Remember Pinky & the Brain? Every morning Brain wakes up with a single goal: to take over the world. Then he develops a crazy plan, and then he acts on it. In the cartoon he always fails, but in the real world, given enough attempts, he would of course eventually succeed.

A failed attempt at world domination is still an excellent way to spend the day.

For the last few weeks I’ve done push-ups and sit-ups every morning on the advice of a self-help book that I picked off the dregs of a bookshelf of free publishers comps at NPR, and because I am very susceptible to self-help books, I now follow its advice to do push-ups and sit-ups every morning.

This is certainly not the straightforward path to world domination. But it can’t hurt.