Anything Worth Doing Is Hard
““Easy choices, hard life. Hard choices, easy life.””
Modern life is all about convenience - there’s a never-ending list of things to make life easier.
Uber lets you summon a taxi in minutes, Amazon will send you anything you desire the next day, and Netflix makes it easy to spend hours watching TV.
But that’s a good thing, right?
Except it’s a trap.
It’s natural, given the choice between two options, to go for the easier one. It feels like the smart choice. After all, you have avoided unnecessary effort.
However, it cultivates a mindset of choosing convenient options over more demanding ones.
Why is this bad?
Because doing difficult things makes life easier in the long run.
It’s one of life’s greatest paradoxes but also one of the most important.
This is due to the law of compounding which states that small efforts repeated over time add up to something greater than the sum of their parts.
To make compounding work in your favour, you have to prioritise long-term benefits over short-term gains.
The difficulty is that it takes time for the long-term befits to manifest, and in the meantime, you are left with short-term sacrifices.
Human beings find these sacrifices hard to tolerate because they are poor at thinking about their future selves when making decisions.
This is due to hyperbolic discounting and explains why you quit things before they have a chance to demonstrate results.
Where possible, you should try to do difficult things. Although they will be tough at first, you will learn a lot about yourself, leading to personal growth.
As your efforts compound, you will suddenly find yourself heading towards a rosier future.
Take travelling, for example.
Travel to become wiser
Heading to a foreign country is both an exciting and daunting prospect.
You most likely don’t speak the language and certainly won’t understand the nuances of the local culture.
This will inevitably lead to awkward moments of miscommunication, getting lost and eating unusual things for lunch.
Consequently, you might feel at times stressed, tired, anxious, confused or a combination thereof.
Only later, when you return home, will you realise all this has helped you to become a wiser and more confident human being.
This will make you more open to further travel, which creates a virtuous circle.
Learn a language to gain a new perspective
Related to travel is learning a new language.
You will flounder in the beginning and feel like a fool. Conversations will be almost impossible to follow, and you’ll have moments of despair at not being understood.
However, if you stay the course, patterns will start to emerge little by little, and what was once gobbledegook will now become clear.
Hey presto, you’ve now opened up a whole new world of possibility.
Exercise to boost your wellbeing
Exercise is another excellent example of putting in the hard work leads to significant results over time.
It’s easier to relax in front of the TV than it is to work out, but over the long term, exercise makes life easier because you will stay healthier for longer and have more energy to do stuff.
Not only that but exercise also boosts mental wellbeing.
Take control of your money now to better your future
Now how about your finances?
You won’t be surprised to learn that doing the hard work early on pays off disproportionately well in the long run. Again, this is thanks to the wonder of compounding.
If you are frugal and save to invest, you will see small amounts of money grow into sizeable pots. Taken to the extreme, this allows some people to retire in their 30s.
By contrast, if you take the easy option and spend it now, then it’s gone forever.
Start a business to grow
Starting a business guarantees you a few anxious years in the beginning as you fight to survive by battling a long list of things to improve.
It’s hard work, but the potential rewards over the long-term are massive. You will learn more about how a company operates than working for somebody else.
If you get it right, it’s possible to have freedom over your time and to do fewer hours of work than you would have done employed by another company.
Learn a new skill to progress
Education is the primary vehicle for progress in life.
Unfortunately, for many people, their journey ends when they graduate from school or university.
For others, the greatest period of growth takes place afterwards when curiosity gets the better of them.
Being an autodidact is rewarding, but the results of your hard work can take time to bear fruit.
You only gain from doing hard things
So what does this all mean?
As a general rule of thumb, the answer is that the easy option will do harm in the long run.
That’s right; compounding works the other way too.
If you don’t exercise, don’t invest, don’t travel, and don’t learn a new language, you will worsen over time.
At this point, it’s probably a good idea to look at your life and ask yourself: “In which area(s) am I taking the easy option and what small steps can I take now to head in a more positive direction?”.
Remember, you will never reach your true potential living a life of comfort.
As US President Teddy Roosevelt said, “Nothing in the world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain, difficulty.”
