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What you are about to read is something I wrote way back in the day (26 January 2015, to be exact), at a time when I was just getting started with my personal development journey and really began to explore the depths of my writing.
It is one in a series of, I think, 10 articles… all of which I will share at some point on this blog.
Enjoy.
The Zombie Experience
What do you want your life to look like in the next, say, ten years?
Not an easy question, I know, but it’s something not too many people ever think about.
Come to think of it now, all we actually ever do is slip into existence like zombies, stuck in this world, but not really a part of it.
The scary part is that it’s usually not our life, but one that society has chosen for us.
Think about it; why are you doing what you’re doing right now?
Because of you; because you made intentional independent decisions for your life?
Or was it Society?… Friends?… Family?… Peers?
Expectations from those around us mould our decisions until our goals, dreams and visions die.
It’s easy because it’s comfortable — the path of least resistance.
Go to school, get a degree, secure a job, start a family… then we rinse and repeat our days until we pack it all up without a second thought as to what exactly we’ve left behind.
Delayed Satisfaction
Nothing in my life has more profoundly influenced the quality of the decisions I make than the concept of ‘sacrificing something good now so that I may gain something extraordinary later’.
Another way of saying this is:
Easy choices made in the moment — quick wins which indulge our immediate temptations and cravings — come AT THE EXPENSE OF the real, hardcore and sustainable euphoria we could experience, if only we were to delay pleasure to some future date by sacrificing our present comfort, fleeting delights and shallow hedonism.
I was first introduced to this idea in the book by Jeff Ohlson, The Slight Edge; but I doubt this was evolutionary, even back then.
I have come across numerous material dedicated to this discussion (the book The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy springs to mind).
But, whether it was my first exposure to or merely the fact that it was something that I happened upon during a crucial point in my life, The Slight Edge has been the most pivotal commentary on the importance of figuring out what things in life we can live without that will yield the most ‘return on investment’.
Become proficient at this one skill and you will be well on your way to achieving success in any arena of your life.
Discipline now, greater later; easy now, suffer later
Check out the video below for a great motivational speech on this very subject:
Survival Mode
I call this type of life, where we get up every morning and do our best to get to the end of every day without being significantly worse off than the day before, survival mode.
Should our situations improve, we mark it off as a job well done.
Any worse? Well, let’s reconvene tomorrow and work that much harder just to break even.
The Comfort Zone
It’s called a comfort zone because it’s necessarily easy to do.
Sometimes we don’t even know any better or to change would mean additional burdens rather than lifestyle relief.
The things we do in our comfort zone are mindless.
We don’t need to think about anything or exert effort; it comes naturally to us, and so we can simply do it on autopilot.
All we’ve allowed for in our lives is essentially an accumulation of bad habits that, even though we can feel them gradually tear us apart, we cannot seem to intellectually separate ourselves from.
Therefore, we create yesterdays, todays and tomorrows that are almost carbon copies of one another.
Yes, this is easy to do but, wow, does it make for a hard life.
The point is this — think about what you value, determine what you will need to do to get you what you desire, get out of your comfort zone and start doing things differently.
Anticipate resistance at the beginning, but don’t allow yourself to use this as an excuse to slink back into your old ways.
As they say: “old habits die hard” but as Albert Einsten supposedly poignantly pointed out: “insanity is doing the same shit all the time and expecting different results”… and I’m not even paraphrasing.
Put another way — we need to come to terms with the fact that, if we continue to do what we’ve always done, we cannot imagine a life significantly better than the one we already have.
Do the Difficult Things and Work Towards an Amazing Life
There are numerous principles required for success and I shall amend and/or add to the list below as time goes on.
However, for the time being, please accept the following hardships as crucial to living an overall amazing life.
Self Control
This is a fantastic trait in and of itself… even if there is no real goal tied to the end of it.
The practice of self-control is so fucking difficult, yet its mindset rewards are massive.
Think of self-control as fitness training for your brain.
Let yourself sit in the torture of fighting against, what you have convinced yourself is, your own free will.
The reason for the pain we experience when we exercise self-control is the thought that we are preventing ourselves from having, doing or saying something which we feel is our right.
We are telling ourselves ‘no’ and nobody tells us what to do! Who do we think we are?
Every time you come out at the end of a self-control experiment, you should realise two things:
- Not allowing yourself the temptation you craved wasn’t as awful as you had imagined; and
- Not only didn’t you need the object of your desire, you can rationally conclude that you’re objectively better off for not having succumbed to the feeling.
Examples from the kitchen:
- That time I lacked self-control and devoured a packet of crisps, two litres of soda and half a jar of peanut butter after sharing an entire pizza with myself because, ya know, I was ‘peckish’… felt euphoric in the moment… buuuuut made me miserable, in ways I won’t describe here, not even an hour after said feeding frenzy; and then
- There was that time I exercised self-control, where I decided a bottle of water and an apple was a better idea… my cravings eventually subsided, I got to enjoy a proper meal at the appropriate time, didn’t feel bloated and lethargic afterwards and was motivated to get in a decent workout the next morning after a good night’s rest.
Opportunity Costs
Keep this concept from economics in mind every time you need to make a decision in your life.
Whatever choice you make, remember that you are sacrificing something else you could have had if you made a different decision.
Basically, ask yourself: “what am I giving up by making this decision right now”
Obviously, we cannot possibly run through every available alternative, but here’s an example from the kitchen to make it easy:
- What do you sacrifice when you decide to stay home and eat a pie instead of going to the gym like you had planned?
- What is the opportunity cost of having that burger rather than spending an extra 10 minutes mixing up a salad?
Inversely, the opportunity cost of working out is the hour or two you could have used to do something else instead.
Growth is the time and energy cost of putting your effort into something challenging and worthwhile in the present, at the expense of trivial comfort, in order to reap massive lifestyle rewards in the future.
It is an investment in yourself.
You’ll find that the opportunity cost of settling into your comfort zone is an easy life now for a hard one later.
… because there really is no such thing as a free lunch!
Lions Don’t Lose Sleep Over the Opinions of Sheep
Realise that most people (especially loved ones) want you to be successful… but, perhaps mostly subconsciously, not more successful than they are.
Taking advice from people in your situation or worse (in whatever comparative arena you can think of) will not likely lead to the results you desire.
Rather, spend time with those who have achieved at least some success in a field you would like to pursue.
Yes, listen to your friends and family and understand that they have (what they believe to be) your best interests at heart but do your due diligence and make a proper, educated and informed decision by yourself.
You will experience a rejuvenated maturity by taking responsibility for your own life and actions, rather than letting the opinions of others chain you down to a mediocre existence.
The Fruits of Today’s Labour Can Only Be Picked Off the Trees of Tomorrow
We also need to break free of the immediate gratification philosophy of the masses.
Appreciate that what we do today, the little things and the big, compound and expand and can only really be seen much, much later in life.
This is the Slight Edge philosophy I spoke about at the beginning of this article.
Don’t give up just because you can’t see a lot happening immediately.
Be realistic with your expectations in the short-term and understand that you can accomplish so much more than you think in the long.
It’s easy to get discouraged because results fluctuate so inconsistently over a short period of time. But, if we were to track the general trend of our life over an extended period, we would get a more accurate depiction of the effects our actions have.
I have done many things where it not only looked like what I was doing wasn’t working, but I was somehow worse off than when I started.
This is life’s greatest deception… and it works both ways.
It’s just unfortunate because, as we chase our comfort, we are blinded to the negative consequences and, as we chase growth, we are blinded to the positive changes that are actually taking place beneath the surface.
Only when we are consistent in our daily actions can we realistically determine how profound these seemingly small habits are in the long-run.
In other words, don’t focus on the rolling results, but rather the cumulative ones; concentrate on the acts themselves and don’t ever expect instant progress.
Conclusion
If you’re comfortable, then you are not growing.
This is not an inherently bad thing… sometimes it’s necessary to step back and take a break.
But chronic comfort is necessarily a bad thing because it means you are allowing your life to atrophy.
In any endeavour, regardless of whether we consider the amateur just starting out or a veteran who wants to level up, transformation is challenging in everything we do in life.
Difficulty, then, needs to be intentionally inserted into your life. Only once something has become an ingrained, automatic habit (as in, it causes more stress not to do it than it would to do it), will it become somewhat ‘comfortable’.
And then we are presented with the same predicament — do we remain in this new comfort zone? Or, do we grow again?
Just remember that comfort and growth are practically incompatible.
And, as it has been said, if we are not growing, we’re dying.
Whew, we made it!
Hey there, it’s Brad again.
Just wanted to pop back in and extend a massive THANK YOU for reading all the way through to the end.
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[…] As it has been said: “do the easy thing and expect a hard life“. […]