A car battery likes to be used – the longer it sits, the more it loses its potency.

It takes as little as four weeks to die if left idle.

Our personal batteries have been sitting more idle than usual as we have been sitting on the couch watching Netflix, working at home, adjusting to education by Zoom and uprooting previous routines.

Jumpstart – a jolt of energy followed by sustained periods of running at high speeds.

Resume a healthy and productive routine.

Eliminate things that exhaust your power such as negativity and fear of the future.

Be grateful for the unexpected timeout we all got as a reminder of sorting out what is truly important.

Life also needs both an ignition and an accelerator to return to power.

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Being forced to spend time with yourself in isolation or with those very few people close to you has delivered an unanticipated benefit – liking to spend time with yourself.

Pre-lockdown life was demanding and often the most important things took a backseat to whatever was next up – in digital life, never-ending work situations or the challenges of life in a distracted world.

Now that the lockdown seems to be ending, some lessons learned:

1. Mister Rogers was right all along to say he likes you just the way you are – after the past few months so many people are agreeing.
2. Best relations come from the quality of time invested not from the number of hours as lockdown forced us to automatically adjust both.
3. Less is still more as the inability to buy love with money turned out to be a blessing – the gift is not cash rewards but time spent living with ourselves and others.

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In sports when you’re down and out, you rally and comeback strong.

It’s the only way to win.

We’ve all been sitting on the bench of self-isolation waiting for our moment to be called up and contribute once again.

That moment appears to arriving.

Why is it in sports when our number is called, we can’t wait to get in and do our part.

That’s how to look at our return to a more normal life.

Eagerly anticipate success and banish all thoughts of negativity.

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“By not demanding love, but by giving it, we increase our chances of getting it”.

We become more lovable and makes it easier for us to love others.

“Hatred invites and perpetuates hatred”.

By decreasing it ourselves we lessen it on others.

These words of Harry Weinberg especially ring true today.

If this has been forwarded to you by a friend, you can start receiving DayStarters every day here. 

Demographers are in general agreement that the generation that fought in World War II was the greatest in the last hundred years.

But why?

Because they were faced with more adversity than most other generations over the same period of time – war in two far away locations, an economy rescued by the war effort and particularly by women who stepped up to serve.

The next great generation may very well be the one coming of age now – in school, college – just starting their lives.

A pandemic, the potential of tough economic times, a disruption of the magnitude that even their parents never experienced.

Which means, they are facing adversity and will rise to meet the challenges.

Adversity introduces a person to him or herself and to those around them so the good news is that we will all overcome these unprecedented challenges because as history has proven beyond a doubt, adversity brings the best out of us.

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That’s what we have now – fear of the virus, of giving up the things we like, of being forced out of our comfort zone and on and on.

The thing about fear is that it breeds more fear and it becomes an obsession with worry that makes us crazy.

Now – and especially now – fear is all around us in our hands, on our screens and imbedded deep in our social media.

If you ever played sports, before a big game you probably felt concern, anxiety – okay, let’s just say it, fear of playing our best to win.  At some point we had to stop thinking and start acting.

That’s the prescription for our lives in these challenging times – stop worrying and start doing.

If this has been forwarded to you by a friend, you can start receiving DayStarters every day here. 

Since the pandemic began, voice-only calls have increased 78%.

And the length of these calls has also increased.

We hear a lot about Zoom, the savior of business, academia and keeping families connected in public health crises but there is evidence that video apps make us feel awkward and unfulfilled.

Then there is the phone – which really is not a phone but a handheld texting machine, iPod and social networking black hole.

But now mouth to ear is back.

An iPhone is really a phone again.

“When it comes to developing intimacy remotely, sometimes it’s better to be heard and not seen”.

If this has been forwarded to you by a friend, you can start receiving DayStarters every day here. 

When stores started cutting their orders for soap during the Great Depression that began in 1929, Proctor & Gamble doubled down and figured people would still need soap.

Instead of pulling back on advertising as most companies are doing during the current coronavirus, P&G ramped up its radio advertising sponsoring daily shows aimed at homemakers.  Ma Perkins, a kindly widow, told stories that consumers of the day loved.

By 1939, P&G was producing 21 radio shows and inventing what was to become known as the “soap opera”.  By 1950, they made the transition to TV.

With uncertain economic times ahead and lots of spare time on our hands now to think, what is your personal plan to meet adversity and take advantage of it?

If this has been forwarded to you by a friend, you can start receiving DayStarters every day here. 

Imagine what Americans might have thought during the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic.

They lived without phones, radios, delivery services, Netflix – you get the point.  I wonder how many of them said “we will survive this and things will not just get better but really better.”

Land on the moon.  Discover antibiotics and drugs that make our lives better and longer.  Prosperity the likes of which I dare say we have enjoyed in full or part for decades.  Did they ever think as bad as things got – they lost 550,000 people in the U.S. during the Spanish Flu – that the future would not only be better but great.

On the other side of hopelessness is hope.

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Viktor Frankl’s book “Yes to Life” inspired by his time spent incarcerated in a World War II concentration camp takes on meaning even in our coronavirus isolation.  It is summed up in the foreword:

“Happiness in itself does not qualify as such a purpose; pleasures do not give our life meaning. In contrast, he points out that even the dark and joyless episodes of our lives can be times when we mature and find meaning.

There are three main ways people find fulfillment of their life meaning, in Frankl’s view. First, there is action, such as creating a work, whether art or a labor of love—something that outlasts us and continues to have an impact.

Second, he says, meaning can be found in appreciating nature, works of art, or simply loving people; Frankl cites Kierkegaard, that the door to happiness always opens outward. The third lies in how a person adapts and reacts to unavoidable limits on their life possibilities, such as facing their own death or enduring a dreadful fate like the concentration camps.  In short, our lives take on meaning through our actions, through loving, and through suffering.”

If this has been forwarded to you by a friend, you can start receiving DayStarters every day here.