In this six-part series, we discuss the ways to become miserable and in today’s episode that involves ingesting chemicals to alter your mind or perception.
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 on how to grow yourself physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually so you can have better careers, better relationships, and better personal finances.
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 financial planning with self-development coaching for Latino professionals.
In today’s episode, we’re are going to talk about part 4 of the six-part series on the prescriptions to be miserable. The last three prescriptions were discovered by Charlie Munger who is Warren Buffett’s right-hand man at Berkshire Hathaway, who expanded on Johnny Carson’s prescriptions to being miserable and now we are going to go into those. If you don’t know who Johnny Carson is, he was late-night show host back in the 70s and 80s and was the most popular one and a lot of people look up to him. If you’re in your 20s or 30s, your parents probably know who Johnny Carson was. So the first prescription that he came up with was that you ingest chemicals to alter your mood or perception.
If you’re using chemicals to alter your mood or perception, basically what you’re trying to do is run away or cover up some type of problem or issue. I remember when I was in the Marines, tobacco use and alcohol usage is the highest out of all the different branches. And a lot of Marines use these things to cover up the issues that they have in their lives. They might have a problem with their spouse or they are just miserable at their jobs but they can’t quit because they don’t know what else they will do for income.
There could be other things that they went through but I saw a lot of folks use alcohol and tobacco just to get through the day. They would smoke because it would be an excuse to get away from their desk and they would drink after work to pass the time before they went back to work the next day. Now that I’m out of the Marines, I realized that it is not a good environment to be in. As marines, we got a lot done, but you could see how some people were struggling. Instead of addressing the issue, they took the easy way to get away from their problems
During my last year in the Marines, I was on anxiety medicine because I was so anxious about going into work. I didn’t like who I was working with and I didn’t really believe in the mission. I felt like I couldn’t change my environment because the culture of the Marines is something that would be really hard for one Marine to change. Since I was on a contract, I was stuck until my contract ended and that’s a hard feeling to handle. So I was using anxiety medicine to help me with my day. Once I got out of the Marines, I was able to stop and look at my life and really analyze what I could of done.
I know what I needed to do, and that was to get out of the Marines and that fixed a lot of issues. But the thing is if you change or resolve that issue, then you’re just going to need to keep using chemicals to change your mood or alter your perception. Then it becomes a game where you have to constantly ingest chemicals so that you can stay ahead of the problem that you’re trying to escape.
We can use other things to assist us in changing our mood or perceptions that really are just band-aids. Some people use food, some people go shopping, and some people do extreme sports, but those things will just make you feel empty once the dopamine wears off and then you’re just back where you started. So the thing is, you just need to address the conflict. I’m really bad at this but I’m getting better. I remember I had to drink a lot of alcohol in order to talk to other folks but then I would be too drunk or sloppy and it wouldn’t turn out well.
It’s not the best way to meet people, to be sloppy drunk and there are better ways to get the attention of other folks. Drinking too much is just going to give me a gut, cause me to have a hangover the next day, and might give me a bad reputation later on. Plus it doesn’t address the main problem of me questioning myself that I’m not good enough to talk to new folks. I’m so much better now in my 30s now than when I was in my early 20s. My ex-wife helped me a lot with that because I already had a partner and didn’t have to worry about impressing anyone else but what helped me was going to a lot of networking events and introducing myself to other folks.
Once you meet a lot of different folks, you realize that they are just worried about not making a fool in front of you instead of the other way around. Once I got that lesson in my head, things became a lot easier in social environments.
Plus I went to this one networking boot camp for a week and one of the exercises that we had to do was go to Hollywood blvd and ask random strangers to describe the three impressions that had from me. I talked to about 20 people in two hours and I got tall, tattoos, and confident, and handsome sprinkled in. This gave me a lot of confidence in myself and realized that you just need to go up to folks and introduce yourself. It’s hard though because you don’t want to be rejected but the key thing is that no one will remember that event down the road. You just have to remember that shooters, shoot, and you have to shoot your shot, but don’t let chemicals be the enabler.
You won’t be able to think clearly and you might make a mistake. It’s hard to shoot your shot when you’re a novice because you’re worried what other people will think of you, but we don’t live in a closed knit society, and people will forget.
If you need to hire a coach, go to therapy, read a book, listen to a podcast, to help you address that difficult thing, then go and do it. The worst thing you can do is to think that the problem will solve its self. It won’t, you have to take an active approach in your development as a person and that will require you to reach out to folks or resources to help you out. We can’t do everything on our own and if we want to live our great life, then we have to find solutions to the obstacles in our way so that we don’t have to rely on chemicals to change our perception or mood to help us cope with the obstacle.
Thanks for listening to today’s episode, to summarize it, the fourth way to become miserable is to use chemicals to alter your mood or change your perception. This is just a band-aid and the wound won’t fully heal unless you address the root cause of the issue. How you do that will require you to go towards the problem and use resources from others to help you out. Do this, and you will l
To get a free copy of my book “More You Know, More You Grow: How to get better every day” just go to my website growwithjoe.me/book and just pay for shipping and handling.
I have a quiz on my website that grades your inner circle, so if you want to find out if your inner circle is an A, B, C, D, or F, you can take that quiz at growwithjoe.me/quiz
I’m also trying to do a feedback Friday episode, so if you have a question that you would like to have my answer on the air, just e-mail me at [email protected]
I’m also on Instagram at Grow With Joe and Facebook just look up Grow With Joe
If you’re on iTunes, don’t forget to give me a five-star rating if you liked this episode.
Thanks for joining me today and remember if you go with Joe, you can grow with Joe, cause Joe knows Dough.
*Music outro
