A concerned mother couldn’t get her child to stop eating sugar.
Determined, she had the bright idea to take him to the wisest living person she knew to talk some sense into him.
“O wise one,” said the child’s mother, “please tell my son to stop eating so much sugar.”
“Hmm,” contemplated the wise one. “Come back in two months.”
Perplexed, the mother and her child made the long trek back home where the insatiable sugar-eating continued.
Two months finally passed.
The child’s mother dragged him back to the wisest person she knew.
“O wise one, O wise one! Please tell my child to stop eating sugar,” she begged.
Without hesitation and with complete resolve, the wisest person she knew said to her child, “Stop eating sugar.”
“Thank you so much, O wise one, but why couldn’t you have just told him that two months ago??“
The wisest person she knew quipped back, “Because I was eating sugar.”
(You can substitute “eating sugar” with any other debilitating self-sabotage: procrastinating, sedating, gossiping, complaining, gluttony, making excuses, exaggerating, being late, worrying, etc).