Full Transcript
Hi Everyone, welcome to the You’re Daily Cup of Joe Podcast, with your host Joe Bautista. In this podcast, my goal is to give you quick lessons that you can reflect on in your journal so you can grow yourself physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually and have a better career, better relationships, and better personal finances while you enjoy your morning cup of coffee.
I’m also the author of the book “More You Know, More You Grow: How to Get Better Every Day”. In this book, I wrote down over 30 tips to help you grow in those four cornerstones. I’m also the founder of Grow With Joe, where I combine self-development coaching and financial planning for Latino Professionals.
In today’s episode, we are going to discuss how we should do the hard but good for us stuff first before we reward ourselves with the stuff that is bad for us in overabundance. Charlie Munger said we should follow the Granny Rule: “Eat your carrots before you eat your dessert.” This is a great rule to follow. If you start with the dessert first, what typically happens is that we will eat more than we should of that dessert, and we probably not going to touch the vegetables.
Now if we do this for a long period of time, then it’s not going to be good for us. It’s best to eat the carrots first, then wait a little bit longer so our stomach and brain and see how much we ate, before we indulge in the dessert. It takes about fifteen minutes for the brain to realize how full it is. This is why chewing your food 20 to 30 times before swallowing is a great strategy plus it’s better for your stomach.
Now this applies to our personal lives and our career as well. Before sitting on the couch to watch television, ask yourself if you exercised first or did your reading beforehand. Before you go to that happy hour with your co-workers, did you make your phone calls, and did you work on the project like you said you were?
If we neglect these carrot activities, how is our future going to look? It’s not going to look pretty. This is why we should learn to love the carrots first and no expose ourselves to the desert too much in the first place. Every morning I like to read for 60 minutes. Then I like to write in my journal and write a podcast episode, then I record my Facebook Live at 9 am, then I exercise and eat breakfast.
This way, I did all my self-care stuff for the day, and I can have a clear conscience. I work for myself and have the luxury to take this amount of time in the morning. But I also tell myself that I need to do the hard stuff for my business first like doing client meetings, doing videos, and working on my course.
Doing these hard tasks over a long period of time allows me to eventually like doing them. So then I actually start to prefer eating my carrots.
In the Four Hour Body by Tim Ferriss, he talks about people following the slow-carb diet to lose weight where people eat a high protein diet that basically is a protein like chicken, beef, or pork, and supplemented by beans and vegetables. You’re not allowed to eat anything white like potatoes, rice, and bread, and you get one cheat meal a day. If you follow this routine, you might gorge out on cheat day, but you’re going to feel sick.
I remember finishing boot camp and I ate a lot of skittles and dessert, and I felt sick afterward because I was not used to eating these things for three months. So once you’ve used to being healthy, being unhealthy will be not so fun. This is why I don’t like all-inclusive resorts because I just feel awful afterward. But this feeling will go away and it will be a temptation to do it again and we can easily slip back into a dessert first mentality.
To establish rules for eating your carrots first and delaying the dessert so that it actually feels like a treat and not something we feel entitled to. Do this and you will have more control and flexibility over your life.
That’s it for today’s episode, to summarize it, follow the granny rule, where you eat your carrots before you eat your dessert. Life is filled with temptations and it’s really easy in this new environment to want to eat your dessert first, but once you take a lick from the lollipop of mediocrity, you’ll suck forever. I don’t want to suck forever and I don’t want the same thing for you. To establish rules for eating your carrots. I tell myself that I won’t do anything else until I finish my morning routine first. Then I can do other things. This helps me do what I need to do and stay healthy physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. Do this and life will feel amazing. And remember, just focus on getting one percent better every day, and eventually, you’ll reach your goal.
If you would like to get the journal questions for today’s episode, you can sign-up for my monthly journaling subscription newsletter, where you get daily journal questions Monday through Friday, and as a bonus, you will also get my time management course and my personal development cheat sheet. You can get all this for $13/mo, which is less than the cost of an audible subscription and it’s less work to gain more wisdom. You can get this offer at growwithjoe.me/journal
Thanks for listening today! To get a free copy of my Audiobook “More You Know, More You Grow: How to get better every day” just go to my website growwithjoe.me/book and you can download it right there.
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Thanks for joining me today and remember if you go with Joe, you can grow with Joe, cause Joe knows Dough.
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