Pick Your Hard
The easy road is a psyop.
There’s two roads in life: the easy way (which leads to a lifetime of hard) OR the hard way (which leads to a lifetime of easy). Most people choose the former BEFORE they realize that the latter is the better way to live.
The Easy Road
You cut corners. You wake up late. You don’t go the extra mile when it comes to working out. You don’t do the extra credit for bonus points. You don’t stay late at work to prepare for that presentation that will lead to your promotion. You don’t do anything above what you’re required to do. And whenever a hard decision needs to be made, you take the easy solution every single time. This life is full of easy, void of inconvenience and compromise. For the short term, it works. You breeze by. You have fun. Life is easy. For the long term, you are behind. You tend to start realizing that the hard work leads to an easy life. You have to make harder and harder decisions. You have to sacrifice more later in life. Easy decisions become a scarcity. Fun is had less and less. You realize, easy early will eventually = HARD.
The Hard Road
You go the extra mile. You stay late in the gym. You’re the first one in and the last one out. You constantly take extra steps even when it’s not necessary. Extra credit? You do it. Bonus points? You aim to earn them all. When it becomes obvious you need to put in overtime at work to ace your presentation that will lead to your promotion, you already have a plan in place to get the work done. You become used to HARD. You become used to SACRIFICING. You become used to WORKING HARD. When life gets hard, you get molded. You begin to get tougher and tougher. Hard situations don’t rock you anymore. You welcome the challenges. Things stop being “hard”, they just become “things” because of life. Eventually life gets easy. You become a master at all things because you faced all of your dragons head on along the way. You create your own fun. You work on your time. You live life how YOU want to, on your terms… terms you carved out on the hard path. Decision making becomes seamless, easy… second nature. You fear nothing because you always faced anything you ever feared. You realize, hard early eventually = EASY.