Preaching vs. Practicing

You need a sense of humor to promote yourself. It especially comes in handy when you realize that you’re telling people to do the opposite of what you’re currently doing.

For three weeks, I’ve done everything I can to promote the new book, and I’ve done almost nothing else. I took the day off on Christmas, and I knocked off a little early on Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve. But that was it, until yesterday.

My normal schedule is simple and sustainable: I get up early in the morning, I knock off for an hour or two at midday to work out or run errands, and then I shut off the computer at 6 p.m.

My promote-a-new-book schedule is insane. I get up early, and spend the next 12 to 14 hours doing radio interviews, answering every reader question as soon as I can (the NROL for Abs forum on JP Fitness is the best place to ask), jumping on every opportunity to write short excerpts or summaries for any media outlet that wants one, and then updating the NROL page on Facebook with links to the sites that mention the book.

Sometimes the last interview of the day is an hour or two past my normal bedtime. Then I wake up at the usual time the next day, which means I lose an hour or two of sleep each night.

In the interviews I tell listeners to turn off their electronic stuff, get out of their chairs, and spend some time unwired. But in order to do the interviews and everything else that goes along with promoting a book, I have to spend my entire day in my chair, a slave to my electronic stuff.

I woke up yesterday feeling okay but looking 10 years older. So after doing a morning interview with WBT in Charlotte, I decided to take the entire day off. I worked out in the morning to make up for skipping Friday’s workout because of scheduling conflicts. (How ironic is it to write this post on Thursday and then have to postpone the very next workout?) I shuttled my kids around to their workshops and classes. I shoveled the driveway. (Hence, the picture of 50 Cent shoveling his neighbors’ driveways. Everything looks more interesting when a celebrity does it.) And then I tried to remember how to do nothing.

It went pretty well for a couple of hours. I napped. I read several chapters of At Home, by Bill Bryson, a terrific history of how we came to live the way we do. I even tried some recreational channel surfing, avoiding news or anything else that might fire up my catecholamines.

Then my wife told me about the shooting in Tucson.

I spent the rest of the afternoon and evening moving back and forth from the TV to my computer to try to make sense of it. Of course, there was no sense to be had. I doubt if we’ll ever know what drove the shooter to single out that congresswoman at that moment. Mental illness takes all kinds of forms and plays out in all kinds of ways. What makes sense to a mind distorted by psychosis or schizophrenia can’t possibly make sense to those of us dealing with ordinary problems like the ones I just described.

Today I got back to work as usual. I wish the families of those killed or wounded yesterday could say the same.

Tags: Tags: exercise, nrol for abs, self-promotion, tragedy, training