I’ve never been the kind of girl to eat my vegetables first.  As a kid, I was the one who’d happily eat the delicious stuff while the cauliflower turned into a limp, cold wodge on my plate.

It was bad planning really, as everyone knows that as disgusting as cauliflower is, it is infinitely worse when it’s cold.  But because there was always the lure of dessert upon presentation of an empty plate, I would invariably fight my gag reflex and force the flaccid putridness down my throat – such is the power of ice cream.

I hated cauliflower.  I still do.  As a kid, my strategy was to immerse myself in the enjoyable stuff while hoping against hope that the gross stuff would magic itself away.  It never did.

As an adult, my natural disposition is to do the same. I’m quite fond of focussing on the things I enjoy while ignoring the cauliflower that’s stubbornly not disappearing and getting more and more difficult to eat the longer I let it sit there.

Anyone else feeling nauseous?

Pay Yourself First

We’re constantly faced with things we know we need to get through to achieve our goals, but for whatever reason somehow really don’t want to do because they hurt, they’re inconvenient or they mean some kind of sacrifice.

Unfortunately, those things can be the difference between having the life we daydream about or the life that most people actually have.  They are the nexus point between achieved goals and a life of mediocrity.

You’ve heard “Pay Yourself First” before, probably when talking about saving but the concept applies to other areas too.  For example, normally it looks like this.

If you want a ginormous house with an office and pool, you’ve got to save a big enough deposit to make sure you can handle the repayments.  The idea is to save a chunk of your pay before you don’t have anything left over.  So, right when it hits your bank account, you take out what you need to save, and live off the rest.  Save it early, or it’ll be gone.  Makes sense, right?  Pay yourself first.

But what if we apply that to other goals?

Like everyone in the world, I want to be fit and healthy.  But the things is, if you want to be smokin’ hot you’ve gotta get up and go for a run. A lot.  So you may as well do it first – like first thing.  It’s much more tolerable a 6 am than at 7pm when all you want to do is zone out and watch TV.  Pay yourself first.

Or, if you want to be a successful trader it’s important to run it like a business. Instead of opening your platform and instantly hitting the charts, it might be better to do your paperwork and reviews first thing, because I guarantee it won’t be any more appealing at 7 pm.  Or 9 pm.

As adults, our success can depend upon getting the boring/unenjoyable/annoying/painful stuff out the way early so we can spend the rest of our time enjoying the really great stuff knowing there’s nothing hanging over our heads.

Life is all about eating the damn cauliflower.

And the choice is ours whether we eat it while it’s hot and vaguely tolerable, or wait for it to become truly awful and stagnant before we bite the bullet and do it.  Or even more likely in the absence of a nagging mother – don’t do it at all.

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