Reflections on first impressions and habits

hey good morning friends i'm uh getting a bit of a late start on today's little message from me to you here in voice notes i guess i could say a message from me to me i think i might be the only person listening to these but that's okay it's been fun going back and listening to them and i still think this is a great use of technology i'm really astounded by

the all the hurdles that have been lowered to going from an idea to going from something that you are talking about or thinking about straight to a blog post or a podcast so I'm still I'm still on board I read one time that

it can take um i believe three weeks is how long it takes for something to turn into a habit so if you do something every day for three weeks it becomes a habit i've done this for three days so i have about 18 days to go but i want to make this a morning habit good morning i hope you are enjoying your monday i've never been one of those people that had the

Monday blahs, it makes sense to not want to go back to work after having a fun weekend, but I feel like my weekends and my weeks blur together. We spend so much time on the computer on the weekend that it doesn't feel like this huge break to get away from the weekend and go back to work. Here's what I want to talk to you about this morning. I want to talk to you about first impressions. First impressions.

We all know that first impressions are important. We know they're critical. A lot of times we can remember exactly what someone was doing or what they said to us or how they acted or how they looked, what they were wearing the first time we met them. One of my best friends, Jeff, is 52 years old. I'm 51 years old.

And we met in seventh grade. And I often tell the story to people about the first time we met. It was a funny story. We had both just been pulled from small pools of elementary schools and thrown into a large group, seventh grade, which was every seventh grader in our entire town. So it was combining seven elementary schools worth of kids.

so we were meeting lots of new people and everyone was fishing for people that they had things in common with and Jeff and I both ended up in music class together a class that neither of us had any real interest in attending and Jeff was all the way on the other side of the room and the teacher

Our music teacher handed out sheets of paper with the lyrics to a song we were going to sing. And I still remember the song was called You Can Sing a Rainbow. And the song's lyrics were silly. It just went through the colors of the rainbow and then repeated this thing about how you could be a rainbow, I think, or you could sing a rainbow.

now um perhaps this was foreshadowing to the future me um but the thing that irritated me the most about the song uh wasn't just the ridiculousness of it all um but also that the colors listed in the song were red and yellow and pink and green purple and orange and blue

which everyone knows are not the colors of a rainbow. It's Roy G. Biff. We all learned that. So not only was the song childish and dumb and embarrassing, it was also factually incorrect, which is something that would have irritated a 7th grade me. But anyway...

Jeff was standing all the way on the other side of the room and I believe he was wearing some sort of heavy metal t-shirt at the time. I don't remember exactly what it was. It was probably...

either an Ozzy Osbourne or a KISS shirt. That would be my guess. But Jeff, we made eye contact in the room and we were all standing on these risers. If you remember from elementary school, we had those musical risers we would stand on. And Jeff left his riser and came all the way over and stood next to me and looked at me in the face and said, are you going to sing this crap? And I said, no. And he said, me either. Hi, my name is Jeff.

It's a story I will never forget. I tell people all the time when we talk about our old friends and stuff. I tell them when people say, how did you and Jeff meet? I always tell them that story. And it just goes to show what a strong first impression that we make on people. And I want to quickly tell you about two first impressions. One is with my next door neighbor

that I met two houses ago. And this is a long time ago. This was 20 years ago. And the story behind us purchasing this house is so long and ridiculous that I could... The story, to tell it properly, takes 20 minutes, and I don't have that time this morning. But the gist of it is that the people that were selling the house were a...

couple who had been married and divorced to each other three times. So they had been married, they got married, they got divorced, they remarried each other a second time, and then got divorced and then remarried each other a third time. They say third time's the charm, but it was not. And so they were getting divorced for a third time. And the divorce was particularly nasty. There were lawyers involved, there were judges involved.

And again, boy, it would just take too long. But we walked into a hornet's nest. We had no idea. We were just shopping for a house. My wife and I were looking for a house. And we found this house. We thought it was great. And the wife, the soon-to-be ex-wife, was living in the house, but she had a restraining order against the husband. So he was not able to come to the house and get his things.

which really complicated issues. If you know anything about purchasing a house, you know that when you buy a house, everything that's in the house and on the property becomes yours once that title is signed. But the guy was not able to get his stuff because she wouldn't let him back in the house. So he became very angry with us, who had no part of this. I told the guy later, I said, listen, I have a house full of stuff. I don't want your stuff.

and we arranged a window of time for him to come get his stuff, which I did not have to do. Legally, it was my stuff. I didn't want his stuff, you know. But anyway, just to let you know how volatile the situation was, when we went the first time for the signing of the title, you know, when you go to the title company and you sign the title for your new house,

The soon-to-be divorced couple were not allowed to be there at the same time, and so the man went first to sign the title, and then while he was there, he grabbed the title and walked out of the title company. So there was no title. It stopped the entire process from happening.

By the time we signed the title, again, there were lawyers involved, there were police involved. Oklahoma is a state where people can carry weapons, and so most of the people who came to the signing had weapons. It was a crazy, crazy time. But that's not the story. The story is, there was a three-day weekend there where we didn't technically own the house because the man had illegally taken the title and ran away.

But in good faith, the realtor said, listen, we're going to get this solved. And if you guys want to go over there and take a look at the house and do things like that, you're more than welcome to. Here's the keys. They gave us the keys to the house. And so my wife and I and our child, who was less than a year old, we were toting this infant around in a core seat carrier, went to the house to go measure for curtains. We were there for 10 minutes or less.

and a sheriff pulled up in the driveway and came up and said, what are you people doing here? And we said, well, here's the deal. We tried to buy the house and they stole the title, but they gave us the keys. And he said, you don't own this house and neighbors have called the police saying that you're here illegally. And I said, I can't believe this is happening. I called my realtor and said, the deal's off. I don't want to buy this house. And she said, we're going to get through it. You'll have the house and we'll be past all this.

But we told the sheriff we would leave. And so as we were leaving, the next door neighbor was standing out in his yard with his arms crossed. And we said, hey, how are you doing? And he didn't even talk to me. And I approached him. And I said, boy, this is crazy. I said, the sheriff was just here. They ran us off. And he said, I know. I called him.

And I said, you called the sheriff on us? And he said, yep. He said, this is my buddy's house. And he didn't want to sell it. Now you people are doing all this. And I said, well, I'm not doing anything. I said, there's a house for sale. And we liked it. We bought it. And he said, yeah. He said, it's a

Not a good deal and you shouldn't do it, you know. And he said, and when we had looked at the house before, there was a small pond, like one of those little koi fish ponds in the backyard. And it had a concrete bridge over it. And he said, by the way, I gave that bridge to them as a wedding gift. And he goes...

I just took it back, and then we looked, and he was right. It was gone. It had been there before, which, by the way, is super illegal. When you go to sign a thing, everything on there, it's your property. So he had stolen it, and I was just shaking my head. I was like, well, this is great. Anyway, we lived in that house for...

Gosh, eight years, you know, and never again spoke to that neighbor. When we saw each other, we would just, you know, stare at each other and he would go his way, I would go mine. It was the most awkward situation. And that was my first impression of that guy, that he didn't want us there. He had called the sheriff's department. He didn't even, I mean, it was such a ridiculous situation, you know.

that again we didn't cause we just stumbled into you know and and we were we were 30 years old like like we were now i think of that as being kids you know um but what a what a first impression to make on your next door neighbor and i want to contrast that with another quick story uh the house i live in now i've been here for about five years and uh uh you know

Now that I'm older, I turned 50 last year, and so when I'm looking for a house, I want to go look at the house. I want to know everything about the house, but I do things that other people don't do anymore. I will come back to the house at night, and I'll sit outside in the street. Are there party houses nearby? Is there a guy who works on cars who's revving engines all night long? These are the things I want to know now when I buy a house. And when we bought this house,

it was it was a new house it was a brand new house had just been built and the no one had mowed the lawn in a month maybe or so and so and at our last house we didn't have a lawnmower we had someone who mowed our lawn and so we moved to this new house and the the grass was getting high and we didn't own a lawnmower until we were reaching out to people online we were like hey you know we're looking for somebody to mow lawns and and the the

yard of our new house is about three quarters of an acre it's a pretty large yard and we would uh try to you know we would we would there was a kid that came around uh and and the thing is our yard is kind of like pie shape so the front yard's not huge but the backyard is very large and a kid came to the door we said hey uh he said hey i mow lawns you know or whatever and we said great we need somebody to mow the lawn and he came in the backyard he came back out he just left

He didn't even say bye. He didn't say he didn't want to do it. He just disappeared. I said, well, I guess that's a hard no right there. So anyway, we borrowed, I think, an electric lawnmower from somebody. It was terrible. It didn't mow very well, and it did even worse on really high grass. And we had parts in our backyard where the grass was knee-high. It was really out of control.

and we weren't able to find anybody to mow the lawn yet, but we knew we had to mow this lawn, you know. And so I went out there with this lawn mower, and I was trying to push it through, and I just couldn't. It wouldn't even go through the grass. It would go six inches and then stop, and you had to restart it, and then another six inches, it would stop. It was not meant for this job, but I was doing my best.

My son came out. He said, can I take over, Dad? I said, yep. And he had the same thing, six inches, six inches, you know. While I was on break, my wife was sitting out on the back patio, you know, in the summer sun, baking. And my new next-door neighbor...

you know, have you ever been like super hot and sweaty like in the summer and you look and you see that guy near you and he's drinking a nice cold lemonade and you're like, oh no, I'm so jealous. I look over at my next door neighbor

and he has one of those, I think it's called a zero-turn mower. I think it's a mower that you stand on. It was one that you sit down on, but it didn't even have a steering wheel. It had two levers on the left and right that you pull and turn, and the lawnmower would spin around. I mean, this was the type of thing that was made like a commercial mower, you know?

and I watched this guy. His mower, I'm going to say, went 30 miles an hour. It was zipping back and forth across his lawn. Zoom, zoom, zoom, zoom, zoom. As here we are struggling with this. And he had just started his lawn and apparently he looked over and saw us struggling with our lawn. And before we knew what had happened, he was in my backyard.

and he kind of motioned for my son to move and my son pulled our little almost what looked like a toy push lawnmower back up to our back porch and my next door neighbor mowed our lawn down in minutes zoom to the left zoom to the right it just took care of the entire thing

And I found out later that he is a pastor at a local church. And so I would say the good deed checks out. He was doing something to literally help his neighbor. And that was my first impression of my next door neighbor. His name is Dave. And Dave and I speak regularly while we're both in our driveways. Our driveways close.

or next to one another. And so sometimes he's in the driveway and I'm in my driveway and we'll stop and we'll say hi and we'll talk for a couple of minutes. We're now friends on Facebook. My wife talks to his wife. They have two kids. His daughter is the same age as my daughter and then he has a younger son who's about 10 years old who is the cutest kid in the world. In fact, I recently found out that

He came over in the driveway one day and told me a joke and he laughed and laughed and laughed. It was a terrible kid joke and I laughed with him because that's what you do.

and because I'm a collector of old things I went into my office and I dug out a bunch of my joke books that I had as a kid and the next time I saw him I gave him one of the joke books and so I've given him four or five joke books over the past year every month or so I gave him another one and his parents have reminded me that the jokes are terrible

They're all really cheesy kid jokes, which makes me laugh that this kid is now telling bad jokes, bad quality jokes to his parents. And so I have a great relationship with my neighbors. And I think it all stems back to that first impression. So here's my takeaway for you today and a takeaway for me today.

is that sometimes when we meet someone, even in passing, that's a first impression. We never know if that person is going to become somebody in our lives later on down the road. We don't know. Sometimes we don't know that our first impression is in fact a first impression. But I can tell you this, most of the people that are in my life

the first impression that they made on me I have remembered for years sometimes decades so that's my takeaway whenever that's what I'm gonna shoot for today I'm gonna put that in the back of my head as a reminder that when I meet people even in passing I'm gonna try to make a good first impression because you never know when that first impression is going to come back