An Owner's Manual for Men: What You Need to Know Before You Venture out There

An Owner’s

Manual For Men

What You Need To Know

Before You Venture Out There

Joe Nickaloff

AuthorHouse™

1663 Liberty Drive

Bloomington, IN 47403

www.authorhouse.com

Phone: 1-800-839-8640

© 2011 by Joe Nickaloff. All rights reserved.

Front Cover Art by Steve Heimans

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

First published by AuthorHouse 11/19/2011

ISBN: 978-1-4685-0746-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4685-0744-7 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4685-0745-4 (ebk)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2011961386

Printed in the United States of America

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Contents

SECTION 1

Life Is Good

SECTION 2

Core Issues For Men

Decisions, Decisions

Conventional Wisdom

Making Mistakes

Dealing with Bad News

Disappointment

Finding Happiness

Character

Depression

Getting A Grip

Taking Defeat In Stride

Dealing With Stress, Panic Attacks, Anxiety and Other Fun Stuff

Leadership and Crisis Management

Conquering Your Fears and Acts of Bravery

Being Human

The Value of Older People

Revenge

Self-Delusion

Taking Responsibility For Your Own Acts and

Those of Others

Embracing Change

Guilt & Regret

Phobia Fun

Breaking Bad Habits

If Only I Had The Time

Boys And Their Toys

The Path of Least Resistance

The Greatest Test

SECTION 3

All Things Woman –

Sex, Love & Relationships

Sex

How To Make Your Woman Happy

Women—What You Don’t Know Can Hurt You

Important Things You Should Be Aware Of

The Differences Between Men and Women

Why Men Love Women

What To Look For In A Woman

Love

First Sex

So You Want To Get Married

So You Are Contemplating Divorce

Breaking Up Is Hard To Do For Guys

Signs Your Relationship Is In Trouble

How To Keep Any Relationship Alive Forever

SECTION 4

Family Values

Parenting 101

Parents

Being a Son

In-laws

Dysfunctional Families

Your Loved One Is Sick. Now What Do You Do?

Death of a Loved One

Facing Your Own Death

The Go To Guy

Religion

Vacations

Friends

Hierarchy of Needs

Comfort Zones and Personal Space

Retirement

The Acquisition of Wealth

Personal Finance

SECTION 5

The Healthy Man

Some Things You Should Know About Men

Meditation and Relaxation

The Male Body

Male Mid-Life Crisis

Getting Old

The Thing About Drugs and Addiction

SECTION 6

Odds and Ends

Did It Ever Strike You As Odd That . . . ..

Things You Need To Know

Before You Venture Out There

Nickaloff’s Law

The Celebrity Paradox

Affirmations

Those Things, Of Which I Am Most Proud

I Had A Dream . . . . About Bob Hope

Garage Sales

Cruising

Flying

Secrets

The Internet

Sports

Other Cultures

SECTION 7

Business, Work,

The Economy and Your Career

Economics, The Stock Market and Investing or

There Will Be Growth In The Spring

Working for the Man or Woman

Managing People and Tips For Being A Good Boss

Going Into Business For Yourself

Government & Public Policy

SECTION 8

I Wish I’d Said

That - Quotes Worth Remembering and Why

SECTION 9

The Laws

SECTION 10

Mentors

SECTION 11

You Haven’t Really Lived Yet Unless . . . .

SECTION 12

Everything Has To End Sometime

For my family:

Mike and Jeff: This is in case I forgot to tell you something important. You may not realize it but it’s been an honor being your Dad.

Jean: Thanks for all the love, friendship, companionship and loyalty. Had I not met you, I surely would have been a lonely and miserable man.

SECTION 1

Life Is Good

Life is Good. At least that’s what it says on the wall of my bathroom. While writing this book, the U.S. and global economies are going through one the worst downturns/recessions/depressions, call it what you will, since the end of World War II, possibly since the Great Depression.

Brewing is a perfect storm of high unemployment, expensive foreign wars that no one knows why we’re fighting, credit markets in paralysis due to mismanagement, fraud and foolish gambles on risky sub-prime and commercial loans, daily and unpredictable stock market gyrations in both directions, downward spiraling real estate values, record personal debt, skyrocketing oil and energy prices, unbelievably high food and commodity prices, unheard of numbers of business failures and worst of all, record low consumer confidence. There’s much more, most of which no one fully understands, but why go on? You get the picture.

All of this is happening. We have gotten used to it and there is very little any of us can do about it. We have collectively and reluctantly entered a period where good news no longer exists. The absence of bad news has replaced it and we have all lowered our standards to accept no bad news as the new good news.

No one wishes to see times like these but they have an insidious way of popping up now and then and you either deal with it or you don’t. No government agency knows how to stop it or when it will end and people have never been more miserable, yet still, life is good.

I had cause recently to close one of the restaurants in which I am a partner. Sales in the restaurant business in particular and almost every business in general have been horrible lately. People can’t afford to buy much in the way of luxuries and even if they did have a little extra money for discretionary purchases, they can’t afford the gas to get to the store in the first place. Suffice to say, closing a business you had high hopes for is a depressing experience at best. You question if there was anything you could have done differently to avoid the misery of failing. You descend into a living hell of lawyers, lenders, landlords and self-recrimination. It’s great fun. Just kidding about that, of course. It’s not fun at all but the process just reinforced two important lessons that I learned a long time ago.

One is that not everything works out. Sometimes despite your best efforts and meticulous care, things just go awry and there really isn’t a whole lot you can do to prevent it. Events tend to take on an existence of their own, come at you too fast to handle and any braking mechanisms that worked for you before just don’t get the job done anymore.

The second is that whatever unfortunate events are occurring in your life at any given moment, it isn’t as bad as you imagine it will be. Your imagination is far more creative than reality can ever be. Things have a way of working out, not always exactly as you would want them to but they do work out ultimately. Once you realize that, it becomes far less agonizing dealing with your problems.

During the closure, I had the task of removing all of the decorations from the walls. The restaurant was decorated in a California beach theme and there were all kinds of surf boards and surf-related stuff to remove. One of my favorites was something I bought in Newport Beach, California on Balboa Island while shopping with my wife and a friend. We were there to buy decorations for the restaurant but more importantly, to counsel and support our friend who was going through a horrible divorce.

The decoration is a relief of an old red and white Volkswagen Bus with colorful surfboards leaning against it and one on the roof. The windows are opaque so you don’t know for sure if anyone is inside. The VW is parked in the sand at the beach and it is early in the morning. The sun is just starting to peak above the horizon. I imagine that there are two or three teenagers asleep inside just waiting for the sun to come up so they can hit the beach again for another day of perfect surfing. Below the VW, separated by flowers are the words-you guessed it- "Life Is Good." It really is beautiful, simple yet elegant and reminiscent of a better time when care and worry were words yet unknown. At my wife, Jean’s, urging I took it home and put it in the bathroom where I get ready each morning. Every time I look in the mirror or get out of the shower I see the words and I dream about myself being in that bus with my buddies with nothing more important to do than wait for the sun to come up and start a new day of big waves and carefree fun. For us life is good. For me life is good.

Why would I say life is good in light of all the bad stuff going on that continues, seemingly without end and blowing ill winds to everyone including myself at the moment?

Truth be told, life really is good. Where we get lost is when we confuse life with all of the garbage we have to deal with in that life. Where there is life, there has to be hope. The two are inseparable. If that weren’t the case, there wouldn’t be any point to it. As long as you can remember a better time in the past and you can dream of a better time in your future where once again, life is good, you will be just fine. When you can no longer do either of those, you may have become lost.

Being lost is not a journey. It is the lack of one. When you are lost, you are going nowhere and there is no better way to get lost than to let the miasma of your everyday problems confuse your senses and short-circuit your ability to cope. Stay focused on the important stuff and you will stay on the journey. You may not know exactly where you are going but you will be on your way and you will never be lost again.

My most important goal and probably the only one that really matters in writing this book is to help you stay on the journey and to always bear in mind that LIFE IS GOOD, no matter what happens.

Captain Kirk in Star Trek, Wrath of Khan said, I like to think that there are always possibilities. What he meant is that you are not done until you are truly done and as long as you have life, you have the means to change your situation for the better, even when you are at low-tide, knee-deep in stinky seaweed and mud and hopelessness is peering right over your shoulder. If you believe that life, in and of itself, is good, then there will always be possibilities for you, regardless of what may come your way.

We will explore together why your life really is good and worth the living. Along the way, we’ll gather up some pointers and advice to make it the best one it can be. Therein lay the core concept of this book. If you possess the knowledge and tools to deal with the never ending parade of problems, issues and responsibilities that is your life, efficiently and with the goal of producing the best possible outcome more often than not, you will be able to set aside far more time to enjoy and work on the real purpose of life and that is living it well. Life is good if you can tear yourself away from all the things that muck it up and concentrate on the things that make it worth living. You can do it if you decide you want to. You’ll need a strong dose of reality and common sense to accompany your flights of fancy but you can do it.

Simply put, the purpose of this book is to teach you in a no-nonsense, down to earth fashion what you need to know to get the most out of the one male machine you were given to work with. I have often heard people say, I wish teenagers came with an instruction manual or I wish my baby came with directions. Well, they don’t, but now you do and your owner’s manual will not only help you get the most out of your life but it will teach you how to deal effectively and efficiently with many of the people, things and problems you will encounter in your life that don’t come with their own instruction manuals.

You have questions about who you are and what you do every day. You are confused about your role in society and your family. You want to do the right thing but are not sure just what that is. You are afraid of making the wrong decisions and endangering those you love and all that you have accumulated. You’re not quite sure how to be a father or husband. You doubt whether you really are a manly man. You wonder if you are not just a boy pretending to be a grown up. You have regrets about the things you have done and the things you didn’t. You don’t know what to do or where to turn when you are in trouble. You suspect that your friends may not really be true friends. You know your family loves you but they don’t seem to understand you the way you want and need to be understood. Your body is reacting to apparently normal stimuli in strange ways and you don’t know why. Your guilt is undeniable and sometimes unbearable when you take time to do something that is just for you. You are being pulled every which way by everyone you know with no respite in sight.

As men, these thoughts and many others swirl around in our heads endlessly. Sometimes we find the answers. Sometimes we don’t. When we do, it is often by happenstance and pure blind luck with no planned process that leads to it. Living as a man in today’s world is no cakewalk. As society and its attendant technology grow and advance, the issues affecting men in their everyday lives expand in lock step.

Figuring it all out on your own is certainly one solution but not a very good one as blindly seeking answers often leads to misstep and frustration. Depending on the help of others is a good solution but men tend to shy away from this naturally. Among men, in our society, dependence on the assistance of others is often seen as a sign of weakness and as such is usually used as a last resort lest we appear less able and weaker than our male counterparts.

The honest truth is that men need guidance in their lives but it is not always available or forthcoming to them. Men have always been at a disadvantage in this respect compared to women and it seems to me that it’s getting worse as everyone’s lives become more complicated and complex. A source for solutions to and guidance for many of life’s problems and issues is what men need terribly but they don’t readily have. I have spent a lifetime studying, researching, compiling, experiencing and analyzing the missing pieces of life’s puzzle as it relates to men. The vast majority of the information presented here was garnered from talking and listening to real people about their real experiences and honestly reflecting on my own. I truly hope that you will find some of your answers here and ultimately enjoy a great life.

This book is intended for men. It’s not that women don’t need life counseling and advice. They do need it but they do have plenty of it available to them already. There are a lot of things in this book that will certainly apply to women as well. Many things in life are not gender biased and both sexes could learn from them. Be aware though, that I have slanted everything towards men

For women, help comes in many forms, mothers, girlfriends, co-workers, etc. If you go to any book store and look through the self-help sections, you’ll find about a million books on the subject of helping women as mothers, as wives, as business people, as nurturers, how to love, how to get love, how to be tough, how to be feminine, how to figure out men, how to be mothers. You name it and it’ll be there. Another great example of this is television. There are uncountable programs for women about women’s issues. One of the reasons these are so prevalent is that women actually like and need to talk about their problems, what they want and what they require to feel good about themselves. Needless to say, men generally don’t talk about this stuff to other men and certainly never to women. Who else is left for a guy to talk to? Well, the family dog does listen pretty well but is usually a little short on sound advice unless you really need to know how to bury a bone or sniff somebody’s butt.

Admittedly, there are lots of television shows for guys but every one is about what guys do. Not a one is about who guys are, what they want out of life, what makes them happy or just how to act like a man. What we get is guys blowing things up, building stuff, fighting, talking about sports or sport itself and most prevalent, killing things. You never see a group of guys talking about all the things they have to face every day, how miserable they are, how they have trouble relating to women, problems with their kids, stress in their life or the like. There is a dearth of programming of this nature and I would really like to see more of it. We all might be surprised by its popularity. I think there is a vast pent-up need for discussion, guidance and just plain outlets for getting things off of our chests specifically geared towards men. When everything stays inside and there is no safety valve, the inevitable result is anxiety, illness and emotional paralysis. Men shouldn’t have to live this way and you don’t have to if you just realize that it is a prison of your own making but ironically, you do hold the only set of keys.

There are many, many books that address general self-help subjects such as how to stop worrying, how to be happy or how to be a better person but they are unisex in nature and do not address the needs of men specifically. However, there are very few, if any, on the subject of helping men deal with issues and problems that are distinctly male in nature, nor do they address them in a way that men can truly understand and use. The only book I found in the self-help section on my last trip to the bookstore by men was actually about what men want and it was definitely for women to read so they could better understand men. There were hundreds of books for men on how to have abs like concrete with re-bar, how to develop gluts you could bounce a quarter off of and how to stay healthy but nothing on all the other apparently unimportant stuff like life, not one that I could find anyway.

My intention here is to help guys with guy stuff. Maybe, I will write a book for women some day but only with a lot of female input. We all know that no man truly understands how women work and I am no exception.

There are lots of books on how to understand the male personality and psyche. You should know if you don’t already, that those books are really intended for women to read, not men. I do, however, fully expect that women will buy this book with just that purpose in mind and that’s okay with me. In fact, I recommend it. Ladies, think of it as the playbook for the other team. Once you read this book you will have some marvelous insights not only into the male mind and how it works but you’ll know for the first time just exactly how we think and feel about you as well. Wouldn’t it be nice to understand what really goes on in that thickly muscled cranium for a change. I’d keep this book on the nightstand next to your bed. When he does the incomprehensible things he does you can just flip to that section and see why and develop a plan of action to deal with it.

There are parts of this book that will make you laugh and there are parts of this book that will make you cry because that’s what we all do in life, we laugh and we cry with brief periods of calm in between.

Any increased understanding among women of how men work, what they feel and what they are up against day to day will be a good thing and can’t help but alleviate the pains and the trials every guy goes through while on the road to becoming a man or just being a man. So ladies, if you want to find out what makes us tick, go for it.

I am constantly told, particularly by women, that men don’t read books or magazines of this nature. Perhaps if there were some, they might read them. Men do know how to read although many of the women I know would swear that they are only looking at the pictures. The real issue for men is not that they don’t want information. They want it alright but it has to be presented in a way that they can relate to. That’s what I have attempted to do here, present information that is important to men in a way that men can handle. The only thing I could have done better with respect to presentation insofar as men are concerned is to include pictures of naked women. That, however, will have to be found elsewhere as I don’t wish to distract you from the task at hand.

I have talked to many men of all ages while working on this book and to a man they responded positively. Young men said they really needed this kind of information because they were mostly confused about how they were supposed to live their lives and what they are expected to do in all types of situations. A book on this subject would be invaluable to them because they didn’t want to waste a lot of time on trial and error. I was particularly gratified to see how many college age men I talked to were rabid to learn. Men of middle age were all facing problems with career, relationship, health, sex, divorce, etc. and they too need some help that is very hard to get elsewhere. Older men, oddly enough, have not given up and still want to improve what they have left of their lives and give it meaning. The fact that people are living much longer with every generation only adds to this desire. I think men will respond well to this book because no one has ever told them this stuff before and that includes their fathers who we will talk about later.

I was watching one television show recently that appeared to have a religious theme that consisted of a group of women talking to a female moderator. The moderator asked the women, What is it that women want most? She answered her own question, We want men to understand us. Right? Every one of the women nodded in complete agreement. Is this true? Is that what women want most? If so, is that what men want most too? I don’t think I have ever heard a guy say that he just wants to be understood by women, other men or anybody, for that matter. You will often hear men say they want to get laid but rarely that he wants to be understood. Just because they don’t say it doesn’t mean they don’t want it, however. I think men do want to be understood. We are just not very good at expressing it. You don’t want to sound wimpy so when you are hurt, scared, misunderstood, depressed or just plain unhappy, the easiest (and least embarrassing) path is to just shut up and tough it out by yourself. This is not good for your emotional health and will contribute to personal and societal problems if you don’t learn to act more like women in this respect and seek out counsel, guidance and support when you need them. No man is an island but that is exactly how we act because we perceive that is the only way society will accept us or at least that is what we think.

Being stoic and silent may have served us well when stalking mastodons but it just doesn’t make any sense in the modern world. I think one of the fundamental problems men and perhaps people in general have in our society is that we really aren’t that far removed, evolutionarily speaking, from our cave dwelling ancestors. Society and technology evolves exponentially while we humans evolve naturally and much more slowly, rendering us incapable of coping with much we have to face because we are continually behind the curve, so to speak. Coping mechanisms, emotional maturity and stress responses required today are not the same ones necessary ten thousand years ago yet we are all saddled with the same natural hardwiring our ancestors had. Is it any great wonder that people have a difficult time adjusting to the never-ending and continuously accelerating change we find all around us.

Women are so much better at dealing with problems, adjusting to change and coping with stress than men are. You never see a woman go it alone when a she is having problems. Her friends or family gather as a group and surround her to protect her from the outside world while providing the emotional support she needs to heal herself. You see this in nature all the time and women do it naturally too. As portrayed in movies, ice cream or wine is usually an important part of the process. Art does imitate life sometimes. I have watched women I know do exactly this same thing and it seems to work.

Men, however, rarely, if ever, do this. In fact, they tend to do just the opposite. Once when I was talking to a close friend of mine about a physical problem I was having, I had an interesting reaction that I won’t forget. While I know he cared, he just couldn’t bring himself to talk to me about something this personal in nature and it embarrassed him. He said, This is way more information than I need, and abruptly cut off that line of conversation. I was really bothered by this as I am far more open about such things than most men and I wanted to talk to someone about it but I let it go because I had seen it repeatedly with just about every guy I had ever known. It is natural for most men and I understood it. Now if we talked about golf, sports, work or our wives, no problem. Conversation would flow. Touch on any uncomfortable subject and it is like someone turned out the light. That’s how men are but it is one of the worst ways for us to act because it is fundamentally destructive to always be alone in your hour of need, no matter how small that need may be.

This knee jerk reaction may stem from the natural male proclivity towards competition with other males. As long as the conversation or activity is competitive or at least about something competitive, it is fine. As soon as it takes the frightening turn towards supportive and caring, the klaxons sound and the shields come up. What you are inevitably left with is yourself, alone to deal with your problem. No one should ever have to do this and I don’t want you to do it any more. It’s not healthy and it isn’t in your best interest although it might appear at first blush to be the correct way of dealing with it. It may seem natural but nothing could be more unnatural. Humans are social creatures by their very nature. Just look at the way we live virtually on top of each other. For some reason though, probably hidden deep in our genes, men are social but only to a point. When certain subject matter comes up, every man around you seems to clam up. Women are usually far more inclined to give men advice, admittedly often unasked for, but the missing element here is that they don’t have the same experience and psychological mindset that men have and their advice, while well-intentioned often misses the mark. Sometimes, this has to come from another man and it almost never does. This is the crux of the problem men have getting good information that they can act on with confidence.

I have seen so many men, particularly younger ones, who are lost or confused about their role(s) in life, their responsibilities and what is expected of them. Usually and unfortunately they don’t have a clue where to turn for help. I remember watching a movie called The Legend of Bagger Vance wherein Will Smith played an angel sent to help a young man, Matt Damon, who had lost his way in the world. He had been to war, was emotionally scarred and was previously a great golfer in the mold of Bobby Jones. The movie used golf as a metaphor for redemption and to teach life’s lessons. At one point Smith (Bagger Vance) said to Damon’s character, You’ve lost your swing. We just got to find it. This is so true with so many men. They often lose their swing. Their swing is a metaphor for their way in the world. When they’ve lost it, they’ve lost purpose and path. The real lesson is that the swing is still there but they just have to find it again. How do you do that when you have hit rock bottom and no one seems to believe in you anymore but more importantly, you no longer believe in yourself?

That’s one of the things we will address in this book. I told my oldest son, Mike, once when he was having some particularly vexing problems and it was obvious to me that he had lost his way in the world, that there was no crime in losing one’s way. The true crime is in not even attempting to find your way back. Of course, he overcame his issues and found his way as most young men usually do but he had to decide to make the effort to find his way back. I know I must have struck the right chord because that is just what he did, decided to find his way back. Sometimes it is difficult for males to make the quantum leap to even attempt to find their way. When that occurs, it is one of the great tragedies because it really isn’t that hard to do even though it may seem so at the time. A little nudge at exactly the right time is often all it takes. Occasionally though, something more is needed.

Quite often men never get help finding their way back and it is the fault of every man they’ve ever come in contact with because most guys don’t know how to help other guys. Notice, I didn’t say want to help other guys. I’ve been a male all my life (Duh!) and I’ve counted dozens of men as close friends. In that time though, I have met only a handful of men who truly wanted to and knew how to mentor other men. I like to believe that most men would help out others if they only knew how but that is not the way we are taught.

I know this was the case in my life. My father, doing the best he could with five kids (three boys and two girls) and a wife who died from lung cancer when most of us were very young, did not offer much in the way of sage advice or guidance because he was taught to just tough it out on his own and that’s what he thought we should do too. After all, he was a member of what has been referred to as The Greatest Generation. And it was too. He grew up during the great depression and he fought along with millions of other Americans against incredible odds to save the world from tyranny in WW II on Okinawa in the Pacific. I don’t believe he ever learned how to teach so we were all left to our own devices with little or no guidance, achieving varying degrees of success in becoming productive and happy people. Some of us turned out pretty good, had an easier time of it but the others struggled a great deal. That’s probably random chance at work.

I can’t help believing that with some very specific guidance at crucial moments in our lives, all of us would have been better off. That guidance, rarely, if ever, happened. Sometimes fate lent a hand but more often than not, it didn’t. I have to say that all of my sibs turned out to be great people so relative degrees of success may not be the most important thing after all. The point is that a little help or guidance at the right time might have made a world of difference and certainly would have made life a little easier for all of us.

I gravitated to father figures when I was growing up and am glad to have called some great older men my friends and mentors. No doubt because most men really need someone to lean on in times of crisis and someone to teach them the things they really need to know to lead successful and fulfilling lives. Not every guy gets this because society frowns on men who aren’t strong. Not every father is capable of giving it and often there are not enough substitute father figures and mentors to go around.

Generally, men are taught from birth to just tough it out. Don’t be a wuss and don’t ever cry. I remember one particularly painful experience when I was hanging Christmas tree lights on the front of our house in Alameda, California when the ladder I was using collapsed under me. I was supposed to be at a 49er game that day with my brother Ray, but I decided to stay home and put up the lights as my wife asked me to. It was mid-December and the lights should have been up weeks before. Even though things didn’t work out so well for me, I was always glad I did stay home as I could not have lived with myself if she had tried to hang them herself and gotten hurt.

For years, I blamed the ladder for failing but eventually came to realize that it was really my own stupid fault for not making sure it was secure. That’s something we will talk about later in the book—taking blame and responsibility. Anyway, the ladder collapsed as the bottom of it slid on the driveway and I put my right arm through it instinctively to break my fall. Don’t ever do this! I expressed to the surgeon days later my dismay at having broken my right elbow instead of the left one. He told me that this was almost always the case as everyone always puts out their dominant hand to break a fall. One of the rungs on the ladder served as perfect leverage to snap my elbow into roughly seven pieces with a nice sharp one sticking through the skin about two inches. My head hit the ground at the same time and I broke my nose which was the least of my worries at that moment but oddly enough, the only pain I felt until I looked at my elbow. I have heard that really serious injuries don’t hurt as much at the time as the minor ones. The serious ones save the real pain for later. That was certainly true in this case.

There was blood everywhere and I started to go into shock. You’ll know when you are in shock because you will be freezing cold and the world gets very surreal all of a sudden. Things happen very slowly but you are not able to be more than an observer of what is going on around you. Even though things slow way, way down, you can’t catch up to them and wrestle back control of your environment. It is much like getting high or drunk. Your body’s natural defense is to protect you when you experience physical trauma by rushing blood to the injured area with all the chemicals it needs to start the healing process. Also, your body, in effect, drugs you so you won’t feel as much pain. This, undoubtedly, contributes to the feeling of being disconnected from events around you.

Apparently, someone inside heard the noise of my crash landing and my wife, Jean, and our two young sons, Mike and Jeff came running out. The boys were about three and five at the time. All of the happenings that day were somewhat of a blur but I do remember several things distinctly. Jean had called an ambulance and the paramedics were doing their thing to prep me for the ride to the hospital. My youngest, Jeff was watching intently and one of the paramedics had some equipment he needed held. He gave it to Jeff and put it under his arm and asked him to hold it. Jeff looked very proud to be helping and I was proud of him for taking it so well. Before I was taken away in the ambulance, Jeff turned to Jean and said, Dad didn’t even cry." You see, even at that young age, it had been impressed upon him (certainly not consciously on my part) that guys don’t cry and that is what he expected of me. Ultimately that is what he has learned to expect of himself as well. What he didn’t know at the time is that it is much more satisfying for a man to utter the foulest of obscenities at times such as these rather than cry. He’ll learn.

Interestingly, even the most painful events can educate you if you just pay attention. I learned that day that Jeff was naturally very cool under fire and does not tend towards panic as his first reaction. He also has great empathy for the hurting and downtrodden. He has proven to be that way ever since. His brother, Mike showed at a very early age that he is a patient teacher, particularly with the old and the young. He has shown interest in helping those who can’t help themselves or are about to make serious mistakes even if it proves to be to his own detriment. Not surprisingly, all of these traits are strong in their mother, my wife.

I also learned that you don’t wear your favorite clothes when you are doing work around the house. The paramedic had to cut my favorite shirt off of me and I miss that shirt to this very day.

This book may help you better understand who you are but, more importantly, it will help you figure out just what you are supposed to do when you are confronted with the myriad situations you will inevitably encounter in the course of living your life. This is an owner’s manual for you and your life.

The lessons will be quick and easy to understand as guys don’t generally enjoy reading long drawn out psycho babble type discussions on why we are the way we are or the deep seated emotional reasons behind our inability to commit. We just don’t care. Right, guys? Many sections includes a discussion of the issue at hand and where appropriate, a list of the things to always keep in mind when dealing with this issue including any do’s and don’ts, conventional wisdom on the subject and real world nuts and bolts solutions that might apply. Other sections are informational in nature but all include important points created specifically to help you improve some aspect of your existence.

What men want to know is what to do when something needs to be fixed and we want to know right now. Men also want information on subjects that is often times difficult and elusive to acquire or just too darn confusing to make it work when you do finally get it such as Why is my wife always so mad when I play golf? Information is knowledge and knowledge is power. Men need rational and easy to understand answers to everyday issues as well as background information on just about everything so we can make a passable attempt to deal with it competently.

The internet and high speed communication has become the basis of our everyday existence and as I have come to learn, sometimes the bane of that existence. All information is readily available and given out in quick little spurts of data that even the most inattentive male can handle. That’s what men want… fast and easy to understand. The great comedian, Jeff Foxworthy, says men are simple creatures. They want a beer and they want to see something nekkid. This is certainly true on the surface but we are also much more than that. Generally, men can only focus on one thing at a time. The ability to focus is probably the primary reason so many great leaps in technology have occurred in our society, not that every great technological innovation belongs to men because that certainly is not true, but many of them do. That single-minded ability to focus on one thing and one thing only is a great tool and most guys seem to possess it. However, it also can be a terrible disadvantage in many of life’s situations.

With this trait in mind, this book is broken down into little sections ranging from What Makes Women Happy to How do I know if my kid is on drugs to Why I need a good lawyer and everything in between. You can read everything and get the Full Monty so to speak or you can just skip ahead to the parts of your owner’s manual that relate to your current problem. Guys should love this.

The very last thing I want to do to you is give you the twelve steps of understanding how to run your life or the seven steps to greater prosperity or the 41 principles of business as warfare or the five steps in getting your wife to have sex with you. The reason these Step" programs don’t usually work very well is that they are just too darn complex. They require incredible levels of commitment and as such are difficult for most men to handle. The fact that most guys focus to a large degree, single-mindedly, on problems is precisely the reason that complex programs with many variables, steps and instructions don’t work most of the time. Men get distracted, can’t concentrate and forget what they are supposed to do. They have refocused on something else that is not the program.

If you really analyze any extremely complex building plan, schematic drawing, spec sheet or even battle plan, you’ll quickly realize that all of them are broken down into very simple sub-components that are designed to be assembled independently and brought together in the final working product. On the face of it, the whole project looks like magic. It is inconceivable for all but the most brilliant minds to conceive of the entire project as a whole. However, if you take the parts one bit at a time and worry through them, it can be done. In fact, it is the only way it can be done. Let’s take the space shuttle program for example. I have read that the shuttles have something like eighteen gazillion parts. That’s a really, really large number. How could anyone make all that stuff work together and not malfunction? It really is quite simple. The project was broken down into millions of more readily digestible sub-projects and each team worked on just that part until completion. Other teams worked on just the integration of the sub-projects into the whole. Of course, there is a master plan but the master plan is not really a part of every team’s day to day operation. I am not ignoring the fact there have been some terrible tragedies in the space program. Not everything works every time but there have been far more amazing successes than failures.

How does this relate to what we are trying to accomplish here? If we start with some grand statement such as This book will make your life perfect, or You will find the road to true peace and happiness by reading this book, I believe you are doomed to failure. The path to these things is a lifelong pursuit. The lifelong pursuit has to be taken one little bit at time. This sounds like a step program but it really isn’t. Pursuing your dreams is not about completing a series of carefully crafted exercises and at the end attaining some higher level of life success. It’s about doing the day to day things that not only make your life better but make the lives of those around you better. Abraham Lincoln said, The best thing about the future is that it comes only one day at a time.

I realize that drug and alcohol addiction is not a simple matter than can be fixed with the wave of a magic wand. There are complex physical, emotional and mental issues that have to be addressed. There is, however, an incredible fall-out or more correctly characterized, fall-back-in rate from the many programs available to deal with this. On the one hand, we should all be thankful that these programs exist because they do a lot of good but any one who administers these programs will also tell you that there is a large recidivism rate. If you really think about it, it really boils down to a very simple set of alternatives. Until one has made up their mind to change their circumstances, nothing is going to change. I have talked to friends and family members in the past about their problems and the one thing I always try to point out to them is that this problem can and will end today if, and only if, they decide it does. That’s it. There is no magic program. The problem ends when you decide it does. My program for alcohol rehab would go something like this. Step 1: Stop drinking or we’ll throw you in jail and your wife will leave you, take your kids and what’s left of your money. That’s it. As Yoda said in Star Wars, Either do or do not. There is no try. I can deal with that.

By the way, this book will be filled with generalities. Generalities have been given a bad rap. Most folks don’t like them but I love them. I guess that’s a generality about generalities. Maybe not. Oh well. I realize that some generalities that hide racism and the like are hurtful and we will avoid those kinds of things here. We will focus on generalities that revolve around the way we live our lives and use them positively to instruct. There is no absolute truth or right way to do anything. There are no answers that are right for everyone all of the time. There are most of the time truths and the best available way at this moment. These are more than good enough for our purposes here. Whenever I generalize, there is usually someone who smugly points out to me that what I said is a generality. I know where these people are coming from. They are thinking that what I said or believe is not true for them, therefore it is not true at all. That seems to me to be a very egocentric view of the world. I already know that’s how they feel but I discovered a long time ago that you can rarely say anything without some aspect of it being a generality of some sort. This is true for one simple reason. Everything is a generality unless you consider pure scientific fact and sometimes we find out that even in that arena what was thought to be 100% true turns out to not be the case upon further discovery. As an example, the speed of light has been accepted as the fastest possible speed anything can attain in the universe. This was thought to be fact. We now know that this law is, in fact, a generality as it has been since discovered that the speed of a rumor running through a corporation regularly exceeds the speed of light as does the speed of all spaceships in science fiction movies or television series.

In many cases, people will accuse you of generalizing without cause. I’ll give you an example. I once told a person I was walking with that all the people I saw jogging on the path that morning were women and that there were no men. A few moments later, a man did indeed jog by. The person I was with immediately said, See, there’s a man jogging. That blows your theory and your generalizing is wrong. Of course, they never stopped to think about what I actually said. All I was doing was making an observation and had stated actual fact. I never said that only women and no men jog on this path. That, of course, could not be supported by fact and would have been a generality. I pointed this out to my companion and that was the end of the discussion.

The point is that people delight in pointing out whenever someone else is generalizing even if they aren’t because it makes them look like a bad person for doing it. I have trouble believing that it is even possible to avoid generalities when talking about people but that’s just my opinion.

Suffice to say that what you read here will be true for most people most of the time, at least from my point of view. I know that everything said here is not 100% true and correct for everyone but it usually will be good enough to move forward. If you say, All women love babies. You are guilty of generalizing. The truth is that it is mostly true from what I’ve seen. I know some that don’t love babies. However, I do believe that most of the things in this book are right for the majority and good enough to help men through many common situations, problems and conundrums. As long as we cover most of the bases, I’m happy. You can’t touch ‘em all every time. If the advice seems right to you, use it. If not, save it for later. It might become useful.

Nobody is perfect nor is the advice you get. It is commonly said that free advice is worth what you pay for it. That’s true, so you must buy this book or the advice will be worthless. Just kidding about that, guys. You still should buy the book though.

I also use a lot of references to movies, books, songs and pop culture in general. I only use them because something in them struck a chord with me and I thought it would be useful in our discussions. There are a great many lessons that can be learned from what passes for entertainment in our culture. Any form of entertainment wouldn’t be popular unless it delivered a message that people could relate to. I find some of the best stuff is to be found in movies, books and songs if you just pay attention.

One of the things that continually bedevils me about this is that my memory of a scene in a movie, a quotation or the words of a song often does not jibe with the original. Usually, it reflects, pretty well, the message but is not completely accurate even though I am sure it is. There is nothing more disappointing than to have quoted a line from a movie or book for years, later to discover when looking at the original that you were quoting it wrong the whole time. If nothing else, these eye opening experiences do serve to remind us of our own fallibility.

I will do my best to get it right. It is difficult to get the exact original reference sometimes because there is a dispute as to its origin or the original has been lost to popular revision and interpretation. Once things move into the realm of pop culture, they do have an irritating habit of evolving. With that in mind, I apologize for not getting references to these things perfectly accurate when it happens. You can rest assured that I did my best, they are always at least pretty close and it really doesn’t matter much if the lesson learned and the message is the same.

I want to state for the record that I am not really an expert in anything particular. If I were to put a label on myself, I’d say that I consider myself a semi-renaissance man more than anything else. In my mind a renaissance man is interested in just about everything and that certainly describes me. My dad used to say that he was a jack of all trades and a master of none. That’s also true of me even though I have tried to master a few and have had some success. It is probably true of most men. I have been at various times a busboy, a waiter, a cook, a restaurant manager, a drug store assistant manager trainee, a real estate agent, broker, and office manager, a title insurance company sales rep., office manager, sales manager, Sr. Vice President, a partner in a company that owned and operated four casual dining sit-down restaurants, a partner in a gymnastics academy for kids and adults and currently a catering company owner and restaurant operator who dabbles in the mortgage broker trade when I can find the time. Oh, I forgot, author. But that’s only at night and on the weekends. All of this has been in the San Francisco Bay Area of California. That may sound like a lot of things but I suspect that this type of resume is fairly typical of a lot of men.

I played soccer passably well in high school and college. I dabbled in football and basketball. Too short, too small, too averse to pain to be very good at it. I play golf and have gotten better but not nearly as good as I’d like. I played a lot of racquetball until the aforementioned broken elbow.

I have a BA in Mass Communication from a nice but relatively un-prestigious university in California which has recently changed its name to get a little more respect and I have completed about ½ of the coursework for a Masters degree in Business Administration from that same university which I will probably never complete. I guess I just got tired of being in school. There is a great line in a movie called The World According To Garp. In it, Robin Williams, who played Garp, was talking to his very young son about graduate school. The boy, didn’t quite get it and asked, "What is gradual school? Williams replied, It’s where people go to gradually realize that they don’t like school."

I didn’t learn anything specific that I can point to as a turning point in my life in college but I did learn the most important thing you are supposed to learn there and seemingly, it happened by osmosis, certainly not something I was aware of at the time. That thing is to THINK. If you can think through a problem you can solve it. If you can measure it, you can change it. You will not come out of school knowing everything you need to know but if you learn how and where to find out what you need to know, you’ve already won the battle. B.F. Skinner said, Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten.

I have a friend who is also the attorney I often use in my business. I’ll call him Dale because that’s not his name. He has a motto that he uses. It is I don’t know what I don’t know. That is how he approaches law and in the course of finding out what he doesn’t know he almost always finds the best solution for his clients at that moment. It is a simple yet brilliant strategy, sometimes tedious and expensive, but brilliant nonetheless. If you don’t know this already, you will certainly find out along the way that the best solutions are almost always the simplest ones and you usually learn them through discovery of the things you don’t already know. Dale obviously learned how to think somewhere along the line. He is also a good friend that you can count on. That he didn’t learn in school.

An interesting thing about thinking is that most of us rarely have the time to actually do it. When you are reacting to one crisis after another, fulfilling one responsibility after another, you really don’t have the time to plot and plan out a whole lot. Most of this book was written in the bathtub, on long walks, driving, while watching TV or listening to the radio. These are a few of the times when you have a chance to be alone with your thoughts.

Unfortunately, it is very difficult to write your thoughts down when you are doing these types of activities. I highly suggest buying a small digital recorder and leave yourself notes when you come up with a particularly useful thought or plan. These work just about anywhere and it is a great deal easier and efficient to talk free form than it is to write things down. Sometimes I don’t have my recorder or it is not an environment conducive to making recordings like when I am talking to someone. At those times I use a mental short hand, sometimes with just the first letter of the things I want to remember and record it later when I am alone. This does work most of the time.

I lost my recorder once when some wonderful person broke the window and snatched my bag from my car. It had about 300 little notes I had recorded for future use on this book and another one I am working on. I never got it back but I did get the bag back with everything else in it except my recorder and a flash drive that had a copy of this book in the early draft stage. My thanks to the guy who found it in the bushes and the San Leandro Police Department for calling me to let me know my bag had been found.

Fortunately,