Learn To Enjoy Difficulty

Whether you like it or not your life will be difficult.

Hard times are inevitable so it's important to be good at dealing with them. Today we're exploring why this is and how to deal with it.

First, accept hard things will happen to you.

It's painful to grow. It's painful to decline. It's painful to stagnate. No matter what you will experience pain.

However, what is under your control is your reaction and interpretation of these situations.

Your world model is the tool you use to navigate your environment despite it being a low-resolution version of reality. Given this, it's in your best interest to choose how you navigate difficulty.

When I was new to working out there were no external rewards. It's difficult to exercise in the beginning, and I didn't enjoy it.

There are two reasons I stuck to it. First, I believed the reward was worth it. Second, I understood that it takes time to enjoy it.

Whenever you take on a task such as this it won't be enjoyable in the beginning, but with time you'll start to associate the difficulty with the rewards. This is why you see people who like to do activities you see as hard and unenjoyable. They've associated the pain of the inputs with the pleasure of the outputs.

Humans repeat actions which have rewarded them in the past. This is the incentive for human behavior. When taking on a new task which is difficult you want to find ways for the task to be rewarding.

It's easy to perform your current habits because you've trodden the pathways in your brain such that your subconscious has linked the input with the reward. This is the end goal when you're trying to add a new activity to your life.

It's not a choice you make, rather it's a process which happens over time. As you repeatedly go through the neural pathways they strengthen.

There's lots of scientific backing to this for exercise. After a workout, your body releases endorphins which feel good. Over time your brain links the two activities.

Just like Pavlov's dog.

This is a difference from others I can now recognize in myself: I find a certain pleasure in physical exertion.

I'd cite this purely to my regular commitment to it because this wasn't a trait I had before.

Given that humans view their lives through story, and attribute meaning this way. You should view your life from a wider perspective. View the narrative structure of your life, the hero's journey.

The hero starts out as weak and underdeveloped, finds or is found by challenge, then grows from it as a result.

If you were optimizing to make the best hero you'd need the absolute biggest monster. The bigger the monster, the more epic the hero. If your goal is fulfilling your potential, then should you not wish to face the biggest challenges so you have the opportunity to overcome them?

Instead of resenting the challenges that come your way, view them as the necessary ingredients to create the person you want to be.

Ultimately your interpretation is up to you. You can view yourself accountable, even for that which isn't your fault. Or you can choose to view yourself as the victim of circumstance.

Neither interpretation is objectively correct, good, or bad. Nonetheless, you must choose how to live.

Alex Hormozi talks about a refrain he says to himself during hard times: “This is what hard feels like. This is where most people stop, and that's why they don't win.”

All the low-hanging fruit are already picked. Everything worth doing is hard, but not everything hard is worth doing. Don't conflate value with difficulty. However, when you find yourself in a difficult circumstance understand that it will pass with time. Hard times don't last, nor do easy ones. It's a constant flux.

To remain sane humans must give themselves to a hard task. It's more a question of which pain are you willing to endure, not easy or hard task. It’s also not difficulty for the sake of it.

Choose your pain. Each individual is uniquely suited to certain endeavors. Consider the combinatorics of DNA. Your genetic code has never happened before, nor will it happen again. On top of that, your environmental influences are impossible to replicate.

You should iterate what you do until it meshes with this. Where your vocation is your avocation.

You'll find the reward for completing hard things often isn't the external metric you sought after but the person you were forced to become. It's not about climbing the mountain, it's about your lungs being able to breathe the air at the peak.

Those who climb the mountain have associated the pains of the input with the pleasure of the output. When what you’re pursuing is the person you could become, your potential, there are more avenues to reinforce good behaviors.

You can make progress each day, finding that motivating in and of itself.

This comes down to focusing on trajectory rather than position. When your identity is tied to position it’s hard to motivate yourself and it's fragile.

If your identity is tied to position it's only a matter of time before it gets destroyed. An identity tied to trajectory is robust because it's a function of your actions.

To illustrate, imagine you’re someone who has the identities of strong, smart, lawyer, and CEO.

Each of these position identities can be destroyed or shown as false by external circumstances.

If something akin to the great depression came along then what happens to your CEO and lawyer identity? If you get injured or sick are you still strong? What if your best judgement proves wrong and blows up in your face, are you smart?

All the identities you predicated your worth on can be destroyed in a moment.

Whereas identities based on trajectory can't be destroyed by anything external. Yes, you can be set back, but you can always hold the identities that you are getting stronger and smarter than yesterday.

By focusing on your trajectory rather than position the identity you hold is a result of your actions and not circumstance. It remains robust despite the difficult situations you'll inevitably face.