EARN YOUR BEER

"The real value of setting and achieving goals lies not in the rewards you receive but in the person you become as a result of reaching your goals.” —Robin Sharma.

Do you reward yourself after a hard day’s work?

What does your reward look like?

Remember back to when you were a kid… The moments when you wanted something so fucking bad but knew that you would have to do something difficult to get it.

An example being; “If you get straight A’s this quarter, I will buy you that toy you’ve been wanting.”

Or; “When you finish all of your chores, you can go to the movies with your friends.”

Many of us have been conditioned to think in terms of positive reinforcement. If I do this, then I can have that. The problem with this (speaking for myself, at least) is that once you become an adult, those rules go out the window. You don’t have to do any chores before going to the movies. If you want to lie around all weekend, you can do that! That’s your God-given right.

But here’s the issue….

Working hard to achieve things feels good. You feel great after you work your ass off to get what you want. This instant gratification bullshit that we deal with daily doesn’t make you feel good about yourself. But it’s easy so…why not?

Back in college, I liked to drink a lot. Wednesday nights you could find me at Jimbo’s or the Old Town Saloon. Thursday nights my roommates and I would host Thirsty Thursday at our house. And since I was out on my own with no responsibilities other than school, I gave in to my vices without having to earn anything. If I wanted to drink, I would put off whatever I had planned that day (sometimes even class or work), and fucking drink. It was a “no parents, no rules” type of situation. I didn’t have to work hard for anything.

I spent those years feeling like a piece of shit. Yeah, drinking with my friends was fun but I didn’t feel better about myself. I was a half-assing college student with no job and a mild drinking problem. I wasn’t exactly doing things to improve my quality of life.

The summer before landing my first full-time teaching job, I got an opportunity that taught me a different mindset. My friend’s dad was building a cabin in a small community up at Courtright Reservoir in the Sierra Nevadas, and he needed a hand. Courtright is a beautiful place that’s off the grid. You’re an hour away from cell phone service with hardly any people around, all while breathing the freshest mountain air that you can imagine. It’s an incredible fucking place. The type of place where you just want to crack open a beer and head down to the water for the day. But that wasn’t why I was there.

When I got up to Courtright, the cabin operation was in its early stages. I, with very little construction experience, had no idea what I was in store for but it was an additional source of income before I could finally start getting paid for teaching. The work was, honestly, much more difficult than just hammering. And my friend’s dad was a fucking gangster when it came to construction, so he basically had forgotten more than I knew. That being said, working with him was tough because his expectations were high. He had a mission in his head and set daily benchmarks of what he had wanted to get done that day. And he and I were going to work until we reached that goal.

Though some days took longer to reach the mark than others, there was always the satisfaction of cracking open a beer or pouring yourself a drink at the end of the day. A well-deserved one after a hard day’s work. You knew you had earned that motherfucker too, because all the pressure of doing a good job went away once the mission was complete. And to be completely honest, that drink tasted a hell of lot better having known what it took to earn it.

I believe that as people we are all fucked up in terms of our reward process. We often allow ourselves access to instant gratification-type situations that make us feel good for only a few minutes. On the flip side of that, we also don’t reward ourselves when we do actually accomplish hard shit. When you complete a big project at work, achieve a difficult goal that you've been striving towards or have a difficult conversation that you've been putting off... those are times that call for some type of reward. So fucking treat yourself! You’ve earned it.