Issue - 371 Mon 19th Jun

Hi,
I hope Monday finds you well.

You may remember a few weeks ago I lost my house keys on one of my first training runs, and that because they had a store loyalty card on them, someone had handed them in, and the store had sent them to me.

Often with these loyalty cards, the amount of money you save is so small that it's hardly worth the effort, but I keep using mine, simply because it's no effort to do so.
All the mail offers I get from them usually get a quick once over before I turf them into the bin.

Last week though, I got a set of coupons through, £6 off when you spend over £40.
Now for a tight-arse like me, that's like a red rag to a bull.

All I have to do is my normal shop, plus a load of non-perishables that don't usually come under special offer, and it's money in my pocket for nothing!
The warm weather is continuing yesterday, so I thought that on a Sunday morning it would be nice and quiet, that people would be out and about enjoying the summer.

I was wrong - it was heaving!

I had been out my run earlier (10 non-chafing miles in 1hour 59 mins), so maybe there had been an announcement of the 4 minute-warning and I had missed it.
After all, if ever there was a 4-minute warning, I'm sure I too would think 'hmm, just enough time to get to Tesco, they have teabags on special offer.'

Having mentioned before how doing simple things like sending my keys back to me enhances a reputation, a fact which seems to escape so many businesses, I got an email which reminded me of another simple thing.

It was from an online buddy who had ordered a CD of harp music from a company called Baby CDs.
Here's the confirmation email they sent her...

Your CD has been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow.
A team of 50 employees inspected your CD and polished it to make sure it was in the best possible condition before mailing.
Our packing specialist from Japan lit a candle and a hush fell overthe crowd as he put your CD into the finest gold-lined box that money can buy.
We all had a wonderful celebration afterwards and the whole party marched down the street to the post office where the entire town of Portland waved 'Bon Voyage!' to your package, on its way to you, in our private CD Baby jet on this day, Wednesday, June 7th.
I hope you had a wonderful time shopping at CD Baby.
We sure did.
Your picture is on our wall as 'Customer of the Year'.
We're all exhausted but can't wait for you to come back to CDBABY.COM!!
Thank you once again,

How about that!!
Do you think someone woud want to order from them again or not?
Brilliant, simple, feel-good marketing!

I think I've been quite restrained so far in my coverage of the World Cup.
I know not everyone is a fan of sport, let alone football, so I try not to overdo it, but sport can give such obvious lessons to take forward into life.
It's one of the reasons why it should be a fundamental ingredient in schooling, (it is becoming less so here in the UK), and since I write about self-improvement and the like, I can't help but be drawn to it.

A lot of countries use football to assert their indentity, to state their importance on the world stage.
2 countries that have done this particularly well are Brazil and Argentina.
Nowadays it is the African countries that use the World Cup as a staging post of their progress, coming through poverty and civil war.

Take Angola for instance.
They are only recently out of over 25 years of civil war.
A lot of the squad had to flee their own country as children.
Not all the players even play for a club - the goalkeeper has trained himself alone for the past 3 years to keep in shape!
When they played Mexico, who are ranked 4th in the world rankings, everyone expected them to get thrashed.
The self-training goalkeeper made several great saves, and the game ended 0-0.
The result was celebrated as if they had won the whole tournament, it was such a step for them.

Now *that's* the kind of reason I like my sport!

Ok, that's it for today, what could you achieve in your life that would be an equivalent of Angola drawing with Mexico?

Have a good week.

'Til Next Time,
Health and Happiness,
Gordon