Introduction:

I was just emailed a blog post today from Seth Godin who has one of the most subscribed blogs in the entire world. Seth has written 12 books and like 9 of them have been bestsellers. The blog that was emailed to me this morning is called The Avocado Principles and I’m going to show it to you right here.

The Avocado Principles

1. If you wait until you really want an avocado, the market won’t have any ripe ones. You need to buy them in advance.
2. If you eat an avocado that’s not quite ripe, you won’t enjoy it. AND, you won’t have a chance to enjoy it tomorrow, when it would have been perfect if you had only waited.
3. If you live your life based on instant gratification and little planning, you’ll either never have a good avocado or you’ll pay more than you should to someone else who planned ahead.
4. Buy more avocados than you think you need, because the hassles are always greater than the cost, so you might as well invest.
5. And since you have so many, share them when they’re ripe. What goes around comes around.

All of these truths lead to the real insight – a metaphor that’s just waiting to be lived always: If you get ahead of the cycle – waiting until the first one is ripe and then always replenishing before you need one – you can live an entire life eating ripe avocados. On the other hand, if impatience and poor planning gets you behind the cycle, you’ll be just as likely to waste everyone you ever buy.

Final Thoughts:

I love this metaphor because it’s so true. However, the real metaphor for me, because I experience this day in and day out with clients, is in planning. I spent a lot of time teaching a system that I call “Double Your Days”, it’s a time blocking system and it’s included in a lot of my online training programs including Restaurant Owners Roadmap or my new program coming out in a few months called SCALE.

The core of Double Your Days is planning (getting ahead). No restaurant owner has ever said, “I got everything done this week/month/year and I got all the free time in the world to just chill out.” Why not? It’s because of planning! Take a half hour at the beginning of the week and plan your week specifically. By this I mean to block out everything you want to do specifically like 8:00-9:00 do this and from 9:00-10:00 do that.

When you plan ahead, you’re going to accomplish everything you want. But when you’re so impatient that you’re always in the moment, looking for the instant gratification, not willing to invest in your business for the future, and not willing to make a little sacrifice now, or spend some time in places that don’t bring you a instant gratification but will pay off for you in the end – you’re always going to be chasing. So stop!

“Plant the tree before you need the shade” – Seth Godin

In other words, buy the avocados before you need them and keep buying them – that’s the key. You can’t just buy a dozen avocados because then they’re going to get ripe before you can eat them all. You buy them, you wait and then you keep buying so you’ve always have a steady stream. I hope you love this one, go check out Seth Godin’s blog, I think you’re going to love it. Have a wonderful day and I look forward to bringing you more great videos like this every single week.