Dealing With The Vegetables

You're listening to The Uppercase Life where we make hard things look easy. And I'm your host, Joseph Brewster. Every child is told to eat their vegetables before their dessert. At least I was growing up. And we're not always told why at first. But as you get older, we're told something like, Well, it's healthy. And partly it's because if you eat your dessert before your vegetables, you're likely not going to be hungry for your vegetables.
So we consider eating our vegetables as a discipline and eating our dessert as a pleasure. And that tiny lesson in life, I think, is really valuable. And I think cultivating a habit of disciplining ourself so that we can also enjoy some really pleasurable things later should spill over into other areas of our life. But adults are really just grown up kids, and even though we're older now and we should know better, sometimes we're not as disciplined as we ought to be.
And when our brains are contemplating what we want to do throughout the day, some things feel more like vegetables, and some things feel more like dessert. Oftentimes, we have real difficulty resisting that dessert and eating the vegetables and what that looks like is us constantly giving in to distractions or moving away from work that feels strenuous or overly taxing to our brains or even to our bodies.
And this is often where we experience what we would call procrastination, distraction or other sorts of things that basically just result in delays or us not doing the work at all because it's hard. But there's some really compelling reasons why we should be doing some of the harder things in our day. And first of all, a lot of the harder things have a higher return on investment than the easy things do.
Also, those things tend to enhance your relaxation later because rest and chill time is more enjoyable when you've had strain and stress. But one of the most compelling reasons to me is that most people don't. Most people don't discipline themselves and do the hard things. So if you can be in that tiny percentage of people who are good at doing that, then you're going to be ahead of the crowd.
In many regards. So what are some ways that we can do the hard thing first and make it easier? Yeah, I know it sounds hypocritical to say we want to do the hard thing, but we want to make it easier. However, I do want to push back against this notion that a hard thing will just always be hard, and there's nothing you can do about that.
Well, it's true that the thing that you're trying to do might be difficult, challenging, boring, maybe. Or maybe really stressful. But there are ways of making it easier and getting it done. So I want to give you three quick tips for getting the hard thing done first and maybe making it slightly less hard. There's a book by Greg McEwan called Effortless.
And in this book, he talks about combine things that you don't want to do with, things that you actually enjoy. And I love this concept. So, for example, if you're going to work on a difficult task and it's something you don't have to do often, but when you do, it's really stressful. Combine it with something you find pleasurable.
For example, when I'm looking over the financials from my business, which is something that I need to do on a periodic basis as someone who owns a company, but it's not something I'm particularly good at or enjoy when I do this, I tend to go out to a restaurant where I can sit and get some type of a treat that I wouldn't normally get.
So I might go and get a milkshake and sit and drink a milkshake while I look at the financials. And you might think a milkshake doesn't help you make better decisions about your finances, but actually it kind of makes me feel good and it puts me in a better mood. And so overall, that does improve my ability to process information and make decisions about my finances.
But you can't have a milkshake with everything you do, or that will have some negative impact on your health. Another way to look at it is associate your finishing with a reward at the end of every marathon. Should be a finish line and you should be able to be really proud of that and enjoy that and be able to look forward to the finalization of this difficult thing.
So associate the finishing of the thing with the reward, which means if this is something pleasurable, you don't get it until you're done in this case. And I find that also to be somewhat compelling for me, sometimes the reward is just I want to go outside because it's a pretty day and I'm tired of sitting at this computer and my reward will be I get to go outside, but I don't allow myself to go outside until I finished the task.
And this is the last thing and maybe it's not as big of a deal for you, but it is for my personality. And that is think less and do more. Most tasks require a certain amount of thinking, but I tend to be an overthinker and especially when the task is hard, I find myself sitting and thinking more than I'm actually doing the task.
And so it's important to engage in the activity and in the process of completing the task instead of constantly thinking through the task over and over again, that can be really mentally fatiguing. And to go back to the eating your vegetables example, if you sit and stare at those vegetables or think about how they're going to taste or maybe even touch them to your tongue before engaging in swallowing them, it's really not going to help.
You want to eat them. The best thing to do is just put them in and send them down the hatch, in my opinion, rather than over thinking the flavor in the texture. And I mean, what does it matter? You're going to have to eat it one way or the other. Just eat it for goodness sake, and go on to something else in your day.
And you can do this. I believe you can do this. There are going to be a lot of hard things in your life that you will have to get through, but you can get through them. And there are ways to associate some things you really love with the things that you don't like so much. And sometimes you're just going to have to stop overthinking it and finish your task.
But in any case, make sure to do the hard thing first, not just because it needs to be done, but because the pleasure you get later is going to be all that much better. Thank you for joining me today on the show. I'd love to hear your questions, your comments and if you enjoyed this, I'd love it if you shared this with somebody else who might enjoy it as well.
And if you're feeling especially generous, leave us a review that makes this content more likely to be seen by more people who might benefit from it. And until next time, live like it matters.