Contractor Radio - Delayed Gratification vs Sacrifice

Foreign. Hello everybody, and this is Contractor Radio. I'm Nathan Thibodeau and I am going to be your host for this week's episode. I'm going to be talking about a subject I've been thinking about for the last few years and I've had some conversations with some other folks in the industry and outside of the industry around this and I've actually had some people ask me when I was going to do a podcast about it. And so kind of excited about it. It's a really interesting topic. I think that most of us will be able to relate to it. Hopefully it'll be thought provoking, it'll be maybe inspiring a little bit. It might poke you just a little bit. But at the end of the day, our hope is that it will be helpful to you and your own development of yourself and of your business and of the people around you. So before we jump into that content though, we're going to hear a word from our sponsors. So let's go.

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All right, so quick word from our sponsors. We appreciate you paying attention to that and now we're going to dive in just a little bit. The subject that I want to talk about is really the two concepts of delayed gratification and sacrifice. So delayed gratification and sacrifice, and if you're like me, you probably thought, well, I know what those things are. I know the differ between them. I kind of know what's going on between those, those two different things. And I kind of thought and felt the same way until I had somebody come along and challenge that a little bit with me. And so once that happened, then if you know me, once I get something in my head, I kind of have to chew through it and think about it and work its way over and talk to others about it. And I did. And some of the concepts that have flowed out of this I found extremely useful in my own life, and I'm hoping that you will as well. So if you know me, you know that I'm going to lay some groundwork and some definitions to make sure that we're all on the same page before we dive too deep into this. So I want to start with the definition of delayed gratification. Okay. So the definition that I. That I found that seemed like the strongest one was resisting an immediate perceived benefit or. Or pleasure in hopes of a greater benefit or pleasure in the future. Okay, I'll read that again. Resisting an immediate perceived benefit or pleasure in hopes of a greater benefit or pleasure in the future. Now, I'm just going to throw out there kind of a fun or simple example of this concept. Three times in my life, I have seriously considered getting a motorcycle. Now, for those of you who know anything about me, you know, I'm kind of a speed freak. If it blows my hair back and puts the wind in my face, I'm all about it. Cars, motorcycles, boats, jet skis, skiing, whatever it might be, I'm in. I love that stuff. And so over the course of my life, I've always wanted to own a sports car or a motorcycle or something. That just really kind of gave me that thrill and that challenge. Well, once again, three times in my life, I have come very, very close to buying a motorcycle in just a serious consideration. Two of those times, I did not. I elected to or made the decision that I wasn't going to buy a motorcycle. At the time I could buy a motorcycle. I have the ability, okay? But at the time, I just decided based on money and circumstances and time that I had available, that I wasn't going to do it at that moment. I was delaying that gratification. Right now is the third time, and the word's still out on whether or not I go that direction. So I'll keep you guys posted on that. And so the idea here is we're not giving up on a concept or a thing. We're still hoping to get a motorcycle, or we're still hoping to build a home, or we're still hoping and expecting and desiring to take that vacation or invest in that Thing build a different business, whatever it might be. Delayed gratification is the idea that we're not giving up on that. We're simply setting it aside for the future in hopes that we come across maybe a little bit better time or that that thing might be a little wiser decision. Some of you might be saying, buying a motorcycle is never a wise decision. And you might be right about that. We'll see. The second thing I want to talk about is the definition around sacrifice, okay? The definition around sacrifice. Now, when I looked up the definition, I was immediately bombarded with the execution an animal or a human being to a deity. That's not exactly what we're talking about. So I think it was the third definition that kind of applies to the. To the content that we're talking about today, which was this sacrifice being the destruction or surrender of something for the sake of something else. I'll read that again. The destruction or surrender of something for the sake of something else. I'll use a very simplistic analogy for the concept of sacrifice. Let's just say you love peanuts. You love peanuts. You like peanuts in the shell. You like them out of the shell. If you're my man, Chris, Russ, you love boiled peanuts, which I've never had before. You like peanut butter. You like peanuts and chocolate, or peanut butter and chocolate, all the different components. You just. You're a big fan of peanuts. Well, there happen to be some people in this world who have a massive allergic reaction to peanuts, so much so that they can't eat them, they can't smell them, they can't have peanut oil, dust, or residue of any kind come in contact with them because it's very dangerous for them, they'll have a very severe reaction to peanuts. Well, if you happen to have a loved one, a significant other, or a child or somebody that you come in contact with on a daily basis who has that peanut allergy, you're probably more than likely going to sacrifice your love of peanuts. You're probably going to surrender your love of peanuts because of or for this other person because you don't want to put them in danger. Right. And in doing so, you're not really holding out hope to eat peanuts in the future. You're not expecting that that's going to happen or that you're going to enjoy peanuts more at some time down the road. You're simply saying, I'm fine with not enjoying peanuts in my life because of this other circumstance or this person. Right. Another good example of sacrifice, I think, really comes down to Parents, when parents have children, they sacrifice an enormous amount of time and resources and energy that most parents don't necessarily expect to get back. They don't expect to get that back. They love their children, they're going to pour these things into their children without the expectation of getting those things in return. And they're sacrificing most of the time willingly for their kids. Some parents even sacrifice their careers or opportunities for their children. So the overall point being that sacrifice is to not expect to get whatever that thing is you're sacrificing back, you're letting it go. The destruction of or surrender of that thing. Excuse me. Now, there's some, some key components when I started thinking about these two concepts that are like, they're little nuances to these ideas and there's some, there's some qualifiers to delayed gratification and sacrifice. One of those things would be that because the future is not guaranteed and nor do we know it, right? So we don't know the future and the future is not guaranteed, we might find ourselves sacrificing something that we thought we were delaying. So I'll say that again. Because we don't know the future and the future is not guaranteed, we could find ourselves sacrificing something that we thought we were delaying. Now, you've heard the old adage before, one in the hand is worth two in the bush, right? And the idea behind that really is that we've got something that's guaranteed here and now. Right now there's a potential that we could have two of these things if we let go of this and seek after those two. But there is the risk that we could wind up completely empty handed, right? There's some wisdom in that. In this particular case, that little parable is saying you need to be careful if you've got something guaranteed that you, that you be careful about sacrificing or losing that thing to go after more and find yourself with nothing. Okay? Now the reason behind this is that circumstances change, things change and things shift. So if we go back to my, my motorcycle analogy, okay? As of right now, as of right now, I'm blessed that I'm physically healthy and I have control of full motor control of my legs and my hands and my arms and my mind and my eyes sight and everything is still clicking along pretty well. So my ability to enjoy a motorcycle right now is probably just as good and possibly better than it was when I was younger. Now, heaven forbid I had contracted some sort of illness or disease that might have debilitated Me to the point that I couldn't ride a motorcycle now or perhaps had been in an accident that damaged my legs or maybe my arms or something of that nature. If that happens and I now no longer could enjoy a motorcycle, I didn't delay that gratification, I sacrificed it. Because now it's gone. Right. Kind of comes back to that whole concept of not knowing the future and the future isn't guaranteed. Circumstances do change and they have an impact on our future for sure right now. Similarly, not all sacrifices are final. Not all sacrifices are final. As a matter of fact, when you think about it, there's very few things that are completely and totally final and eternal or forever. There's really not that many things that fall into that category. Right. There's always more opportunities that exist. That once in a lifetime deal. Now this is never going to happen again. We're never going to deal with that or know about. You're never going to be able to get that thing. Retailers do this to us a lot. Right? You're never going to see these kinds of prices. This is a once in a lifetime thing. Turns out if you wait a year or probably a few months, you'll probably have a chance at that thing again in the future. Okay. So we don't necessarily need to jump on everything right now because somebody says that you'll never have this chance again. Not all sacrifices are final. Now we're going to jump in a little bit into what exactly drove me into this mindset or this mind process of thinking about this. Because I've got a little story for you and we're going to hit on that right after another word from our sponsors.

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Okay, we are back. And I promised you I'd tell you a little story about what kind of put me on the path of thinking about this. So a number of years ago, I was actually on an interview with a couple of gentlemen who are interested in bringing me on to their team. Both of these gentlemen were a little bit older than I was, and we were having a great conversation. It was a really good interview. I really enjoyed it. But one of them asked me if I was married, and I said, yes, I am. And then he said, do you have any children? And I said, no, I don't. He said, are you and your wife planning on having kids? And I said, well, I think so. My wife and I have talked about it. It's a consideration that we have in our minds. We're pretty positive towards the idea. We think that we probably would like to have children at some point. And he said something that I had never heard before, and it really struck me. He said, nathan, I'm an older guy, little older gentleman, and all my children are grown. Okay? All my children are grown. He said, I say that for a reason. I want you to understand that this position that we're talking about has a lot of travel involved, a lot of travel. You're going to be out on the road talking to people, visiting people, and you're going to do that quite a bit. You'll get a chance to go home and all that, but you'll be gone a significant amount. And I said, okay. So it was interesting direction this conversation was going. And he said, being that my children are grown, they're all adults, and some of them have some little ones of their own, they've been adults for years, and so I've had the opportunity to engage with my kids and talk with my kids and become friends with my children as adults. And that's just been an ongoing and perpetuating thing. I said, okay. And he said, I always, so far, I always have a chance to engage with my adult children. And if I happen to miss a lunch with one of my kids, I can probably have another lunch with one of my kids or a fishing trip or any number of things. I said, okay, so I'm trying to track with him here. And he said to me, he said, but when my children were babies, little babies, he said they were only babies for what felt like the blink of an eye. He said, and then they were toddlers, and they were only toddlers for what felt like the blink of an eye. And then they were little people, 5, 6, 7, 8 years old, and they were playing sports and they were doing dance recitals and they were doing theater at school and they were doing debate team in high school and blink of an eye, then they were teenagers, they were learning how to drive, they were becoming more independent. They were going out with their friends and making some good decisions and making some bad decisions. And then they were out of my house. And he said, nathan, if you have kids, those moments never come back. He said, I cannot get any of those moments back. None of them. He said, and if you travel a lot with us, working with our team, and you and your wife have children, good chance you're going to miss some of those moments. That was amazing. I had never considered or thought about this concept before. And on my drive home, I couldn't get it out of my head. I just kept thinking about this idea that, like some think you just can't get that back. You don't ever get to go back in time and experience your kid's first soccer game, right? And so I began to expound upon this idea and thinking, well, what else can't you get back? What other things could I be doing right now and missing on other things? Now, I understand we don't want to create an environment of continual worry, right? But at the same time, this became an extremely helpful mental exercise to me. And what I realized is that the reason why it struck me so hard is because a lot of the messages that we get as professionals, as business owners, entrepreneurs, hard working, hustling people, a lot of the messages that we get are very centered around 10x your effort right now. There is no work life balance, you know, live like nobody else now. So that later you can live like nobody else, right? Put in the grind, now's the time. And that's the message that we get inundated with a lot. If you don't do it now, then you're not going to have it in the future. But then I thought, well, what about the things we're giving up to do that? Are we still going to have those things in the future? And the concept of children is the thing that clipped, that lit that thought in my mind about that whole thing. And I couldn't give it up. And I've been thinking about it ever since. And so it's led me to these two realizations, or let's say there are these two things. There are two things that amongst my thinking about this whole concept, there are two things that I've come up with that I think there is always sacrifice involved in. There's two things for which there will always be sacrifice. One of those things is time. One of those things is time and my phone's going off. We only get so much time on this planet and we don't even know how much it is. If we're honest with ourselves. We don't know how much time we have here. And we don't get time back. We can't buy time now. I realize that you can do some things now. You can, you can, you can do a lot of things now that will save you time in the future. But once the time that's happening right now passes, it's gone. It's gone forever, right? So I want to keep that in my mind. I only have a limited amount of time. I don't know how much time that is. And once a moment passes, it's gone. The second thing that I believe get sacrificed, in almost every decision or every decision surrounding it, there's usually a sacrifice involved. Are relationships, relationships, people. And the reason for this is people change, drift happens. People's interests shift. We evolve, we grow. We're also finite, right? Our interests change, we grow. Sometimes people move or move away, sometimes people pass away. And you may have an opportunity to build a relationship with somebody right now because you have a lot of things in common. If you think about your longest lasting relationships in your life, many of them started where you had a lot of things in common. And maybe at this point now you may not have as much in common as you used to, but you have that relationship that you built. And that relationship might not be possible if you were to try and start it now because you're so different. People shift and if we, if we put off relationships and the building of relationships and we continue to put those things off. As I started to think about this, it was almost like it started to develop this timer in my mind. How many times do I say no to going to lunch with this person? How many times do I skip that, that guy's trip? How many ski weekends do I not go on? Going back to the motorcycle conversation the second time, second time that I was seriously considering a motorcycle was because two of my three younger brothers bought motorcycles at exactly the same time. And my FOMO went crazy. If you don't know what FOMO is, FOMO is fear of missing out. Fear of missing out fomo. And when they bought those motorcycles, I thought, man, first of all, it's super cool that they've got motorcycles. That's going to be awesome. But what I also realized is that they are going to ride those motorcycles, right? They're going to take trips, they're going to cruise around town, they're going to go to places, meet people, see things, and enjoy adventures together because they have those motorcycles and they're going to go do that. And right now, because I forego for went having a motorcycle at that time, I missed those things, those moments that they had when they were on their motorcycle adventures together, I will never have a chance to participate in those. They're gone. So even though I delayed the gratification to get a motorcycle and I can still enjoy one now, the moments that happened at that time, those were sacrificed. It's not all bad, right? And I certainly don't want to dwell on that negativity, but I should realize the impact that that has on my decisions. So the two things that are almost always sacrificed when it comes to these kinds of decisions, whether we can do this thing or not do that thing. Time and relationships. If you put off certain relationships, you might find out that by the time you've arrived at a place where you feel like you can engage in that relationship, that other person might not be interested anymore, or they might not be around some heavy things to think about. That's why I've been thinking about them for so long. So this led me to a few questions. One of the questions was, how do I know what is delayed gratification and what is sacrifice? How do I know what is delayed gratification and what is sacrifice? The second question it led me to was, well, what should I delay? What things should I put off? And then obviously the third one, what things should I sacrifice, right? Well, in answer to the first Question, how do I know what is a sacrifice and what is a delayed gratification? I think it really comes down to that permanence question that we talked about before. Are we dealing with a circumstance? Are we dealing with a circumstance in which we're never going to be able to retrieve that particular thing? Is it permanent or how permanent is it? Or what's the likelihood that we'll actually be able to enjoy it in the future?

Right.

Or are we willing to give this thing up entirely? Are we willing to give this thing up entirely is really, I think, at the core of what's a sacrifice and what's a delayed gratification? Kind of like we talked about a little bit earlier. The next question. Next two questions, actually. What should I delay and what should I sacrifice? I'm going to talk about right after we hear from another one of our sponsors. So hold on tight. We'll be right back.

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Okay, we are back with this episode of Contractor Radio. Thanks for hanging on. We're going to kind of dive into, I think, really, what was the core of this? When I started thinking so seriously about delayed gratification and sacrifice, the last two questions that we were discussing were what should I delay and what should I sacrifice? Now this is really a secret. That's not such a secret. The answer to this is a secret. That's not such a secret. And that is that your values always drive your motivations and the decisions that you make. Your values will always drive your motivations and the decisions that you make. So what are your values? What's the most. What are the most important things to you? Could be your family, could be your friends, could be your community, could be your children, could be your spouse, could be your extended family. All kinds. Could be your property, could be your. I mean, there's all kinds of different things that we value, right? And there's a deeper component to this. Are your values actually what you say they are? So this is where, this is where we get a little pokey, right? We start getting a little pokey in this concept, when we claim that we're really trying to build the best life for our family, is it. Is that really the case? Do your kids really care if they're riding around in a brand new Escalade? Do your friends and family really care that much if when they come over to eat at your house, you're in an 8,000 square foot house filled with beautiful things and a bunch of really cool toys parked in the garage? Does your greater community really care about how expensive or how nice your clothes are? Do these other places and people who we claim are valuable to us, do they care about these things or do we care about those things? This is not a judgment or an indictment against anybody else. As a matter of fact, it's as much an indictment against me as it would be anybody else. I've certainly caught myself making decisions that I couched, that I couched or maybe hid underneath a claimed value. But the reality was I was actually after something else. Do we make decisions on delayed gratification or sacrifice because we're actually after a particular status or because we kind of want to be a big deal? I've seen this happen before. Somebody gives a really grand amount of money to help out an organization and then they get their name on the building. Not that that's a bad thing. Once again, not judging anybody. Are our values truly what they say they are? Because I can tell you this. If you've done like I have and you've hidden a true value or motivation behind lip service to something that sounds really great, at some point, your decisions around delayed gratification and sacrifice are going to violate the thing that you pay lip service to. So the question we want to ask ourselves is, if I say I value these things, do my actions truly reflect it? If I say I value the things that I do, do my actions truly reflect that I value those things based on what I delay gratification around and what I sacrifice. I really hope that you guys have gotten something out of this podcast. And I know that's ending on something of a heavy note, but take heart, right? We are designed and we are able to help other people and we can walk down a path of self discovery to understand what things we really, truly should be focusing on. And so I hope that these things have spurred some. Some conversation with you and a loved one or maybe your own internal dialogue. I hope that they have an impact on your decisions like they have with mine. I know they certainly have with me. I think about these things in a totally different way after having really worked my way through this, and I hope that you guys really find some powerful benefit from this. So that's this week's episode of Contractor Radio. Hope you guys enjoyed it. Hope you got something out of it. Be sure to check out our sponsors online that you heard commercials from today and give them a little bit of love. And if you're ever looking to get in contact with me or anybody else at Contractor Radio or at Contractor Coach Pro, be sure to check us out on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, or at our website, contractorcoachpro.com and we will see you next week.