A couple of weeks ago I had a bad day. Actually, it was a terrible day. Every piece of news I got was disappointing. Did it affect me? I still have bruises from the rock I tried to hide under.

Guess what? In the coming weeks you will have a bad day, too. Whether you are an entrepreneur launching a new product, an employee aiming for a promotion, or simply someone going after a big goal in your other 8 hours, you will experience disappointment and setback. How you respond to disappointment could determine your eventual success or failure. Why? A really bad day can, at best, cause you to lose momentum, and at worst, cause you to lose your will to continue.

Here are five tips to survive a bad day:

Don’t add more pressure. Forget about turning lemons into lemonade. The first rule to follow when trying to turn around a bad day is to not try to turn around a bad day — that’s nearly impossible and puts way too much pressure on you. Your goal should be to survive the day and minimize the long-term damage by agreeing not to make any decisions. After a barrage of bad news, your decision making ability will be all messed up. Take a break and, if possible, escape…

Escape. It’s easy to get too analytical and try to think your way out of a bad day, but often this can just cause you to dwell on the problem. Sometimes it makes sense to escape. Go see a movie. Go dancing. Play with your kids. Do whatever it takes to distract yourself and stop obsessing about your bad day. Your “problems” will still be there when you return, but you’ll come at them with a fresh mind.

Insulate yourself. One of the best ways to shield yourself from negativity is by wrapping yourself in a “positivity condom.” Wake up 10 minutes early and write about those things for which you are grateful on a daily basis. About a week after I started doing this, I got some really bad news. The very first thing I thought was “this sucks!” I was shocked and angry. After about 20 seconds of this, I immediately thought back to what I had written earlier in the day. It instantly changed my perspective.

Eliminate overgeneralization. What happens when you’ve been doing great on your diet but suddenly find yourself with an empty bag of Doritos in your lap and an unnaturally orange substance covering your hands? Usually generalization. This is where you turn a single negative event into a never-ending pattern of defeat, and it’s this kind of thinking that can cause you to give up after a bad day. The solution? Attack the belief. Write down all the reasons why this bad day is really just that — a bad day — and not a sentence to a life of failure.

Avoid personalization. Personalization is another cognitive distortion. It is when you take credit for an event for which you didn’t have any control. Many of the negative events you will face will be beyond your control, but you might blame yourself. Got laid off? It might not have anything to do with you and everything to do with the company, but if you personalize this you’ll beat yourself up over it. Again, the solution here is to attack the belief. For each negative event, ask yourself, “Am I responsible for this or was this outside of my control?”

When you throw down the gauntlet and commit yourself to improving your life, you will face challenges. If you can follow these bad day tips, you’ll keep your motivation and you’ll spend a lot less time under rocks.

Air-Conditioning Is Terrible for the Earth — Here’s How to Live Without It

We live in a society that has been built around the idea of energy-intensive cooling. Here are some easy ways you can stay cool and cut your summer energy consumption.

Over the past decade, gains in the general energy efficiency of appliances have been wiped out by our growing reliance on one device in particular: the air conditioner. Just since the mid-1990s, as the U.S. population was growing by less than 15 percent, consumption of electricity to cool the residential, retail and automotive sectors doubled.

If people in India, Brazil and Indonesia used as much air-conditioning per capita as we do (and why not, their climates are hotter than ours), they would consume not only their own electricity supplies but also all of the electricity in Mexico, the United Kingdom and Italy — plus all 60 nations of Africa! The air-conditioning of America’s homes, businesses schools, and vehicles causes the release of greenhouse gases equivalent to 400 million tons of carbon dioxide annually.

But while working on Chapter 1 (pdf) of Losing Our Cool: Uncomfortable Truths About Our Air-Conditioned World, I learned that there are still plenty of people who, out of ecological and other concerns, live without air-conditioning — even in the hot heart of the Sunbelt.

Chris George and Dani Moore, for example, kept their windows open and their refrigerator stocked with ice water through the entire summer of 2009 in Tempe, Arizona. I visited them on the second-hottest day of the year, when it was 114 degrees outdoors and 100 in the kitchen.

Sheila and John Stewart have been opening their 1920s-era house in St. Petersburg, Florida to Gulf breezes year-round since 1984; Sheila told a local reporter in 2006 that life in hot, humid Florida without air-conditioning is “a thermostatic thing. Your body gets used to it.”

Meanwhile, we residents of central Kansas are no strangers to triple-digit temperatures. Torrid south winds can ripen our eight million acres of wheat overnight. But my wife Priti and I have lived here for the past 10 years without air-conditioning. Life in Kansas, and before that, in India, has taught us a few ways of adapting to heat.

As I see it, if you want to get some really creative ideas for keeping cool at the height of summer, go to someone who has figured out how to live without air-conditioning on the fringes of Phoenix — the world’s number-one urban heat island — or in the sun-broiled steambath that is southwest Florida.

So I asked John, Sheila, Dani, Chris and Priti to help me come up with a summertime guide to remaining comfortable — or at least of sound mind and body — without air-conditioning.

If you follow any of this advice, it may be out of a desire to reduce your carbon footprint or your utility bill. But we’re betting that as you begin to realize some of the benefits of the non-refrigerated life, you’ll find yourself looking for more opportunities, even excuses, to turn off the air-conditioning. — Stan Cox

The ground rules for online courtesy gelled sometime in the late ’90s: Don’t swear on public forums. Zip large files before sending. AVOID WRITING IN CAPS, AS IT IS RUDE TO CYBERSHOUT.

Today, as we spend more and more hours interacting online (Americans devoted twice as many minutes to social networking and blog-reading in 2009 vs. 2008, according to a Nielsen survey), there are more opportunities than ever for awkwardness, unintentional insult, rejection, creepiness and misunderstanding.

So this week, Stuff Hipsters Hate co-blogger Andrea Bartz and I are taking a break from broad-swath advice spewage and instead playing Emily Post to our friends’ and fans’ real-life netiquette conundrums.

Frenemy territory

“A friend-of-a-friend whom I see in a group setting every month or two just randomly unfriended me on Facebook. I have no idea how I offended him, but now running into him is understandably uncomfortable. Should I just confront him?” –A Good Person, I Swear

We find it hard to believe you’re totally innocent here, AGPIS.

The unfriend is a powerful symbol of cut ties — We know plenty of sworn enemies who’ve steadfastly avoided it, still sending one another token Facebook event invites with fake smiles frozen on their tremblingly spiteful faces.

So if this snip-snip wasn’t preceded by an actual blowout, you’ve got to ask yourself why somebody would want you erased from their feed — do you update every 20 seconds with inane observations? Pen mushy posts on your girlfriend’s wall?

If you’re still coming up short, you could … we dunno … ask him what’s amiss? If this makes you feel all squirmy-like on the inside — revelation! Maybe y’all shouldn’t be FB friends. Dude played FarmVille, anyway.

Word imperfect
“My co-worker sends business e-mails with a staggering number of spelling and grammar errors. It’s at the point where we’re all embarrassed he’s allowed to communicate with the outside world, but no one knows how to tell him. He’s like the guy in the office with terrible breath.” — Mortified By Proxy

Yeah, we hear this happens in fields in which employers value prowess in “math” and “hard sciences” and other such bewildering voodoo.

But unlike the close-talker who reeks of stale onions and rotting corpses, this guy probably knows his writing skills are subpar.

(Side note: This is why you must always, always, without exception, accept gum when offered and shove it into your mouth post-haste. I don’t care if, thanks to a raging case of TMJ, the chewing motion will enflame your jaw and give you the bulbous chipmunk-y appearance of a college freshman who has just had his wisdom teeth yanked. Just assume it’s a hint about your oral hygiene and start masticating.)

Anyway, the good news for you is that you can treat this like a bad breath scenario, with even less subtlety.

Vaguely blame it on the clients who’ve been subjected to his LOLcats-like missives (”They called me all confused, apparently they had misinterpreted something you’d written ’cause there was a typo”) and offer that Altoid — collaborative e-mails from your team (i.e., you write — or skim — the important ones).

Since that’ll create more work for you, ask what else he can take on to re-level the load. Or just eat his soul. Wait, sorry, we were getting corporate America mixed up with hell. Our mistake.

Family values

“My little cousins/conservative aunt/Dad tried to friend me on Facebook. I don’t need them/her/him seeing my drunk shenanigans or my angry status updates, but I get majorly guilt-tripped for rejecting their requests.” — Hipster Who May Or May Not Be Of Legal Drinking Age

This, HWMOMNBOLDA, is a common complaint and the reason many users keep scads of potential friends in Facebook deep-freeze. They’re loath to hit “accept” and ashamed to hit “reject,” thus locking acquaintances in friend-request limbo for all time.

Relatives, gung-ho about these newfangled social networking sites, are probably just excited that you showed up when they asked Facebook to find friends in their address book. (Fully 48 percent of parents merrily friend their hapless kids on Facebook, finds a survey from electronics shopping site Retrevo.)

But stand your ground. If you’ve traditionally limited your profile to your 677 favorite peers, letting in just one out-of-demo friend will throw off your delicate Facebook ecosystem (or just require a lot of freaking detagging).

You could allow them to see your limited profile (so certain portions — i.e., all the snaps of you beer-bonging and then consequently darting around the yard sans pants — just don’t show up when they stalk you). But why bother?

Just mention that you only use Facebook to stay in touch with your good friends (”I’m just not that much of a Facebook person” is an effective lie), and direct them toward better ways to keep abreast of your goings-on: sweet weekly e-mail check-ins or your public Twitter feed, for example.

Relatives just want to feel close to their little angel — no need to let on that you’re currently foaming at the mouth and this close to quitting your job and finally starting that screamo band.

There are so many possible detractors that can derail you from achieving success as you start a new (or grow an existing) real estate business….two such detractors are time suckers and energy vampires. I slayed my energy vampires very early on in my adult life, but frankly I’m still battling with a couple remaining time suckers even though I hate to admit it. Perhaps this article will be a great reminder to both you and me!

Time suckers:
Thomas Edison once said “Being busy does not always mean real work. The object of all work is production or accomplishment and to either of these ends there must be forethought, system, planning, intelligence, and honest purpose, as well as perspiration. Seeming to do is not doing.”
You see, time suckers can be highly deceptive. You think that you are making productive use of your time towards your real estate business, but in reality you’re not doing anything to push the ball forward. At the end of the day you look back, baffled, thinking to yourself “Where did the time go? I didn’t really accomplish anything on my list today!” Time suckers can be things like: spending too much time responding to e-mails, having long conversations with people who call you unexpectedly, sitting through pointless meetings, getting caught up in heated online forum discussions, reading way too many blogs in one day.
Sometimes the time suckers are not deceptive at all — they are simply addicting, like television (for some) and social media websites (for others like me)!

Energy vampires
Energy vampires are some of the absolute worst type of people to surround yourself with. These are people who suck all of the positive energy out of you and leave you feeling completely drained and unable to carry out the goals you’ve set. Energy vampires constantly blame others for their circumstances, complain about life (or family or business or everything), and are rather self-centered with little regard for others time or feelings. While some energy vampires may have ill intentions, many are completely oblivious of their persistent negative attitude and its effects on others around them.
So how do you slay the energy vampires and wipe out the time suckers? Here’s a few tips, many of which are obvious but still ignored:

• Take inventory: First you need to know what your time suckers are and who your energy vampires. Really think about them and write them down. At the end of a day, write down everything that you did during that day. It can be eye opening! Then think about who in your life leaves you feeling exhausted when you around him or her.

• Get on schedule: Set a specific time (or times) during the day to handle phone calls and emails and stick with the schedule as much as possible.

• Space it out: You can learn a lot from blogs and online forums, but you don’t have to read everything at once. Space it out — take a few at a time each day!

• Just say no: If the call is unexpected, let it go to voicemail. If the forum discussion is getting heated, don’t jump in (or if you do, resist the urge to go back and forth). If the offer for free real estate training is on a topic that is not directly related to what you’re doing right now or within the plans for the next 3 months, don’t opt in! If you’re invited to a meeting with no agenda (and can’t get one), skip it!

• Be intentional: Interact with social media sites with the intention to connect with people (but briefly). Forget the Facebook games or the temptation to watch the list of related videos on YouTube

• Put vampires in a box: If energy vampires leave you feeling wiped out, take responsibility for this because its your fault and you have the power to change it! End conversations with energy vampires quickly and do not join the vampire’s pity party or complaint circus. Remember that energy vampires can also surround you virtually so if you’re reading your facebook newstream or twitter stream and someone consistently sounds like a negative Nelly or leaves you feeling irritated, remove them.

Hopefully these tips have you thinking about what your detractors are. The sooner you begin to remove them, the sooner success arrives.
Shae Bynes