Rule number 1!

A good rule I learned from some great friends.

If you've read my newsletters for a while, you probably know my that wife and I met during college. We dated during our senior year and for a while afterward.

Then, we broke up. We didn’t reconnect until our 20th college reunion.

After that, we moved quickly: got engaged in a few months, married in less than a year. Now, we have a daughter and we live in the ‘burbs.

We have some other friends, a husband and wife, who took a different path.

All four of us graduated, but they skipped the whole “two decade hiatus” thing, and got married and had a family almost right out of school.

The result is that they’re our peers, and our great friends, but also they’re 20 years ahead of us in many ways.

I’ve turned to them a lot for advice, and one of the best things they shared early on was what they call Rule No. 1 in their family: “Don’t freak out.”

Photo by Nick Page on Unsplash

It’s applicable to almost any challenge. We taught it to my daughter almost as soon as she could speak, and it’s shorthand in our family now, too, when people get upset: “What’s Rule No. 1?”

Like a lot of things in life, the rule is simple, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy.

Also, like every other rule that I try to follow, I'm nowhere near consistent.

But it turns out that a while back (nine years ago!), during the heyday of the Internet listicle, I wrote a column for Inc.com about things to do when you’re feeling overwhelmed.

(I’d completely forgotten about this until recently. That happens a lot since I’ve written something like 3,000 columns.)

Some of the advice seems a bit generic, I must admit: “Go take a walk,” or “take a night off for dinner with friends,” or “go to a movie.”

But some of the ideas remain very applicable:

• Take a physical or emotional time-out. On it.

• Work out. I fell off the wagon on this for quite a while, but have recently returned.

• Pray or meditate. I’m glad to have found this nine-year-old article because I mentioned in it that I occasionally used to go to a Catholic church run by the Jesuits near my office in New York.

Lo and behold, I happened to be alone in the city early on a Sunday a few weeks ago, and I had the chance to go by again afterward.

(Who starts a conference early on a Sunday morning, you might ask? The National Retail Federation, that's who -- and if you're trying to interview the CEO of Walmart U.S., it doesn't hurt to go to his 8:30 a.m. Sunday keynote address.)

Back to the list:

• Phone a friend. Funny, I talked yesterday with the very same friend I mentioned in this article all the way back in 2016. (He also went to college with the four of us I mentioned above.)

• Talk things over with your significant other. LOL, my poor wife, who gets to hear EVERYTHING going on in my head. By the way honey, can I tell you something I'm thinking about doing with the newsletter? (Inside joke.)

• Write stuff down. I don’t keep a diary, but I’ve basically littered the Internet with my thoughts over the past two decades.

• Clean up. Yeah, I need to do more of that.

Those are just my strategies. I’m sure a lot of people reading this have even better ones. (Feel free to share.) But honestly, whatever it takes.

There are very few situations in life that are improved by losing control and freaking out. So thanks to my friends, my wife, and my daughter, for reminding me when I need it, about Rule No. 1.

Actually, there's probably never a time when that's not worth remembering.

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7 other things worth knowing today

• President Trump pardoned Ross Ulbricht, 40, who had been serving a life sentence for founding and operating "Silk Road," an online black market that prosecutors had called "the most sophisticated and extensive criminal marketplace on the internet." The site facilitated hundreds of thousands of illegal transactions, and led to the overdose deaths of at least six people who bought drugs on it, while Ulbricht himself made millions, according to prosecutors. "The scum that worked to convict him were some of the same lunatics who were involved in the modern day weaponization of government against me," Trump said in announcing the pardon. (CBS News)

• Historic snowfall is burying parts of the Gulf Coast amid dangerous cold as a once-in-a-generation winter storm wreaks havoc on travel in a region wholly unaccustomed to winter weather, including an area stretching from Houston into southern Louisiana that has recorded widespread 3 to 6 inches of snow. (CNN)

• At least 66 people are confirmed dead after a fire engulfed a ski resort hotel in Turkey. The 161-room Grand Kartal Otel was nearly fully booked, with 234 guests, due to schools being on break. Two people died jumping from windows of the wooden cliff-top hotel after the fire started around 3:27 a.m. (Metro UK)

• Fewer people are eating in a way they consider healthy –– and they don’t even like it, according to new data. Globally, 81% of people said in 2023 they enjoyed their food in the past week, which was down from 87% the year before. And about 75% of people said they ate mostly healthy, compared with 82% in 2022, according to the survey. “In some instances, we’re still seeing strong majorities of people saying that they enjoy their food,” said Andrew Dugan, consulting principal researcher at Gallup. “But the decline has been pretty stark.” (CNN)

• Inside a $300 million members-only luxury doomsday bunker with AI-powered medical suites and indoor pools where the 1% can seek shelter from apocalypse. (Realtor.com)

• For all their charm, the pristine beaches of the Caribbean have always been slightly at odds with the reality of life in the region. This situation is helped by the fact that tourism remains the lifeblood of local economies – and is typically insulated from the high crime rates, civil unrest and political instability. Over the past year, a rising tide of experts and law enforcement agencies have been sounding their alarms about a surge in violent crime across the Caribbean, including in countries usually regarded as tourist paradises. (The Telegraph)

• Prince Harry’s mission to put the British tabloids on trial for decades of alleged unlawful snooping into his life was in question Tuesday as last-minute settlement talks delayed the start of a high-stakes trial pitting him against Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers. Harry, 40, the younger son of King Charles III, and one other claimant are the only two remaining who have not joined the hundreds of others who have settled lawsuits against News Group Newspapers over allegations their phones were hacked and investigators unlawfully snooped on their lives. (AP)