Granny said eat your veggies first.

There’s a story behind that.

This is your daily message from Chad number 1166 to upgrade your mental game today by telling yourself a better story, because the most important story you hear is the story you tell yourself. And this message is dedicated to Sarah Geneva Rose Badgley on her birthday.

Here’s the upgrade:

You think you have a discipline problem, but upgraded thinking knows most of it is just an ordering problem.

Here’s the story:

Charlie Munger loved the simplest reward system on earth. He called it Granny’s Rule: you eat your carrots before you get your dessert. You don’t need a new reward, a new app, a new accountability partner. You treat yourself already. You take the coffee, the couch, the phone you were going to have anyway — and you just move it to second. The dessert was never the problem. Its position was. You don’t delete the dessert. You demote it.

This message may wrap up a little mini-series we’ve been doing on incentives. You can go back to message #1162 if you want to start at the beginning. Kobe Bryant at the beginning of the summer would write out his entire training program — every workout, in advance. Why on paper, why so early? Because he knew that mid-July, exhausted, he’d start negotiating with himself: “What if I did this instead? I could just skip today.” So he made the decisions before the excuses arrived. Writing it down took the vote off the ballot. That’s Granny’s Rule at the level of a champion — decide once, while you’re strong, so you don’t have to decide again when you’re weak.

Because that’s the real disease. Kevin Kelly says the whole purpose of a habit is to remove the action from self-negotiation. Most of us never do it. We re-decide the hard thing every single morning. We hold a little election in our head — should I work out, should I write, should I make the call — and we campaign, and we stall, and eventually willpower loses. Nobody wins a thousand elections in a row.

“But Chad, isn’t that just discipline?” No. Discipline is winning the fight. Granny’s Rule is not having the fight.

And don’t underestimate how much of your life this runs. Munger said he spent his whole career in the top 5% of people who understand incentives — and still underestimated their power every single year. So you are almost certainly underestimating how much of your “I need more willpower” is really just “I put the dessert first.”

The better story to tell yourself is, “I put things in their proper order.” Name your carrot — the workout, the page, the call. Name your dessert — the coffee, the couch, the feed. Fix the order. Put the carrot first, and decide it once, today, so tomorrow there’s no vote. Carrots, then dessert. Every day. No exception.

Tell me a story of a Granny’s Rule you run on yourself to fromchadsmith@gmail.com. Send someone a text and ask them, “What’s your carrot, and what’s your dessert?” You can get a free copy of my book, The Most Powerful Story in the World, by going to fromchad.gumroad.com. The transcript of this message and hundreds of others are always available at www.fromchad.com.