11d ago (edited) in Growth / Self Development
Choose Your Hard
I was given a piece of advice, that initially wasn't intended as advice, but over years of it being repeated, drilled into my mind and my every day, became one of the most powerful driving factors to how I live my life and progress towards my goals. It was simply this: "This life wasn't meant to be easy."
Life is hard.
You'll come up with countless examples if you read that "life is hard" over and over again. Life is hard. Life is pain.
The beautiful thing is: You can control a lot more of it than you think.
You get to choose your hard. And don't get it twisted, not doing anything is a choice. That's choosing for it to be much harder later.
We have the amazing ability as human beings to communicate lessons and experiences to make each others' lives better. There's virtually nothing you can venture into in life, or experience, that someone else hasn't already been through. Whether it's deep down or not, you know what's coming up next.
If your diet is a mess, and you work a desk job, and watch TV or scroll social media all evening and never get out and get active, you know you'll gain weight. You know you won't be healthy forever. You know life is going to get really hard later. But congratulations because you can choose to make life hard now, so it's not hard later. It's hard to get up an hour earlier. Hard to get to the gym. Hard to life the weight one more time than last week. Hard to run 30 seconds longer than last week. But that daily hard will make your life so much easier when in 20 years you're still healthy, active, less pain, less medical bills, less strain and stress.
If you're un-happy in your relationship, and a little voice in your head says that it's not going to be forever, but you do nothing, you know it'll go wrong. You know it'll be painful to have the conversation when it comes up on its own. You know every day it gets harder and harder, and you become more and more afraid of facing it. But the beautiful thing is, you can choose the hard now, and have the conversation, so it's easier later, so it's easier now than it would be in six months.
If you have an employee that shows signs of under performing, but you do nothing, it'll get very hard when they're on the verge of losing their job, their home life is miserable because their work life is miserable, and even worse if you have to start fresh training their replacement. But the beautiful thing is, you can choose your hard now. You can have the tough conversation, the tough training to keep them on track, and keep them on board.
If your home is a mess, and you put off doing basic cleaning things like putting the dishes in the sink vs on the counter, or throwing away that one little piece of trash vs leaving it on the table. All the little things compound until you're coming home from work, overwhelmed by the mess at home and the monstrous task of a whole day of deep cleaning ahead of you. In stead, you can choose the hard early. It's hard to remember to take your shoes off at the door, walk the trash over to the can right away, rinse the dish and put it in the washer right away, fold the laundry right out of the dryer -- the list goes on. But doing each of those little tasks right away, the little hard moments, makes life so much easier when the weekend comes and you don't have six hours of cleaning to do, you can spend an hour and then enjoy the rest of the day, spend time with your family, get another task done so you're less overwhelmed for the week.
Most of the time, if you choose a hard task now, the overall level of hard applied to your life is so much less than letting it build into a beast on its own. So choose your hard now.
Eventually, you'll find yourself starting to switch your mindset. You get to choose your reward.
I can have the reward of the chocolate chip cookie every night and that little immediate gratification in the moment, or I can have the much greater reward of hitting my weight goal in a couple months and being confident in the mirror and my every day life. Essentially, I can have the tiny reward of a sugary treat, or the massive reward of a better mood and a better life every day all day.
In reality, I can choose the reward of the cookie now, but with my disciplines, that means I'm also choosing the hard of an additional 30 minutes on the treadmill later.
When you look at it from the perspective of choosing your reward, you'll find that the delayed gratification is so much better of a reward than the sum of the small rewards you're sacrificing in the moment.
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Choose Your Hard
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