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 look to fix small problems today so that we prevent bigger and more expensive problems down the road. I have a degree in economics and I’m always looking for ways to create the biggest impact with the resources I have. Economics is not about money, but more about the study of scarcity and how to use the market to set prices and allocate resources.
I remember watching this one TedTalk in college and it was an economist that was arguing out of all the problems in the world, like pollution, water scarcity, malaria, and food insecurity, we should focus on the problem that will provide the biggest benefit. All people want to focus on CO2 emissions, which is something that is important, but it’s not something that will provide the biggest benefit. We can spend billions of dollars trying to reduce CO2 emissions marginally, or we can spend those same dollars on eliminating malaria, and then we will have a population that will be more productive and able to go to school and participate in the workforce. Then hopefully they can be educated on ways to solve climate issues or know ways to reduce their CO2 significantly. The goal is to eventually spend a lot less money to get the same result that we desire. To do this, we have to look at many things to see how they are interconnected and see what is the thing we can fix to provide the biggest benefit down the road.
This same concept applies to our lives. I have recently been dealing with back spasms and it’s because I have herniated discs in my lower back and I can feel the discs shift at times and it causes me a lot of pain. I don’t want to go through surgery because that is expensive and it’s going to cause me to be out of commission for a while. So I’ve been doing a lot of physical therapy exercises with stretches. Plus I make sure that I don’t carry a lot of extra weight. That is not going to be great for my back either. Plus I need to make sure I have a firm mattress. Doing these preventive measures can prevent bigger problems when I’m in my 60s and 70s. I just can’t look over the next five years, I have to look at the long term effects of my actions today.
Now, many people just deal with small inconveniences like knee, hip, or back pain. The pain is not great enough to throw us off our game but it’s something that we notice. When this pain is happening, we should address it as fast as possible. The same concept applies to our careers and relationships. If someone at work is causing your problems, don’t deal with it, handle it. It’s going to prevent bigger problems down the road. When it comes to relationships, if you’re going to pass judgment, then fix the problem when it’s small before it turns into something bigger.
Smaller problems are better and more enjoyable to fix than a bigger problem. The key thing is that it’s still a problem and it can be uncomfortable to face. Just like the nagging injury. But an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. A small problem can be addressed in five to 30 minutes. A bigger problem can take weeks or months to fix. Going through a divorce can take years, and if you can address problems when they are small that can save a lot of headaches.
So in your life, look for the preventative measures that you can take with your physical health, mental health, emotional health, and spiritual health. This will then help you out with your relationships, your finances, and your career. It’s going to require more effort, time, and courage to do, but it will lead to a great life because of hard choices, easy life, easy choices, hard life.
That’s it for today’s episode, to summarize it, An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure like Benjamin Franklin said. And if you want to read a great biography, read Benjamin Franklin’s biography. He followed this lesson and was able to do amazing things in his life. And life is about minimizing problems and maximizing great memories. No one is going to give us great memories, we have to go out and make them, but we have to be prepared for them, and we do that by taking preventive measures to reduce risks in life. It’s not always fun to eat well and exercise, but these things will give us a great life down the road. We don’t have all the time and resources in the world, so it’s best to spend that 30 minutes on self-care so it can give you years of living down the road. Instead of enjoying one month today. So make the best choices with your day today and see what activities will maximize your life over your lifetime.
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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