Two pairs of house slippers. 10 pairs of warm socks. One pair of neoprene toe warmers. One heat pad for the bottom of the bed. Six packets of hot-hands hand warmers.

This sounds like the 12 days of Christmas song… for a chronologically confused cold blooded mammal.

In reality, these were Christmas gifts I accumulated from four different family members. It is safe to type that I’m not a winter guy. So much so, that I won’t even give it proper noun credit with a capital W.

There is a familiar feeling of build up and then let down that comes with each winter. November and December are filled with family and fond memories that pinnacles into a celebration of a New Year.

Then, January brings some of the coldest temperatures, my knuckles crack and my lungs wince with each deep breath. I’ve got a better chance of getting Vitamin D from a Sunny D bottle than the vacationing sun on the other side of those grey blankets. My throat is scratchy in the mornings and I wake up and go to sleep in darkness. A day of winter can feel like a game of Frogger, but instead of avoiding cars I’m scurrying around sick people that haven’t adopted the technique of sneezing into their elbow instead of their hands.

Just in case I haven’t painted a vivid enough image of how I perceive winter. I drew one for you.

See what I’m doing here?

There is a common marketing technique called “Benefit Stacking”. This is when you create an initial offering and then stack benefits on top of it to enhance the desirability of a product/service. If you’ve ever seen an infomercial, the progression looks like this.

• Product offering at $29.99
• Call in the next 15 minutes (price being x’d out on screen) we will drop the price to $19.99
• But wait, we will throw in one more for free if you promise to tell a friend.

Benefit stacking is powerful. Just ask Ron Popeil and his nine figure income selling Chop-O-Matics.

The beginning of this post, I laid out something I’ve dubbed “Detriment Stacking”. It’s a really helpful resource if you want to dig yourself into a solitary hole and then stream the Moody Blues with your last 10% of battery life on your iPhone 4.

See I just did it again.

• Solitary hole
• Moody Blues (depending on your music preferences)
• Low battery
• Behind two generations iPhone

No one truly controls our attitude and outlook on the day except us. Perfect example is the guy who leaves his home and a large pigeon unloads on him. Is his day ruined or does he buy a lottery ticket because he is going to have great luck today?

That fellow is faced with an important decision. His reaction is the first card placed in his stack. Depending on how he views the situation, will determine if he is Detriment Stacking or coming up Aces.

I woke up at 4 o’clock this morning to my poor wife on the tail end of strep throat, painfully coughing. The first thought I had was I hate winter. Then I realized I was already detriment stacking my day at 4am. Instead, I put on a pair of new slippers and bumped out a video project and wrote this here blog post, all while enjoying a hot coffee.

Then my alarm went off.

That first thought can be pivotal and pivoted.

Which way will you stack the deck?