How many traditions does your family have?
Or maybe, you and your friends have a tradition that you love.
As we are becoming more connected and busier every single day we have less time for traditions.
It’s a very dangerous world we have created for ourselves. We are constantly connected and always doing work or at least thinking about work (or at least I am!).
We value traditions less but we need them more than ever!
I bet in ten years people will be more obese than ever. We order out more often and we want everything delivered, right now.
So, for all of you, who have those little traditions I think you should do anything and everything in your power to keep them.
Even, if they are small traditions. For example, in college every Sunday night, my friends and I would always order food and watch the Sopranos. Those little traditions are what make us happy and is what life is all about.
Whether it’s going to lunch with your girlfriends and then getting your hair and nails done every Friday, going to the gym and grabbing some food afterwards, having breakfast with your friends after a long weekend, playing football Thanksgiving Day or eating dinner with your family every Sunday night; these are the traditions that keep us going.
My family and I have a really nice tradition of visiting my Grandpa at the cemetery every 6 months or so; usually around the holidays. We’ll go on a Sunday morning and then go for breakfast afterwards.
I wouldn’t miss it for the world.
The cemetery is in Elmont near the Belmont Park Race Track. It’s very easy to not want to wake up early on a Sunday but it comes down to tradition. It’s very important to me and my grandpa deserves all the respect in the world.
The main reason why I admire him and strive to be like him so much can be summed up in one word: Simplicity. (I’ll write more about him one day because we can ALL learn so much from him!)
We always go to this one diner after we visit the cemetery. Recently the diner was sold from Greek owners to Asian owners. Unfortunately, with the change, off went the waitresses with the great Brooklyn accents and the hilarious stories. That’s part of what you buy when you go into a little diner like that. It’s what makes it so quaint.
We decided we’d stick with the diner even with the change in owners and waitresses.
But this past Sunday, something astonishing was going on. There was an Asian woman sitting at the diner counter walking up to the tables and asking people, “If you want DVD?”
I decided I’d investigate and I realized the owner of the diner was endorsing this!!! I almost spilled my chocolate milk all over the place when I realized this.
Is he out of his mind?
This guy, who most likely made the biggest purchase of his life, of buying what was probably his dream, a diner, is now thinking of ways to make more money from existing customers by annoying and interrupting them.
While enjoying a delicious breakfast the last thing any person wants, is having someone solicit them to see if, “They want DVD?” Literally, every single person in the diner was bothered by this. You could see it in everyone’s face as they rudely said, “No,” or just by watching them shake their heads and talk about it with the people at their table.
Clearly, this guy better stop doing this or pretty soon he’s going to have to turn his little diner into a DVD store.
Obviously, for research purposes I decided I was going to act interested. So when the sweet looking, little Asian lady walked over to my table as I was eating my egg white and turkey omelet and said, “Do you want DVD?” I said, “Sure, what you got?”
(FYI: I’m not racist or anything close to that, I’m literally just repeating exactly what happened and how it was said.)
Immediately, she got really excited and for some reason started showing me every possible mob movie ever created; all as I’m eating my breakfast. (I guess I just appear as someone who’d be interested in mob movies.)
You certainly can’t get more of a captive audience than this.
That’s like me being able to walk around a McDonald’s as a 300 pound guy is eating his fifth Big Mac and tell him about MyBodyTutor.com.
Not possible.
The scary part is that the owner thought this was a good idea!
After about 2 minutes, I told the enterprising young lady with all the mob movies, “No thanks.”
What this diner owner was doing is equivalent to me allowing someone to call all of my precious clients and try to sell them stuff!
If anyone tried to do that to my clients, oh mannn, fuhhh-gettt-abouttt-ittt!
I’d break their f#%king legs and make them an offer they couldn’t refuse. It’d be along the lines of, “Do you want life?”
If you know what I mean.