Friends of Dave #409: 🥔 long live the spudnut 🍩
We wear costumes every day, not just at Halloween.
Another quick preamble this week and a reminder for you as you get ready to celebrate Halloween:
This is not the only time of year when we wear costumes. We actually wear them everyday.
What do I mean?
We all wake up, get out of bed and get ourselves ready to take on the day.
As you go through your process, perhaps you have a certain type of clothes you like to wear.
Maybe you have a certain hairstyle or like to wear makeup.
While you get yourself ready, you look at yourself in the bathroom mirror and, consciously or not, start to assume the role of the person you want (or in some cases, need) to be to get through the day.
Maybe it is the Hardass Boss. Or Doting Parent. Or Superman or Wonder Woman. The Know-it All Colleague. The Comedian. The Quiet One. The Rebel (With or…maybe… Without a Cause). The Taskmaster. The Activist.
I guess you can even be Sexy Bernie Sanders if you really want to…
Whatever it is, it is the persona the rest of the world sees when they interact with you each day.
Hopefully, if you are lucky, it is as close to the real authentic you as it can be. Sometimes it can be far from it.
Either way, make no mistake, you put on a costume.
And sometimes that costume you choose to wear can get you a bag full of all of life’s treats. Sometimes it gets you to pull tricks, even if you know you might regret it later.
Sometimes….well, sometimes you don’t get 5 pieces of candy or a quarter…..sometimes you just get a rock….
Sure wearing a clever or scary costume at Halloween or every now and then can be fun or empowering — but having to put the same one on everyday can get old after a while, can’t it? Especially if that costume makes you have to be something different than the real person you are inside of it. Even more so when you believe other people expect you to wear it.
Hell, even the rock band KISS gave up the kabuki makeup at one point.
Here’s the thing, Friends — we all have a choice on what costume we choose to put on each day. If you like your go-to get up and it is working for you and it makes you happy and fulfilled, by all means, keep wearing it.
But if you don’t like what life puts in your Trick-or-Treat bag or the reactions you are getting from the costume you are wearing, YOU CAN CHANGE IT.
It may take some time, some work, some thought and maybe some courage to change your costume, but you don’t have to wear the same one everyday. It’s okay.
Whether it is at Halloween or just some random day, life’s too short for us to be wearing costumes we don’t like.
The world will go on and it will embrace whatever costume or persona you choose to put on tomorrow when you get up and get ready to take on the day. It may take a little getting used to, but trust me it will happen.
Yes, even it is Sexy Bernie Sanders…..
Here’s to you getting a bag full of treats this week….and every week that follows.
XOXO
Dave
And now a few things to make you smarter…
While pandemic-led wage growth boosted real incomes, it followed five decades of stagnant wage increases. At the same time, housing prices have soared. Pushing up prices are a limited supply of homes, with home construction plummeting 55% compared to 2006. Together, these broad economic forces have made it harder to get ahead, even with a competitive salary.
This graphic shows the estimated cost of the American dream per household over the course of their lifetime, based on analysis from Investopedia.
The person you admire became that way because they weren’t intimidated by the people they admired.
Being in awe of people – no matter their status, talent, or experience compared to yours – holds you back and stunts your growth.
A survey was conducted of 350 people who said they’d splurged on an experience or event in the last couple of years. While just over half reported the high prices didn’t dampen their satisfaction level, nearly 37% said their experience was at least a little bit of a letdown because of the expense.
This year, 94% of companies report hiring recent college graduates. Among these companies, only 25% state that all recent college graduate hires worked out well, while 62% mention that only some were successful. Further, 14% report that only a few or none of the hires were successful.
“We would always take a couple of different Halloween masks with us so we could go back two or three times. Spudnuts were better than a crummy candy bar.”
Germans like to kick off their pre-Lenten revelry with platters of fastnachts, yeast-raised fritters often made with mashed potatoes. This idea was brought to the US and were called “spudnuts.” In 1940—the same year Dick and Mac McDonald opened the first McDonald’s restaurant—the first Spudnut shop was opened in Salt Lake City and soon after, a local Halloween tradition was born.
Picking out what to wear during the fall or spring can be tough. It might be sweater weather in the morning, only to feel more like summer heat by lunchtime. There is actually a meteorological and a biological reason why the same temperature can feel different depending on the season.