After recently listening to the English comedian Jimmy Carr on Steven Bartlett’s The Diary of a CEO podcast, and subsequently Carr’s new audiobook titled Before & Laughter, I learned a few things.
Firstly, that Carr is not just a comedian, but a deep thinker and a very wise and funny man. There’s another side to him that you don’t see on television or stage that I found more interesting than the what we usually expect from him and his strange laugh.
Carr opens the book by stating that he always thought when reading others’ autobiographies, “God, that person speaks about themselves a lot!” So what he decided to do for his book was to mix in lessons he had learned that could benefit all of us, with a few stories about his own life. It was a perfect mix: Too much self-help and it becomes preachy, too many stories of his own life would maybe lessen the impact on the reader.
One of the main things I got from listening to the book is that Carr prioritizes the long-term over the short-term. He mentions famous psychological experiments such as the marshmallow test, where young children are tested for their ability to delay gratification. Spoiler alert: the children who were able to delay gratification ended up having better social, health and academic outcomes throughout their lives.
One of Carr’s mantras is to do things that will make tomorrow’s version of yourself thank you that you did today. For example, today I registered for self-assessment on my tax return – something that I dread and do not enjoy, but I will be grateful that I did once it is complete. Other tasks like household chores, brushing teeth, showering, skincare, and working out, would all elicit a similar response from future you.
Then you have things like cultivating relationships with friends, family and significant others. One of the most common regrets of the dying is that they didn’t keep in touch with friends or tell loved ones how they felt about them enough. If we do these things today, hopefully we can avoid a similar fate.
Choosing to do the hard things now make our lives easier down the road. Making sure your car is adequately serviced should prevent a call to a tow-truck later on. Staying on top of work and becoming great at what you do could create financial security in the future. Making sure that you have your devices charged overnight will take away potential hiccups tomorrow.
One reaction I had to Carr’s advice was: if we are always trying to help the future versions of ourselves, are we forgetting to enjoy and cherish the current versions of ourselves? When is it acceptable to have fast food, sit on the couch, binge Netflix or social media? Would we still be present in the moment if we are always thinking of the future?
After hearing Carr’s point, I made some changes to my life where I valued the future version of myself more, and began to think longer term. I stayed on top of my to-do list, went to bed earlier, used social media way less, worked out, and applied myself at work better.
But I ended up getting an unexpected side-effect from serving my future self. Instead of becoming bored of doing the ‘right’ thing all most of the time, I actually felt pretty good about myself. All these micro-decisions we encounter daily, and choosing the right option to serve the future version of yourself, ends up making you like yourself more in the now.
So taking care of yourself in the future, is indirectly serving yourself in the now.
Thought Canvas 