Green Beans First: How Prioritizing What You Like Least Helps You Do What You Love Most

I came from a large family with a mom that made us eat our vegetables. When one of us didn’t like something that my mom had made for dinner, we got a nice scoop of what my mom called a “no thank you helping.”

Green beans?  No thank you.

Cabbage?  No thank you.

Lima beans? No thank you.

I hated green beans, especially the ones from a can.  Growing up, it felt like my mom prepared green beans with every meal.

The Problem

My mom was a great cook and great home economist.  We always sat down for dinner as a family in the dining room with a set table, silverware, and napkins; all ten of us.  Yes, that’s right, ten.  I had four brothers, three sisters, a mom, and a dad.  If my math is correct, that’s ten people.  (I learned later in life that the reason my parents had so many children had nothing to do with religion, which most people automatically assume.  It was because we didn’t have cable television. Give it a minute, it will come to you). 

Anyway, my mom’s cooking wasn’t the problem.  I just hated green beans.  But I learned that if I didn’t finish my “no thank you helping” I wasn’t leaving the table.  If I couldn’t leave the table then I couldn’t do the important things in life like climb trees and catch toads.  When I pushed the green beans off to the side and ate them last, I was left with a green-beans-from-a-can taste in my mouth for the rest of the evening. Gross.

The Solution

So I came up with a strategy:  eat the green beans first.  If I ate them all first, I got them out of the way, and then all the other food on my plate effectively eliminated the awful taste of green beans from my refined elementary school pallet.  Life was better.

What in the name of Mike does that have to do with anything, you rightly ask?  In life, whether at home or at work, we all have things we hate doing.  If you’re like me, you tend to avoid the unpleasant tasks (the green beans) and then they end up lingering on your plate.  Left uneaten, you can never leave the dinner table and move on to the finer things in life.   So here’s what I recommend: eat your green beans first.

Do What You Like Least to Do What You Love Most

Full confession: I’m an introvert.  People exhaust me.  It’s not that I don’t like people, it’s just that they use up a lot of my energy.  As a detective, I would avoid answering voice mail messages, making phone calls, and doing interviews.  The problem was, like my green beans, they wouldn’t go away on their own. Those tasks would linger and hang over me like Damocles’ Sword and cause me to feel less productive and be less productive. 

Once I began instituting the green-beans-first rule, I got the unpleasant things that sapped my energy out of the way.  I could then move onto the things that I was better at and enjoyed more.  I felt more productive and was more productive.  You can be too.  Eat your green beans first.

For more on how to live in your strengths check out the book Go Put Your Strengths to Work by Marcus Buckingham

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