Wake Up Happy: The Dream Big, Win Big Guide to Transforming Your Life - Softcover

Strahan, Michael

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1476775699 ISBN 13: 9781476775692

Verlag: 37 Ink, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

From the beloved cohost of Good Morning America, NFL Hall of Fame member and Super Bowl champion Michael Strahan comes a motivational guide to tackle each day from the moment you get out of bed.

Pulling from his own life experiences, Michael Strahan details the mix of mental discipline, positive thinking, and sense of play that lead him to a Super Bowl XLII victory as a member of the New York Giants, and later to star alongside Kelly Ripa in the hit daytime talk show Live! with Kelly and Michael. Each of these “Strahan Rules” will guide you step-by-step through developing a work ethic and mental durability that will prime you to achieve your goals and transform your life.

Delivered with his signature wit and wisdom, Strahan’s Rules combine a range of advice, from values he picked up from his father who served in the military to professors who teach on the science of happiness and include:

-Rule #5: Too many of us count ourselves out before we even give ourselves a chance...Do the work. Be excellent. You’ll find your place.
-Rule #11: You can’t change other people, but you can change how you are around them, and sometimes, a lot of times, that’s more than enough.
-Rule #12: Listen to other people, but don’t take their opinions for fact. Have your own experiences. Draw your own conclusions.

Whether you are attempting to achieve your career goals, seeking to better your relationships or simply up your optimism quotient, Wake Up Happy will inspire you.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

NFL legend Michael Strahan made his name on the football field, setting the record for single season sacks in 2001 and being inducted into Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2014, but his star has shined brighter and for longer than his 216 history-making games with the New York Giants, which included a win at Super Bowl XLII. In 2008, he joined the Fox NFL Sunday pregame show as a commentator, and in 2012, he beat a competitive roster of candidates to replace Regis Philbin as co-host of the wildly popular Live! with Kelly & Michael. In April 2014, he joined Good Morning America as a special cohost, and Barbara Walters selected him as one of her 10 Most Fascinating People of 2014.

Veronica Chambers was an editor for The New York Times Magazine, a culture writer for Newsweek, and a senior associate editor at Premiere magazine. Her work has appeared in Vogue and Glamour, among many other publications. She is also the author of a critically acclaimed memoir, Mama's Girl. In 2000 she received a fellowship from the Japan Society to spend several months researching in Japan. She fell in love with the country and has returned for extended stays every year since.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Wake Up Happy

1

WHAT I LEARNED FROM HERSCHEL WALKER

Rule #1

Help can—and will—come from the most unexpected places. Be open to everything around you.

MANNHEIM, GERMANY, was an awesome place to grow up. It wasn’t a giant city like Berlin or Munich, but it was a big enough town and there was enough going on that we never got cabin fever. There was always something to do.

When I was thirteen years old, my favorite activity was to chase after my brothers and their friends. Wherever they went, I wanted to go too. My brothers, Victor, Chris, and Gene Junior, were fifteen, seventeen, and twenty-one, and I worshipped them. I had two older sisters as well, but it was all about my brothers to me. And then there was our extended family. Because we were all so far away from home on an American base, friends became family quickly. Mothers—many of whom had neither the work visas nor the language skills applicable to the countries in which they were based and therefore had time on their hands—felt licensed to grab you by the collar and question you as if you were a soldier gone AWOL, now facing disciplinary action:

Where’s your homework?

What are you doing?

Where are you going?

Where’s my kid?

Who’s dating whom?

Did I see your brother kissing my daughter? You know that girl is only fourteen; you better tell Gary that if he doesn’t want Tanisha’s father to have a talk with your father, he better act like he knows.

This was Germany in the 1980s, so it was all Smurfs and gummi bears at the Base Exchange, the shop near my father’s office that stocked everything we might need. But nothing you could buy in a store could compete with my mother and her Cake Boss–level baking. My mother and her friends made all of the classic deep dishes from home: cherry pies, mixed berry pies, caramel apple walnut pies. Then there were the cakes. Every mother I knew kept a yellow cake with chocolate icing on a glass cake stand in her kitchen in case her husband brought someone home for dinner, or an unexpected late afternoon coffee break, an unannounced guest, say a high-ranking officer or a visiting American dignitary.

But that was just the standard. Like I said, these women had time on their hands. So in addition to the yellow cakes they whipped up from boxes of Duncan Hines procured at the Base Exchange, there was the more exotic fare: black chocolate lava cake or Earl Grey tea cake, not to mention all the German specialties. People always talk about the French and their bakeries. I’ve been to France more than a few times, but having grown up in Germany, I have to set the record straight for you: you can’t tell the Germans a thing about making cakes. Forget about Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte, Black Forest Cake. That’s nothing but a mess of chocolate, cherries, and whipped cream. Let’s talk about some Bienenstich, Bee Sting Cake, a beautiful yellow cake confection with caramelized almonds and a buttercream filling. Don’t even get me started on the Berliner, which are like jelly donuts—if jelly donuts were made in heaven, by angels. And then there’s Spaghettieis, which is a bowl of German ice cream that has been put through some special spaetzle press so that the vanilla ice cream looks like a bowl of spaghetti, after which it’s covered with a strawberry sauce, which is cooked to look just like tomato sauce, and then the sauce is covered with shaved coconut, which mimics Parmesan cheese. Proof positive that German ingenuity does not apply just to cars, people.

As you can tell, I spent more than a little time eating when I was a kid. My mother could cook, and she is, to this day, the picture of Southern comfort, easy grace, and hospitality. I’d get home from school and she’d wrap me in a giant bear hug.

“Afternoon, baby, how was your day?” she’d ask.

At thirteen, a lot of boys don’t want to sit down and chitchat with their mothers. But I’d walk in the house, and the kitchen would smell like a bakery, and there was my mom—standing there like a female Willy Wonka—offering me the golden ticket of goodies every single day of the week.

She’d cut me a big piece of just-baked streusel and pour me a cold glass of milk, and you bet I’d sit down for thirty minutes and tell that woman anything she wanted to know. I’d tell her about how Mrs. Polans was a nice teacher, but Algebra 1 was so freakin’ hard, I didn’t know how I’d make it to Algebra 2. Or about how Mr. Adlersflügel, who taught our German class, cut himself shaving each and every day. He’d come to class with little pieces of toilet paper all over his face. My mother would laugh so hard at my impression of Mr. Adlersflügel, done in animated, exaggerated German. “Oh, bless his heart!” she’d say. “He must be single, because no woman would let him walk out of the house like that.” My mother didn’t have a mean bone in her body, but she loved to hear funny stories about our teachers and the other families on base, and I loved to make her laugh. Louise Strahan’s laugh is just like her baking: all butter and sugar, with just the tiniest dash of salt.

My friends and I did our best to increase awareness about the game of American style football. We would play with whoever expressed an interest. And when we tired of football, we would go to a friend’s house and play Atari. But what I really loved to do was hang out with my brothers.

One afternoon I was following the older kids. My brothers and their friends kept calling back to me, “Bob! Bob! Keep up, Bob!” I didn’t think anything of it. My brothers always called me Bob. Sure, it was an odd nickname, given that my name is Michael. But not any odder than what my friends were called by their big brothers.

That day, as I was huffing and puffing my way up that twelve-foot fence, my brother’s friend Anthony came up behind me.

He said, “You know why they call you Bob, right?”

I shrugged. Who knew why my brothers did any of the things they did?

He turned to me sympathetically. “Bob stands for Booty on Back,” he said. “They call you that because you’re fat.”

When he told me what “Bob” really meant, a name that my brothers had been calling me for years, I was stunned.

I close my eyes and I can see myself, plummeting four feet down to the ground slowly, so slowly that I have the time to ask myself the question again and again:

Am I fat?

Am I fat?

Am I fat?

I hit the grass with a thud, and while I can feel the bruises coming up on my back, my neck, my arms, feel the cuts and scrapes on my bare legs, I’m hurting far more on the inside than on the outside.

Anthony looks down at me. He is still hanging on to the fence. “Hey, man,” he shouts. “You okay?”

I nod yes. Then I say it as loud as I can. “Yeah, I’m okay.”

Once I see Ant has cleared the fence and gone running toward the field, I dust myself off, and with real, hot tears on my face, I take off in the other direction—toward home and my mom.

Louise Strahan has many gifts, but lying is not one of them. If Germany had ever been invaded during our time abroad, and the security of our base and the nation relied on her powers of subterfuge, we...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: 37 Ink
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2016
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1476775699
• ISBN 13: 9781476775692
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 208
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV; info@simonandschuster.nl; ; Herculesplein 96; Utrecht; 3584 AA; Niederlande