“Do the hard things.” Sounds great, but what does it mean?
Good question.
I believe the answer is different for everyone.
What one person considers hard may simply be a warm-up for someone else.
But everyone has an edge.
It’s that place where they reach their limits and begin to feel uncomfortable about going any further.
For some it’s running a long distance endurance race, for others it may be starting a business.
Whatever it is, the point is to do things that cause you to push beyond your comfort zone.
Something that requires you to put in a ton of effort.
Something that forces you to build discipline.
Something you know will cause you to struggle.
Something you could possibly fail at.
I know it’s probably not something a lot of people like to hear because we’re naturally inclined to look for the easy way out.
In a lot of ways, our culture conditions us to choose the path of least resistance.
We value leisure over work.
You can see it in the empty promises and desires to have ten-minute abs or become overnight millionaires.
We’d rather stay indoors on a cold day and watch the latest season of our favorite TV shows than go outside and run a few miles.
But it’s important to find something that teaches you the value of hard work.
Because with hard work comes lessons of strength, perseverance, and endurance.
Hard work teaches you how to finish what you started.
It helps you expand your limits.
Theodore Roosevelt summed it up well when he said:
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how strong the man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; because there is no effort without error and shortcomings; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows the great enthusiasm, the great devotions, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.”
You have to get into the arena.
Purposely doing things that are hard sets a tone of intention to the endeavour.
It establishes a resolve that become the seeds of personal development. Most people avoid doing hard things because they demand you to work through discomfort and demand endurance.
And, quite frankly, most people aren’t conditioned to endure.
We’re taught we can do things like “leverage” debt to buy the things we want now, instead of saving the money and purchasing it later.
We’ve lost the art of endurance.