Upgrade your life!

UPGRADE has been upgraded

Stephen Hise has recently upgraded the book cover for ‘Upgrade’, a romantic suspense novel about a man who decides to upgrade his life. Personally, I love the new cover and it reminded of when I upgraded the cover for my book ‘The Royal Sheikh’ (see my earlier, rather succinct post, ‘New book cover’).  It also got me thinking about the whole topic of ‘upgrades’.

The first thing that comes to mind are flight upgrades, which I used to get many, many years ago by asking nicely at the check-in counter.  However, this came to an abrupt end as soon as soon as I started turning up at airports with first one and then two small children, though a friend of mine in the airline industry assures me that this was purely coincidental.  Apparently, at about the same time that I stared to have children, airlines began to enforce strict polices about who could get an upgrade based on membership levels on loyalty programmes, air miles earned etc.  Since I don’t fly often enough on the correct type of ticket (super economy earns about 3 air miles per trip, compared to first class full-fare which earns about a million), I will probably never have a flight upgrade again no matter how nicely I ask at check-in.

However, there are a few ways in which I can ‘upgrade’ the quality of my life for free (I was going to call this post ‘Get a free upgrade’, but I thought it would be misleading.  Someone might find it on a web search, click on the link thinking that they are going to find out how to get an easy upgrade to business or first class, and then find themselves reading my musing instead!)

To instantly improve our lives we can:

• Smile. It’s infectious (in a nice way).  Smile at someone, they will smile back at you and you will both feel better.

• Give someone a compliment.  Find one nice thing to say to a person and tell them.  If you want to take it further, praise someone’s work.  It depends on your workplace, but too often people hear about what they could do better, or what they’ve done wrong.  Instead, tell someone what they’ve done right.

• Help someone.  Do something for somebody that you don’t have to do.  It could be something as simple as offering to pick up something at the shops for them, or it could be something bigger, like offering to babysit their kids for an evening, or baking a cake for them.

Now, you might think that the last two points don’t really seem to be about improving our own lives, but about improving other peoples’.  However, the more we do for others, the more we create a positive atmosphere for everyone (ourselves included), or in the words of the traditional saying ‘It is better to give that to receive’. 

What do you think?