Medicine for really little kids usually comes in liquid form. You can do the classic spoonful, but these days the meds come with little plastic syringes so you can just squirt it into their mouths. Despite whatever they try to flavor it with, medicine still tastes like medicine and many kids don’t love it.
When a kid is feverish, that’s not really the time to impose discipline if you don’t need to – it’s the time to get the medicine into the kid however you can. I learned that if I took the dose of medicine and just shook it up in a few ounces of juice, my son would gulp it down and all would be well.
We’ve all done something like that. Parents mash pills into applesauce. Pet owners wrap bits of bacon around the pills so their dog will swallow them. Caretakers of the elderly mix medicine into tea.
But it isn’t just medicine, and the wisdom is helpful all around. Any time you have to do something you’d find unpleasant on its own, there’s almost always a way to mash it into a larger volume of something you find enjoyable to the point where you barely notice. Have to write a term paper? Crank up music, grab a cocktail, and write it a paragraph at a time during the loading screens between levels of your favorite video game.
Mash it up in the applesauce if that’s what it takes to get it done.
If you eat too much chocolate and not enough protein, get chocolate-covered almonds. It’s not as good as just almonds, but it’s way better than just chocolate!
The point is this – we don’t have to grit our teeth and endure unpleasant things just because they’re good for us or necessary. We’re allowed to make them pleasant. We’re allowed to coat them with sugar or drown them in music or cover them with glitter to make them fit into our lives – especially if they alternative is avoiding them entirely.
The Opportunity Machine 