Today’s episode is a little different as I sit down with one of my long time friends Michael Yoder and talk about an old, old Aesop fable – The Scorpion and the Frog – and how you can avoid shooting yourself in the foot while setting goals and taking action towards items on your impossible list.
We also discuss the exact pronunciation of Aesop and grossly underestimate how long ago it was written.
This episode is a little more laid back then the others, but we had a good time doing it.
Links Mentioned In This Episode
Where To Listen To This Episode
http://youtu.be/DhcPD7uTwVA
Impossible FM #004 TranscriptHey everybody. Welcome to Impossible FM – the show where we talk about pushing your limits and doing the impossible in fitness, gritness, business, and life. I’m your host Joel Runyon, welcome to the show. Let’s get started!
Hey everybody. Welcome to the podcast today on the show I’ve got Michael Yoder who writes at truthwork.org. I’ve known Michael for the last, oh geez, 7, 8, 9 years?
MICHAEL:
9 Years.
JOEL:
Oh my gosh. It’s —
MICHAEL:
We are old. We are old.
JOEL:
Yeah we are getting there. Last 8, 9, years I’ve known Michael he writes at truthwork. He’s done Impossible Abs, had a great case study. You still have a little bit to go, but… 50-60 pounds in, what 8 months? Is that what you went after?
MICHAEL:
Yeah.
JOEL:
So that was pretty cool. So he writes at truthwork.org. I’ve talked to Michael quite a bit, just about life, creative this. We were talking about a story the other day. It’s a little bit different with what we typically talk about on this podcast, but, we kinda went back and forth a couple of times on it. The more we talked about it, the funnier it kinda got. So we decided to share it, just record a podcast talking about it, so. It’s a parable. It’s like an old school parable or story, or whatever one of these things are. I don’t even know where it’s from but it’s like, the one on the scorpion and the frog.
MICHAEL:
It’s like an Aesop fable.
JOEL:
Oh! Okay okay. Yeah. Aesop.
MICHAEL:
Is that a word? Is that a thing?
JOEL:
Yeah, thats… I mean, thought it was AE-sop. But that’s just me. It’s A-E-S-O-P I’m pretty sure. I don’t know the pronunciation.
MICHAEL:
I’m pretty sure it’s “Ee-sop.”
JOEL:
Okay. Alright. We’ll take a poll. What do you guys think? If you guys you don’t know, put them in the comments. Who’s right? Pretty sure it’s Aesop. It’s A-E-S-O-P. Anyways. The story is about the scorpion and the frog. It’s just an interesting story that we’re gonna talk about. We’re gonna talk about actual, practical applications in fitness, in business, and mindset in general. Michael, do you just, kinda, wanna do the quick overview of the story?
MICHAEL:
Yeah, absolutely. First, just thanks for having me Joel. A pleasure and honor to be here. To say that I’m a huge fan is kinda weird, because I’m a friend, so, I wouldn’t say I’m a fan of you. I don’t know. It’s awesome
JOEL:
You could be a fan if you want. It’s okay.
MICHAEL:
I don’t want to make your ego any bigger. Just kidding, Joel doesn’t have a big ego. For all you faithful listeners. Well, as the story goes. There’s a scorpion and a frog on the side of the river. Now, everyone knows that scorpions and frogs are natural enemies. I mean, you knew that, right Joel?
JOEL:
Yeah, they don’t get along very well.
MICHAEL:
Everyone knows this. So the frog’s getting ready to cross the river and the scorpion needs to get to the other side. And he says, Mr. Frog, as that’s what the frog’s name was. Mr. Frog, can I hop on your back and you’ll give me a ride to the side? And the frog immediately says, absolutely not! That’s the worst idea in the world. You’re gonna kill me. You’re my enemy. The scorpion says, listen, I promise you, if you let me get on your back, you take me to the other side, I’m not gonna kill you. The frog think about it for a while, he starts to over-analyze the situation. Eventually, he convinces himself that this is a good idea. And he says, you know what, since you promised you’re not gonna kill me, you gave me your word, you can get on my back. And so the scorpion proceeds to crawl on the frog’s back and they jump in the water and they’re going and going and swimming and they get halfway across the river. The scorpion rears its tail and stabs the frog. And the frog proceeds to drown with the scorpion on his back.
JOEL:
They both die.
MICHAEL:
As they’re drowning… This is the best part. As they’re drowning, the frog looks up to the scorpion, he says, what did you do, you said you wouldn’t do this? You’re gonna kill us both. And the scorpion’s simple response was, well I’m a scorpion. That was I was made to do. I love it.
JOEL:
So this is an interesting story because we talked about it. I think we talked on the phone. Maybe like a month back or so. And you’re telling me the story. And I was like, okay, well that’s cool. And…. I was like, waiting and waiting for the rest of it. And the interesting about these stories is like, they don’t have these long indexes or appendices where you can go and like, this is what this sentence meant. This sentence meant…. It’s not like that. As we started talking about it, as you kinda repeated it over and over and over… The absurdity of the whole thing just started to play out a little bit more because that’s what a lot of people end up doing. In fitness, in life, in general. Most people… not most people, but like we convince ourselves that what we’re doing.. we know it’s terrible, we know it’s bad for us, we know it’s gonna kill us, we know there’s no good possible outcome but we decide to do it anyways because we promised ourselves, or something promised us it wasn’t going to be that bad.
MICHAEL:
And then! And then we get mad for the thing that kills us for killing us.
JOEL:
And you’re like, OH! I totally didn’t expect this.
MICHAEL:
It’s like going in, smoking two packs of cigarettes a day, and getting mad at the cigarettes for giving us lung cancer. No! It’s not the cigarette’s fault! You’re choosing to smoke two packs a day! I’m sorry, that’s not meant to offend anyone that smokes. It’s just the reality of it. I love this quote, we can’t get mad at the things we allow to happen.We can’t get mad at the things we allow to happen.
JOEL:
Basically, we talked about this earlier. There are 3 main points that we’re going to take away from this. The first one ties in really well with that. It’s the idea that we’re surprised that bad things happen from poor decisions. Like people make really poor decisions and then are surprised that something bad will happen. So practical application with this is with like Impossible Abs. Or if you’re in a fitness mindset or trying to train for something and all of a sudden you’re like, okay, I’m gonna have a cheat day. I’m gonna have 3 cheat days. I’m gonna have a cheat week. Even if you’re not consciously doing and you just have a bad couple of days and you weigh in next week and you’re like, oh my gosh what’s happening I can’t believe it, this is just terrible, nothing I’m doing is working. It’s like, well, you made a few conscious decisions not to stick with what you planned out and now you’re surprised about it. It’s not that surprising.
MICHAEL:
I mean, I’ve been doing Paleo. It right along with Paleo. I’ve been trying to convince to join me. They’ll go halfway in. They’ll be like, Mike I’m doing Paleo, I don’t understand, I exercise, I’m losing weight, but I can’t stop eating pasta because I love it. But I’m doing everything else but I’m eating pasta.
JOEL:
It doesn’t make any sense!
MICHAEL:
It doesn’t make any sense at all! You’re allowing yourself and then you’re getting mad at other things for allowing yourself.. it just…
JOEL:
You’re getting mad at Paleo for not working when you’re not actually doing Paleo. I’t just funny because it’s one of those things, you’re like, I can’t believe the scorpion wouldn’t let me cross the river and I told I was gonna take it and it promised me and then….
MICHAEL:
For whatever reason, we would rather blame anything else but ourselves for our outcome.
JOEL:
So that kinda leads into point number 2 which is, we’d rationalize terrible ideas and then act like a victim when they actually play out. It’s like, well you know actually Paleo sounds like a really cool idea but I really like pasta so I’m not really gonna give it up. I’m not really gonna give Paleo a shot. So I’m gonna have Paleo but I’m also gonna have pasta and now I’m pissed because Paleo just doesn’t seem to be working for me. I’m doing everything right except for the pasta thing but other than that, it just doesn’t seem like Paleo is anything to it. And it doesn’t work like that! It just doesn’t work like that.
MICHAEL:
No. Not at all. You have to go 100%. Not just for Paleo. With anything. With Impossible Abs, or with exercising. There’s no halfway. I know we’re deterring a little bit from the scorpion and the frog, but I think it correlates perfectly.
JOEL:
It’s like, oh.. The idea is like.. I just want a little bit of something terrible. I little bit of poison. I’m just gonna have a little bit of. See how it works out.
MICHAEL:
It’s like I go to DQ and I get those delicious ice cream cakes. And I eat all of it and I get mad at the ice cream cake for making me gain weight. Except that it’s not the ice cream cake’s fault!
JOEL:
That’s what the ice cream cake does.
MICHAEL:
I know. You’re really delicious, ice cream cake and I wanna eat you. That’s your fault. But it’s my fault for eating it. You know? Stupid ice cream cake.
JOEL:
Is that a personal experience?
MICHAEL:
It is. It’s my… at least once a week. Ice cream cakes.
JOEL:
So this is really a podcast you’re be listening to yourself over and over.
MICHAEL:
I hope to.
JOEL:
Just listen to it in the car on the way to DQ.
MICHAEL:
<laughter>
JOEL:
You’re like, oh no this is a terrible idea. I should not be mad at myself.
MICHAEL:
Ice cream is my Achilles heel. I know someone out there can relate to that, man.
JOEL:
And the last part. Okay, so the first part was, you’re surprised bad things happen from poor decisions. The second part was you rationalize terrible ideas and you act like a victim. The third part kinda ties into the third part. You over think the obvious and play stupid. The initial reaction when the frog is going to the water and the scorpion asked for a ride, he’s like no no no that’s a terrible idea. That’s stupid.
MICHAEL:
It’s the worst idea because they’re natural enemies. The frog knows without a shadow of a doubt, the most common thing in the world is stay away from scorpions. It’s gonna kill you.
JOEL:
It’s not gonna be good.
MICHAEL:
It’s obvious.
JOEL:
It’s obvious to him, it’s obvious if there animals hanging around watching this interaction, they’re like hey dude, that’s probably a terrible idea. But as he starts thinking about it and overthinking it, well he promised me! I don’t know. I think scorpions are pretty honest. I don’t know. I haven’t had a lot of interactions.
MICHAEL:
Yeah. Besides killing the frog, I think honesty’s the next best quality.
JOEL:
Killing machines, honesty.
MICHAEL:
They go hand in hand.
JOEL:
Pretty good baseball player. I don’t know what’s next. But yeah you know, killing frogs, honesty. And so he’s like, yeah, this could be convincing. I can really see where he’s coming from. He needs to get to the other side. I can take him there. We could be friends, we could work it out, and he just starts over analyzing the topic. Thinks about it way too much when it’s a very simple answer. No. Get away from me. Run away. But he overthinks the obvious and he plays dumb. Actually he’s playing dumb. He’s not actually stupid because his initial reaction was, I don’t wanna do this. This is gonna kill me. But he plays stupid. He convinces himself that it’s gonna be alright and he does it anyways. And then again he’s surprised that bad things happen from his poor decisions. He’s surprised that he’s killed by a scorpion when he decided he was going to be giving it free river crossing. Flashing back to your Oregon Trail days.
MICHAEL:
It’s just like every time in the Oregon trail. It fails! Before that river and someone dies. I guarantee you.
JOEL:
Something always dies.
MICHAEL:
Something goes wrong. Stay away from the river.
JOEL:
That’s the real moral story of this. Just don’t go to rivers.
MICHAEL:
Let’s wrap up. You’re good, I’m good.
JOEL:
<laughter>
MICHAEL:
No, but, such is true. I mean in all areas of our lives. The more we surround ourselves with awful decisions, the more we have these accessible to us, the more likely we’re gonna do them. A real life example. Paleo. When I started eating healthy, I had to literally go through all my cabinets and just throw stuff away. Last night, I kid you not, I started getting cravings for stuff and I just want to EAT. I ripped open my cabinets just… where is some stinking fooood!! And if I had that stuff around, I would have just gone to town on it. I would have made a bad decision health-wise because I had it around. If the frog was never even talking to the scorpion in the first place, he’s not gonna end up dead in the middle of the river.
JOEL:
That’s a good point. The idea that he’s even entertaining…. like the quickest way to get out of that situation, the quickest way to avoid those situations is the natural instinct that.. NO, I’m not gonna deal with it. I’m not gonna talk to that guy I don’t care. Maybe a really great conversationalist will just blow honestly on the scorpion traits. But I know he might seem like a cool guy but you just gotta bounce out of that. That’s the same thing.. that’s one of the reason why people end up doing a lot of the things they do. It’s because they’re not willing to make the snap judgments. They just doing. That’s something I talk about all the time. What’s a 12-step process? People really want to think through things and really have the methodology for doing A, B, C, D, E down pat and just sit and think about it. And then 2 weeks later they’re gonna jump into it. The people that I see who have really good success in a lot of the stuff is people who say, okay this sounds good, I’m going to jump all in 100% and do it. We’d just announced.. and then they just jump into it and they don’t think about it. They kind of.
MICHAEL:
And you’ll figure it out as you go.
JOEL:
You’ll figure it out as you go down. We just announced a plummet at the summer we’re doing at WDS this summer. It’s a bungee jumping thing that we’re taking probably like 25 people going bungee jumping. And it’s really funny with bungee jumping. It’s kinda the same mental process. People who sit at the platform and actually jump are the ones who like… as soon as they say 3,2, 1 jump, you jump. The people who don’t… like if you don’t jump, when they say 3, 2, 1 jump, you end up psyching yourself out too much that people go from really excited and just about to do it to breaking down on the ledge. We’ve done it for 2 or 3 years in a row and we’ve had 50 or 60 people go bungee jumping with us and it’s funny. We’ve only had one person not do it and they got on the ledge and they counted down 3, 2, 1 and they didn’t jump when it was time to jump. And they ended up psyching themselves out. And as soon as they started thinking about it, as soon as they started to overthink the decision, they just paralyze themselves basically. And they ruined any effectiveness they had as far as just getting off the ledge. It’s interesting what happens when a lot of times you wanna try to think.. you wanna give it the benefit of the doubt, you need to really talk about all the different reasons why this could be a possibility. The best reaction is just instinction… no– following your instincts. Just get away from it as fast as possible.
MICHAEL:
Yep. Get out.
JOEL:
So I think that’s it. You got anything else? It’s just one of those stories that like.. it’s so simple. The interesting about Aesop, or “Ee-sop..”
MICHAEL:
Definitely “Ee-sop.”
JOEL:
We’re gonna have this discussion.
MICHAEL:
I communicate for a living, Joel. Trust me, if there’s one thing I know, it’s how to pronounce things.
JOEL:
That’s the top quality you’ve got.
MICHAEL:
Pronouncing. That’s not even a word!
JOEL:
I’m pretty sure it’s pronunciation.
MICHAEL:
Ohh man. Sometimes I struggle. <laughter>
JOEL:
Just sometimes.
MICHAEL:
I think you wanna talk about weight loss for a little bit.
JOEL:
I think all kinda ties into… I mean a lot of people coming, checking out Impossible are interested in fitness or whatever. All these things can directly be applied to that. I mean, the idea that bad things happen from poor decisions. The fact that like, I went out and partied 2 or 3 days this week and now I didn’t see results. But I was really good for 5 days. Well, you know it doesn’t take 5 days. It takes 6 and a half or 7. You’re gonna have 1 maybe off meal or something but if you take 2 or 3 days and you string them together and they’re all poor decisions, don’t be surprised if you’re not seeing the results that you want.
MICHAEL:
I think that for me it all boils down to: our actions have consequences. Period. Our actions in life have consequences. Negative or positive. There’s consequences to what we decide to do.
JOEL:
As much as you want to rationalize and think about, oh well this could be okay, and this is gonna be alright, and it’s not. It’s the stupidest dumbest thing in the world. That frog, like you know what, I’m just gonna trust that scorpion. It’s like you go into DQ and you’re like, listen that.. it’s got half the calories of a normal ice cream cake so I’m gonna have two of them. It’s gonna be great.
MICHAEL:
That honestly sounds incredible. If I could eat 2 ice cream cakes for the calorie amount of one… oh SIGN ME UP.
JOEL:
I don’t think that’s the message we’re trying to communicate.
MICHAEL:
Absolutely not. Do not try that at home. It’s a bad idea.
JOEL:
<laughter> No, it’s just the idea that, when your goal is weight loss, your actions should be congruent with what you want to achieve. And if you’re not taking steps to ensure that your actions are in line with what you wanna actually accomplish, don’t be surprised when you don’t accomplish the things that you say you want to do. If you’re not actively moving forward every single day towards whatever you want to achieve, it’s probably not gonna happen. It’s not gonna happen by accident.
MICHAEL:
There’s no standing still.
JOEL:
No. So. That’s what I got. I just like the story because it’s one of those things. It’s a children’s tale. You can tell it to a kid. And even kids will say that that frog’s kinda stupid. You could talk about it more more more and as you go into it, you could really kinda break it down and apply it to a bunch of different areas of life. There’s a lot of different areas that are.. interesting and applicable. So maybe we should do a whole series on “Ee-sop,” Aesop. I don’t even know. Have ’em pop in the Impossible FM episode.
MICHAEL:
Yeah, maybe we can do a podcast with him.
JOEL:
We could try. I don’t know if he would be up for that because he’s pretty much…. Those were written for like, 200 years ago right?
MICHAEL:
I think.
JOEL:
You think? You have no idea.
MICHAEL:
I have absolutely no idea.
JOEL:
If anybody knows how long those.. we could Google that. We don’t need a listener. If you guys wanna chime in and say… just drop Aesop knowledge on us. That’s what we really have to resolve. That’s a big issue here. Let’s get down to the things that matter. Alright. I think that’s it for us. Michael. People want to find out more information about you, where do they go?
MICHAEL:
Yeah. Visit my site at truthwork.org or follow me on twitter, @michaelyoder81. Love to interact with you. Love to chat.
Hey everybody thanks for listening to the Impossible FM podcast. For more tips, blog posts, podcasts, videos, and a whole lot more, check out ImpossibleHQ.com. Until next time I’ll see you guys next Monday morning, right here behind the mic at 8:00 AM Eastern Standard Time. Until then, get out there, go do something that pushes your limits, and do something impossible.
Michael says
It was a blast doing this! Let’s do it again soon!
Sean says
You don’t have to post this, just some feedback for you.
First, I’m psyched about the over all site. You’ve done a ton of good work in the past.
Michael’s voice is inaudible in the video, at least as played on my tablet.
I had a similar issue with hear the guest on one of the earlier impossible FM podcasts too, although I think I could make out what was said. It’s extremely distracting.
That said I totally appreciate the work you’ve done and what you’ve built! I definitely feel you on the CST. Just one wrinkle lately with these podcasts. You probably know this already, but I worry that when you start talking about doing lots of work and being efficient … these kinds of things are well, extremely distracting.
Best of luck. Keep up the otherwise solid work!
Joel Runyon says
Thanks Sean,
Working on a new workflow for the podcasts that should help with the audio. Thanks for the feedback!