or more minutes every day. You do this thing and if you were to wake up tomorrow and decided not to do that thing, no one would even notice that you didn’t spend that time on that thing today, or the next day or ever, no one would notice and they probably would not have even cared if they did notice. Freedom is calling out these bits of our automated routines and putting them to bed.

When I was younger, I had a lot of that useless stuff in my automated routines, but with every passing year, these types of codes have largely been mitigated in one way or another in my life.

Every once in a while, I do intentionally throw a wrench in my routines to see what if anything breaks. Sometimes I find stuff to change and make better for me and other times, I’m like, yeah, I’m smart for doing it my way. eff the other way.

A big one for me early on that was transformational was after coming out of the navy, I decided I was doing away with a lot of “hair stuff”. clippers, trimmers, shaping up every other day, cleaning up hair and going to a barber every saturday. It all just seemed like a lot of time for stuff I don’t think matters to anyone, certainly didn’t matter to me.

So, I stopped it all, ended up with dreads, dreads became cool, so than I became cool. Fast forward 25+ years, we shave it all off and start again. Will I live to see another 25+ years of freedom, dunno. But making the best of the time in the mean time.

Another easy one is the snoozers. If you’re hitting that snooze button every morning, that’s 5 minutes right there no one is going to notice if you didn’t spend time on. I think it’s one of the worst words in the english dictionary. Why would you give such a wasteful thing a name, word or label. I would have just used the word “nothing”. Why did you hit that button? “nothing”. What are you doing? “nothing”.

That saying about snoozers exist for a reason. Winners love snoozers, less competition for us to get through out there. Don’t be a snoozer, be a winner.

Watching family shows growing up I used to envy the kid who’s mom was coming into his room to gently remind him it’s time to wake up…”hey johnny, wakie wakie johnny, it’s time to get ready for school.” She would do this two or three times until eventually johnny woke up. Let’s put a pin on that for a minute and I’ll quickly explain what this looked like in my home growing up.

I ran cross country in high school and the only reason my pops let me join the team was because training began at 5am. So he would be dropping me off at school at 5am 6 days a week on his way to work. He allowed me to join the team because he knew he was going to have some fun with me waking up in the mornings. Fun for him of course, not necessarily fun for me.

As pops predicted, the honeymoon period of making the track team ended. Hanging out with your friends from the neighborhood late into the evenings and waking up for track practice at 4:30am, just don’t work.

Pops would come into my room 5 minutes before he was leaving, the car would already be warming up in the driveway and if I was in still in bed he would pour a cup of ice water on me and he’d “say I’m leaving in five, if you’re not in the car when I leave, your grounded for the rest of the school year.”

And so this would happen a few times throughout the year until the day mom wispers to my pops “our son is wetting the bed (I was about 14 or 15 at the time) I think you should talk to him, he might be embarassed If I do it.”

And this is how pop talks to me about it….”Your mother thinks your wetting your bed. Stop stressing her and wake up when your suppose to. We don’t do the snooze thing in this house. I’ve pretty much been early most of my life, early in more ways than one.

I don’t know how little johnny from the tv shows turned out, maybe he is a winner or maybe he is a snoozer. But I don’t envy little jonnie today.

I try to win everyday and I try to be in a state of freedom most of the day on most days. I do better at it somedays than others. And that’s OK.

This is the sort of stuff that runs through mind that sometimes finds it’s way into a journal (for my children and grandchildren) or this article for my nostr fam.

I’m not a professional writer (yet), so take it easy with the judgements of my many grammatial faux pas and street speak’isms.

Thanks for reading. shashmon