Choose your hard.
Is there anything that you know you should be working towards but you’re putting it off? Maybe it’s eating healthier, drinking less, exercising more, controlling your spending, or saving for retirement? We know we should be doing these things, but it’s hard to make change and get started.
Rory Vaden, a self-discipline strategist, has coined the term “the paradox principle of sacrifice”. It says that easy short-term choices lead to difficult long-term consequences, while difficult short-term choices lead to easy long-term consequences. If you do the hard thing now, you’ll have an easier time later, or you can do the easy thing now, but you’ll have a hard time later. Choose your hard.
Eating healthier now and drinking less is better for our bodies as we age; exercising keeps us fit and agile; spending within our means prepares us for later choices; saving for retirement means we don’t have to work in old age.
This is simple, but not necessarily easy. Doing the hard thing goes against our instincts.
There is a behavioral economics term called “time inconsistency”. Time inconsistency is the tendency to value present rewards more highly than future rewards. We will make choices that feel good in the moment, instead of what’s good for us in the future. You plan to save for retirement, but today, when faced with the choice, you would rather have an immediate reward, like a new pair of shoes. We have a “present bias” - we value the present (getting the shoes now) more than what is far off in the future (having money saved for retirement).
How can we make better choices now, or, do the hard thing?
Here are just a few ways to commit to the difficult short-term choice.
Remove options or create constraints.
Build saving and investing directly into your budget so that you have less income to consider as disposable.
Calendar your exercise so that it doesn’t get pushed aside for something else.
Take your credit card out of your wallet so it’s not an option to use.
Remove automatic payment options from regularly used sites (think Amazon).
Meal plan for the week ahead so that there is no question about whether you’ll eat out or what healthy meal you’ll have ready.
If buying the shoes is never an option because you already put that money towards retirement, then you won’t feel the pain of what otherwise might have felt like sacrifice.
Commit to do the hard thing visibly and manageably.
Write down and tell a friend your goal. Pledging to do something is known as a “soft commitment”. When we do this, we set ourselves up to succeed because we don’t want to feel the discomfort of not doing what we said we would do. Break the commitment into small, manageable, achievable goals.
Think about what advice you’d give someone else in your situation.
If someone came to you for advice about how to save for retirement, what would you tell them? Research suggests that when we give advice to others (which we’re quite prone to do!), we are then more likely to take our own advice because we don’t want to go against what we’ve told others to do. In any of these areas that you want to make change, write down how you’d suggest someone else do it.
Finally, take the time to first figure out what the difficult choice is. Oftentimes, it’s our own fear that keeps us stuck in easy short-term choices, or even as ostriches in the sand. If we don’t first take the time, sometimes the hardest step, to get to our longer-term choices, it’s impossible to even commit to doing the difficult thing.