In this episode, we discuss the importance of asking yourself, “What is the worst thing I can do today?” and how it can bring a lot of value to your life.
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 self-development coaching and financial planning for Latino Professionals.
In today’s episode, we’re are going to talk about the important question that you should be asking yourself on a daily basis, and that question is, “What is the worst thing I can do today?”
See what most people want to do is ask themselves what is the best thing I should be doing today and that question can lead you in a bunch of different directions because there are a lot of different things that you should be doing. When you do the inverse, it can provide you a lot more clarity. When you ask yourself, “What is the worst thing I can do today?” You can list a couple of things and then you know you shouldn’t be doing those things.
Every day that I wake up, I have to make choices for how I’m going to spend my day and not every activity is created equally. I have to spend my time on the tasks that are going to provide me the most value because once the day is gone, it’s gone forever. When I ask myself the inverse of a question, it gets me thinking in a different way, which can lead me to better solutions for my problems.
I got this valuable way of thinking from the book, “Poor Charlies Almanac” by Charlie Munger. This is a great book about how to make better decisions in your life and in one chapter he talked about the German Mathematician, Carl Jacobi who always inverted a problem. Then I just took this idea and asked myself what is the opposite of having a good day and the answer is how to have a bad day.
I don’t think many people think about this question but it is a very important one to ask. If you don’t know what will make you miserable, then you might do something that is making you miserable. I remember when I was working as a federal employee, I was miserable and I would go on the metro to get to work and I would see all these other miserable people on the train. I asked myself, “how can I stay miserable” and the answer was to go to work. So then I quit my job a couple months later. I was miserable for a long time and didn’t want to go to work.
I know I would have had a mental breakdown if I stayed at that spot. I didn’t quit articulate my decision to quit by saying “What is the best way to stay miserable.” but the idea was there. My mom worked in a job she hated for a long time and it took a toll on her health and I don’t want the same thing to happen to me.
So every day, I ask myself “What is the worst thing I can do?” and then I write the response in my journal. By doing this, it makes me realize where I should focus my attention and what I should cut out of my life. Usually my answer is going to scare me into a direction that I’ve been putting off for a while. Like the worst thing I can do for myself is to not work on my marketing or to write an article, because if I do those things then I won’t have a hard life.
Most people when they complain about something not going right, they are complaining about the symptom and not the actual root cause. When someone say they are unhappy with their body weight, that is a symptom. The actual root cause is not working out but then you can take it to another level and there is some emotional reason for not working out.
Since I’m a big believer that the distance between your dream and reality is called action, by saying the worst thing I can do for myself today is to not workout, then that is going to make me more likely workout for the day. Same thing when I say the worst thing I can do today is not write an article. Doing these things will give me a brighter future and I would be worst off if I didn’t do them. And that’s the power of asking what is the worst thing I can do today.
For the most part, people don’t want to do things that are bad for themselves. So by having the self-awareness around the subject, you can do better as a person. There are days when I do the worst thing for me but the idea is that you don’t make the same mistake twice in a row. The more decision that I can make that aren’t mistakes, the better off I’m going to be in the future. To help me avoid the mistakes though, I need the self-awareness and I get that by putting pen to paper and expressing my thought.
Writing things down is a very powerful exercise and I write in my daily planner almost every day. To help me get clarity on what I want in life and to have the self-awareness to get me there. We have to be intentional in life because if you’re casual about life you’ll end up a casualty. And I don’t want to end up being a casualty. I’ve seen people who weren’t intentional with their lives and it scares me into taking a pro-active role in my development as a person. I don’t want to be struggling from day to day, because I didn’t ask myself what is the worst thing I can do for the day and then actually do that thing.
Every day I live is intentional. From how I work to how I play. Just find the right balance and you will minimize your bad days.
That’s it for today’s episode, to summarize it, to live your best life, try asking yourself the opposite, how can I live my worst life? Then once you find all the things that will give you a bad life, remove those things from your life and start working on the things that will give you a better life.
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]
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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.
*Music outro
