Immediate Impact

With doing, comes consequences.

There is a feedback loop with just about everything you do. Let’s use food and entertainment as an example.

What you ingest, into your brain, and your body, will make you better or worse in the future.

That future might be immediate, such as when you eat something that tastes good, but is bad for you, that makes you feel sick or have to run to the bathroom.

Or that future might be far off in the distance, such as when you spend all your time watching hateful or hurtful messages, and you start to treat others poorly as a result.

Or by continuing to eat unhealthy things and eventually, you become fat, tired, and sick.

What you will notice about just about everything is there is the fast result, and the slow result. The immediate impact, and the cumulative impact. The short term reward, and the long term punishment.

So how do you take this reality, and make it work for you?

If you take a tiny bit of time to be disciplined, and make a choice that will benefit you in the long run, and then just do what needs to be done to make that happen, you will be better off.

To flip that equation from short term reward, and long term punishment, to short term punishment and long term reward.

That’s the hard thing. Doing what sucks now, because it will be great in the future.

For most of us, it’s in our nature to do the thing that feels good, tastes good, or entertains us now, forgoing the future.

I still fall into this trap. Binge that show. Play that game. Watch that next YouTube video.

The best part in life is when you get to the point that you have enough experience to see the thing that turning off that show, skipping that dessert, or making the hard choice, will result in your being better off. Once you know that to your core, making that choice will bring a bit of that end experience back into the moment.

You don’t have to be perfect. Perfection is an illusion. But when you make that choice enough times, eventually, you will see enough results today from the choices from yesterday, to know that choice is good. And worth it.

You raise your daily standard up. Your tomorrow’s baseline will be slightly higher than today’s baseline. It won’t be mind-blowing. It won’t even be noticeable at first, but trust me. After years of doing this, you just wake up one day and things are better than before.

You remember how crappy things were, and have a bit of surprise that today isn’t nearly as bad as yesterday was.

But it takes a while. So stick with it!