The following article is an extract from my book Optimal Happiness. Enjoy!
Once, I heard praise towards a branch manager who was so down to earth; he did his own chores, such as taking out his own garbage and cleaning up after himself if he spilled something. He could always delegate these activities to his secretary or one of his other subordinates, but he always chose to do these things by himself.
Hearing this statement, I was surprised. Since when did people receive gold medals for taking out their own garbage? After all, we all want to have fun, enjoy life, and work on the projects we are passionate about, but this is not always possible. Even those of us who are lucky enough to work on projects we are truly passionate about have to do things we don’t necessarily want to do.
For example, despite working on his passion for taking people to Mars, Elon Musk does many things he does not like to do. Virtually every day, he talks to people he does not like or who make him angry, dealing with many mistakes and setbacks that happen in his companies, and raising money for his projects. Being a billionaire does not free him from many daily chores and things that he would not necessarily want to do, and this is even more so for the rest of us.
It’s true that we only want rainbows and butterflies, but we will always have something less than ideal happening in our lives, regardless of how we lead them. We need to learn to deal with this and accept the chores for what they are, as things we need to do regardless of how we feel about them.
Therefore, to achieve the results we want, we need first to do things that are less than pleasant, and since they are a part of the process, we might as well learn to enjoy them.
Especially in the case of procrastination, people often avoid making decisions to prevent associated pain. Most of the time, they know exactly what they need to do, but because these things require effort, dedication, or dealing with negativity, they postpone these tasks. But avoiding decisions just leads to more problems, which causes even more pain down the line. To solve this situation, it is better to follow the advice of Brian Tracy and just “Eat That Frog!,” by which he meant to get these negative things out of the way as soon as possible, which will eventually free enough time to focus on things that we like to do.
