Yesterday, however, I received the best Christmas gift of all. The Colts decided to sit Peyton Manning in the middle of the game, allowing the Jets a defeat against a third string quarterback.

It also gave the Jets an 8-7 record, putting them in charge of their playoff destiny. Next week I hope Marvin Lewis decides to sit his best players too so that the Jets can win again. It’s the Marty Schottenheimer style of coaching – get into the playoffs and lose.

My Christmas break was great. I was in New Orleans looking for a place to get married. I saw some really cool venues. If any of you know a great band or a great photographer down there, let me know. Or, if any of you are a professional photographer, let me know and perhaps we can work something out.

Over the holiday, Yahoo! published an article of mine and put it on its homepage. I really love when Yahoo! publishes my articles. It’s great. It gives me massive amounts of feedback in about a six hour time period.

It also, however, makes me realize something very sad. It makes me realize that there are a lot of people out there who hide behind their laptop and criticize people all day long.

Whenever I look at comments on any article which appears on Yahoo!, I’d say at least 50% of them are full of anger. It doesn’t matter about what each person is writing, people will find fault with it.

They are the blamers in life. They are always blaming other people for their misfortunes.

They are also very negative people. They are always looking for the opportunity to say, “Aha! I told you this wouldn’t work!”

These people often say things like this because they don’t realize they are the cause all the negative things in their own life. They are responsible for every decision they make, every mistake they make and every relationship they’ve had.

They are 100% responsible for these things. Instead of confronting themselves and taking responsibility, they hide in forums, chatrooms and message boards and blame others. Instead of going out and working on themselves, which they should do every day, they spend hours and days online blaming everyone else.

The Internet is wonderful. You can reach the masses by pressing a few buttons., but too often you realize that a lot of the members of the masses are very angry.

Sometimes I read comments about technology items — items that work perfectly fine — and yet people will find eight things wrong with them and spend their time and energy spewing their anger on a message board about them. Why?

Why waste so much time on anger? If you’re angry, it is your own fault. Take responsibility for your anger.

I have a friend who constantly bounces checks and is somewhat of a financial mess. He is always blaming Bank of America for his problems.

The bank is against him he believes. Really? Bank of America, which probably has about ten million accounts, is against him?

If you bounce checks, it is your fault. It means you don’t know how to handle your finances. It’s not that my friend doesn’t make money. He makes money and he is still a financial mess.

I can understand if someone is buying food for their family, and they bounce a check because they need food to survive. This person, however, actually makes a good living and he still blames the bank for his problems.

As we close out 2009 and head into the 10′s, isn’t it time you stopped criticizing or harping on things and started taking responsibility for yourself? You are 100% responsible for your life. That is what being an adult is all about.

For my young readers who still live at home with their parents (and maybe battle their parents on a daily basis), one day you will be 100% responsible for your life. You can start right to prepare yourself for that by seeing every decision you make as a lesson being taught to you.

I remember the first time a friend of mine got drunk and threw up. He blamed everyone, saying they forced him to drink.

We use the term “peer pressure” when we’re young. In reality, though, you are the one in the end who has to make the decision.

When you’re young, it’s harder to make an independent decision because you want to be cool and go with the flow. When you’re older, however, you just have to make up your own mind about yourself and make your own decisions.

So spend the next few days thinking about how you blame others for what has happened and how things are in your life. Start writing it all down. Write “I blame so-and-so for this” and “I blame such-and-such for that.”

Then I want you to amend all those and substitute yourself in those sentences. At the end write, “I am fully responsible for everything that happens in my life due to my choices.”

Have a great Monday!

So for this week, here is my list of winners and losers. . .

The Saints will continue on their unbeaten march heading toward the playoffs.

The Packers will put the Bears into hibernation mode.

The Colts will remain unbeaten as they collect a win against the Broncos.

The Bills versus the Chiefs? Who cares! I don’t need to waste time predicting that one.

The Bengals versus the Vikings is a tough one, but I will say the Bengals will prevail.

The Patriots will get their act together and defeat the Panthers.

Even with Mark Sanchez on the sidelines, the Jets can’t be that stupid as to lose to the Buccaneers.

The Dolphins / Jaguars game could be the game of the week. Miami is a lot better than people first thought, and I’m picking Miami to win this one.

Everybody can beat the Lions, so enough said about that game.

The Texans will finally wake up this week and beat the Seahawks, and they will finish the season 8-8.

The Titans will defeat the Rams.

The Raiders seem to be able to beat good teams, and the Redskins seem to be able to beat themselves. So who really cares who wins this one. I don’t.

It’s December, so Tony Romo is thinking about eating ribs and not about playing football. So I pick the Chargers to take that game.

The Eagles versus Giants game is a tough one to call, but I am going to predict that the Giants beat the Eagles today.

The Cardinals will continue their march toward another great season with a win today against the 49ers.

Now that you know what is going to happen in all of today’s NFL games, let’s move on to talk about today’s blog topic . . .

Please follow up with me. It’s amazing. I wrote a blog the other day about how I was recently looking for cars, and about how few people would follow up with me.

Follow up is the key to life. How you follow up is the key to everything in life. It is also the key in dating.

How many of the guys reading this get a phone number from a woman, and then actually sit there and wonder when you should call her? You waste tons of time thinking about the “right” time to call, thinking “Should I wait 72 hours so I don’t look too anxious? Should I wait 24 hours, so I look not too anxious but look interested?”

These questions focus completely on the wrong thing. The reality is that it is not about how long you wait to call someone, it is about what you say (and how you keep the intrigue and attraction going) when you do call.

So many guys spend way too much time thinking and focusing on things like how long to wait to call, instead of spending time understanding how to keep the attraction building. For example, when I was single I would go and meet a woman in the supermarket, ask her based on what was in her cart what she was making for dinner. If she told me she was trying a new recipe, then I’d wish her a great meal and tell her to let me know how it turns out.

I’d tell her, “Give me your number. I want to hear all about it.” I would then call her up, and I would continue the conversation we were having at that moment in the supermarket.

I would stay in that conversation, because I want to bring her back to that moment. I would call up and say something like, “Hey, how was dinner? That sushi looked so good. Was it as good as it looked?”

What you are doing there is showing that you were paying attention to all the details. That is what it’s all about.

It is about paying attention to all the details. People respond to people who remember things about them. That is how you form a connection with someone.

So to all you guys who waste all that time thinking about when to call a woman (instead of what to say to her), it’s time you change you focus and learn how to really connect with women.

That is something I talk about in great detail in my Men’s Mastery Series. I talk about how to remember details about women so you can have powerful connections that can last a long time.

My football record stands on its own at 12-1. 12-1 is pretty good I think. The Titans are my only blemish. So, with that, I am going to go out on a limb and tell you which teams I’m picking this week

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The Giants are going to dominate over the high school quarterback led Oakland Raiders. The Vikings will be victorious over the Rams and its equally inept quarterback. Really, the Rams aren’t rams at all; they’re more like goats.

The Ravens will beat the Bengals. I’m not buying all the hype about the Bengals yet.

Here’s another tough pick. The Eagles will beat the Buccaneers. Let me tell you, Jon Gruden is laughing every single day. They fired him? Are you kidding me?

Braylon Edwards will catch a pass and lead the Jets to a victory over the finless Dolphins. The Patriots will win big.

Denver is going down this week. Is that not the worst 4-0 team you’ve ever seen?

Dante Culpepper will wish he was still on the bench after the Steelers destroy him on Sunday. As for the Buffalo vs Cleveland game, really who cares? It’s not even worth predicting.

As for Dallas, Tony Romo better start learning that finding the end zone is not as easy as finding one of his celebrity girlfriends. Maybe he should go back and run one of his family’s rib businesses. Tony Romo notwithstanding, Dallas will squeak a win out this week.

What is it about ex-boyfriends and ex-girlfriends? They seem to somehow know the exact wrong time to text you.

Here you are, about to have sex with your partner, and all of a sudden there it is. You hear that certain beep telling you that you have just received a text message.

You think to yourself, “Oh man, who is texting me? It’s really late. Who is texting me?” You get nervous about those 1:00 a.m. texts that come in.

It’s nerve-racking, because the only one who should be texting you at 1:00 a.m. is the person with whom you are laying in bed at that very moment. So you keep wondering who texted, until you can’t stand it anymore and you instinctively check your phone like Pavlov’s Dog.

At first you are relieved and you think, “Whew! Thank God it’s not me.” Then all of a sudden you notice that it is your partner’s phone that is blinking. You both have the same “beep” for incoming text messages, and the beep that you heard is theirs (not yours).

Now you think to yourself, “Oh man, I know EXACTLY who just texted them. It’s the ex.”

So here you are laying in bed, either just about to have sex or just having had great sex, and you have to have “the ex talk.” You may have already had the ex talk before several times. When that ex intrudes into your personal space at 1:00 a.m., however, that ex talk goes into a whole other dimension.

You will lay there wondering what your partner is thinking and feeling. You will want to know what the emotions are that they are experiencing, and how they are feeling at that moment about their ex.

Ex’s are a very powerful influence in a relationship. Even though you are with somebody new and you are sharing amazing feelings together, you will still wonder what your partner is thinking and feeling about their ex when a text comes in like that.

You tell yourself that you are not going to let your paranoid mind take over. After all, it is you who is laying next to then (and not the ex). You are the one with whom they are now hanging out and sharing feelings.

Regardless, you have that ex talk right there and then at 1:00 a.m. You are wondering about it, and your partner really needs to let out whatever is on their mind about it.

You need to be 100% okay with whatever they say, because the topic needs to come up and your partner needs to get out what is on their mind. Eventually, your partner is going to need to confront the ex issue, because at some point the ex needs to stop holding on to whatever part of that old relationship to which they are clinging.

The key is that your partner needs to feel that there is an open space where they can talk to you no matter what is going on and no matter what they have to say. They need to feel like they can talk to you anytime and about anything, because building a relationship is all about open lines of communication. That is the only way that two people are going to get close.

I am always fine with the ex talk because I like clean slates. Both people need to have clean slates when you’re in a relationship, and sometimes you need to clean those slates together to get there.

You’ve got to deal with things. Relationships are all about supporting one another.