OUR STORY

Entertaining Actionable Self-Improvement

What is this Prime Your Pump blog about anyway?

A blog where we look at a wide breadth of topics in the self-improvement arena and discuss them in entertaining ways that you can easily make actionable to improve your life.

You are probably wondering why our blog is called ‘Prime Your Pump’? We came up with the name as a variation of an expression you have probably heard before, ‘prime the pump’.

On idioms.com (no, not idiots.com – although after reading our blog it may be how you think of us and we take no offense because sometimes we are idiots) the phrase ‘prime the pump’ is one that means ‘To take action that encourages the growth of something or helps it to succeed’ and ‘This phrase is used literally of a mechanical pump into which a small quantity of water needs to be poured before it can begin to function.’

To us, ‘Prime Your Pump’ simply means improving yourself every day and the content on our self-improvement blog will encourage your personal growth and help you to succeed in life. You may also want to think about a mechanical pump that pours knowledge into your brain to help it function better.

Sounds boring, right? Well, if our blog was written in the traditional academic style it probably would be! However, we will use entertaining stories and examples and over the top humor, so hopefully you won’t even realize you are learning because you are being so entertained.

That is another thing about us and the blog, we are real and raw and always ourselves. We are quirky, we have issues, we are a little crazy, we are curious, but at the end of the day we are always trying to get better and trying to make ourselves and you better.

What you see is what you get with the three of us.

Why do we use stories and examples to teach self-improvement?

Since the beginning of time, people have communicated using stories and examples. Stories and examples, especially those that are entertaining (and here’s the most scientific we’re going to get), release a chemical in the brain called dopamine that helps keep people interested in the subject matter which facilitates learning. Academic subject matter is frequently boring; using stories and example to teach is key to understanding, learning and using what you are learning.

Why the Blog?

Because we love to learn and improve. And one of the best ways to learn is to teach. So, by doing research and learning and then teaching it back via our blog posts and videos, we are learning it better ourselves. Plus we are sharing it with the world aka you!

The blog is our way of introducing you to our way of self-improvement by giving you what we think is valuable and entertaining content every weekday. If you like it and find it useful, we would appreciate if you shared it with your family, friends and even your enemies (and who knows, maybe they won’t be such jerks after reading our blog).

Who Are We?

Speaking of us, you are probably wondering who the hell we are. Well, you will learn more about us on the Bios page where we introduce ourselves.

We are good friends from different generations who are as different as can be and our diversity is part of what bonds us. Our different viewpoints and life experiences are part of what helps us to learn from each other and make each other better. Hopefully, you will learn from us and there is no doubt we will learn from you via your comments on our blog and various social media platforms.

We could give you the usual sleep-inducing bios and expand on the fact that Howie is a tenured professor with a PhD, and Rick is a former healthcare executive with several graduate degrees yadda yadda yadda, but really, who cares? Let’s look at it another way, if author biographies on blogs were to be compared to sexual positions, most would be your run of the mill classic missionary style – nothing wrong with it, billions of children conceived by it, and an infinite number of smiles, screams, and moans emanating from it, but a little bit hum-drum and boring after a while. Instead, we wanted to shake things up a bit and be a little different (no we aren’t talking about spanking and/or dressing up, although that’s not a bad idea), so instead think less missionary and more butter churner, more spork, more Swiss ball blitz, more snow angel (Google ‘em and thank us later). Rather than the usual ‘look at me and my amazing credentials’ that no one gives a crap about bios that some blogs bore you to tears with, our bios will be written in the form of online dating bio descriptions written for dating sites appropriate for our given generation, which we hope will entertain you while you are getting to know the real and authentic us, warts and all, quirky as hell and proud of it.

One last thing, from what you have just read you can already see our writing style is non-traditional, to say the least. So, before all of you nerdy grammar police get your ‘granny panties’ or ‘tighty-whities’ in a bunch because we have committed grammatical incest by having run on sentences, subject-verb agreement errors or dangling modifiers, dangle this and chill out. We get it, there are a few grammar mistakes, who cares, life will go on. The point is to laugh, learn and apply the stuff in our blog posts to improve yourself.  So instead of emailing us or leaving a comment moaning about a stupid sentence fragment (what the hell is that anyway?), take five minutes and Google some new sexual positions like the ones we discuss above and then start moaning because of that instead.

Now, on to our bios…