When I started my personal development journey a decade ago, I came across this line from motivational speaker Les Brown:
If you do what is easy, your life will be hard.
This simple but powerful concept has been my guiding principle over the years. As living beings, we evolved pain receptors that warn us with danger or impending damage to our bodies. Our hands feel pain even before we actually burn ourselves. It seems like our default nature is the pursuit of comfort and the alleviation of pain.
This “default” feels safe, but is one of the biggest mistakes you can make.
True North
Instead of choosing the easy path in life, we should aim to be in the path of least regret. Author Erwin McManus takes this even further by saying that we shouldchoose the path of what we fear. According to him, fear is a marker for the direction of growth and purpose, rather than a paralyzing obstacle. We should not be avoiding fear, but instead lean into it.
By leaning into our fears and choosing the hard path, we go against what most people are doing. And going against the majority seems to be the recipe for getting the most out of life. Just take a look at the people you know. Are they mostly happy? Do they have bodies that you want to live in? Are they satisfied with life?
If going through the path where most people go to does not lead to your desired outcome, then it makes sense to go on alternate routes instead.
The Narrow Path
Why choose hard? Since we do not live forever, doesn’t it makes sense to maximize our happiness and comfort while we still live?
Happiness is a mirage. When you are in the office, you can’t wait to go on a vacation. But while in vacation, you can’t help but think of all the work that is piling up in your absence. We chase happiness like it is the ultimate goal, but always fail to achieve it. When we think we are happy, we realize that we can have something that will make us happier, and so the quest goes on.
Strive towards meaning instead. We say martyrs and heroes are people who lived a full life. They mostly lived short lives but full of meaning. Retirement is what we look forward to as we grind at work for decades, but find that our life’s meaning is gone when we leave the workplace for good. It is meaning that sustains us, not happiness.
The Journey Is the Reward
Dopamine is a hormone secreted by the body, and is called the “happy hormone”. This is released when something good happens to us. But studies show that this was released when we are just expecting the reward, even before we actually get it.
There is a theory that we evolved this behavior because we came from hunter gatherers. Nature does not give us what we need all the time. There will be days when food is scarce, and days when it is plenty. In order to survive, we should be motivated to wake up every day and search for food. These hormones kept us going in life, even though we could not forage for anything sometimes.
In this modern world where our conveniences are taken for granted, we yearn for this hormone. Sometimes people do this in destructive ways. Gambling is one of these things, where we are always in this state of heightened expectation. We are not addicted to gambling itself, but to the emotion it brings us through this expectation.
The journey is the reward. But then our appreciation of that reward is defined by the difficulty of obtaining it. If the journey is easy, we do not treasure it. It is not something that we can relive with others in the future. On the contrary, some of the hardest endeavors we had in life were the most transforming and fruitful. Soldiers who went through war experienced the most brutal scenarios you can imagine. But ask many of them and they would say it was the time they felt most alive.
Hard Things, Easier Times
Of course, we don’t have to experience horrible events for us to appreciate our lives! We are given ample opportunity to choose between an easy path or not.
Most of us do not get enough sleep. The internet brought us with an endless supply of things to look at, to read, and to chat about. Sleep is often the casualty of modern life. This may sound ironic, but the hard thing to do is to sleep more! Deciding to skip our favorite feed, show, or video game so we can have more sleep is easier said than done.
Keeping our financial foundation solid is another one. This can mean many things depending on your stage of life, but the essence is that we have to be able to support our family’s needs. Taking care of your career so you remain employable if you are working a job. Learning to keep a portion of your income for savings and investments. Saying no to things that you don’t really need so you are more prepared for emergencies. Not basing our self-worth on how we look externally, by not trying to one-up our friends and neighbors at the expense of financial insecurity.
Learning to take circumstances as is, and not judge them as good or bad. Nature is neutral, but it is us who decides how to react to it. Having a difficult time at your home or your work? Take it as an opportunity to practice humility, perseverance, and discipline. No problems on your life at all? Prepare for the eventual storm that is coming. Practice premeditatio malorum. Understand how it feels to feel lack and strain, not just physically, but emotionally and spiritually as well.
Final Thoughts
Eleanor Roosevelt wants us to do one thing every day that scares us. Author Brian Tracy tells us to eat that frog first. Lean into the difficult because that is where growth is.
By choosing what is hard and doing the uncomfortable we strengthen our character and our resilience. Life will throw a curve ball at you when you least expect it. The only question is, are you ready for it? Can you say to yourself, “I have been through worse, I’ll be fine?”
Photo by Daniel Born on Unsplash