Guy Reams (00:01.294)
Today's day 183, the basics will kill you. Now this post is a reminder to myself that you just cannot skip the basics. If you ignore the basics, they will eventually grow in the background and quietly sneak up slowly and stab you in the back. Now, am I being too dramatic? I don't think so. I think I'm awesome, you know? I think I'm really cool. I'm doing all these great things. So I end up taking all these shortcuts. I skip the basics.
I don't have time for those basics. I'm going to charge the hill and do all these great things. So I keep skipping over the basics and not doing them. Well, unfortunately, the basics will not be ignored. They have to be reckoned with. All that time you saved will eventually come to get its due. You will pay the price. They will accumulate and accumulate and accumulate, and you will pay the price. I'm thinking about this right now because,
As usual, I delayed doing my taxes. So here I am having to take time out of my day to deal with the taxes. Now, it doesn't matter how rich you are, how wealthy you are, you have to deal with your taxes. Now, you can hire people to help you, but you still have to deal with it. You have to make decisions. Like you cannot keep pushing it off. Now, you might be able to skip doing your taxes for a couple of years, maybe.
But eventually you're going to deal with it and it ain't going to be pretty when you have to deal with it.
But we do this all the time. We like to skimp on the basics at great price to ourselves. One of them is sleep. We can pretend to be one of those superhuman people that don't need sleep. But reality is, you need sleep. And you will eventually fall into debt and your body will collect. You will have to sleep. You will crash. So, you know, it's funny how sometimes people will say, I'm so tired, I'm exhausted, I'm wiped out. And then I'll find out they're not sleeping.
Guy Reams (02:06.733)
You have to sleep. End of story. It's one of the basics. Nutrition. You can skip out on eating nutritious meals and you can decide, you know what, I'm having a tough week so I'm just going to eat donuts all week. For a while you'll be fine, but eventually the lack of nutrition in your diet, the lack of good food in your diet, you will pay the price. You will feel like crap and you will crash. That's just what happens. So yeah, you have to do the basics.
Another example would be relationships. Once you have a great relationship, like with your wife or a child or a friend or a business colleague, there are basic things that you need to do to maintain that relationship. If you don't do those basic things, do basic relationship maintenance, there will come a time when you will suddenly find out that that relationship is no longer available to you. You know, you always hear of the example of the man that
His wife suddenly says, I'm divorcing you. And he's like, what did I do? What's wrong? You never told me. Well, it's funny because the woman has probably been telling him for days on days on end, but he's just not listening. You have to keep up the basics. And that includes relationship maintenance. Now I could go on forever. For example, I had four things break in my house all in the same day recently. And I was like, woe is me. Why did everything have to break at one time? Well, it...
What really happened is I ignored basic maintenance for far too long and then everything started screeching to a halt one day. That's what happened. I can try to blame the universe for causing these problems in my life, but what really happened is me ignoring the basics again. There are just so many examples where I do this to myself all the time to get cut off guard. So no matter what you do, you have to spend time.
You have to spend the appropriate time doing the basics. Like one of the things that really annoys the heck out of me is snail mail. I get mail and there's some people that send you notices in mail, like the DMV. I get notices in the mail from the DMV. I gave up having them email them to me because it's hit or miss as to whether they do it or not. So anyway, I have a stack of mail. It's like this big. It's this giant stack.
Guy Reams (04:33.549)
And I know I got to deal with it, but I keep kicking the can down the road, keep pushing it off until one day, like this is a couple years ago, I got pulled over and a police officer told me, your tags are expired. I'm like, oh crap. It's because I ignored the mail for far too long. And sure enough, my registration was sitting there in the mail. So you cannot ignore it. Eventually, it comes to come. So.
I've had to learn to discipline my life to where I schedule and make sure that I spend time on these basic things because if you don't do the maintenance, they will become a much larger problem later on in life. So don't let the basics kill you.