The other day my mom told me about a family member who had a flat tire on her bike. This relative doesn’t live an easy life.
She had a doctor’s appointment and when she pulled out her bike to go there, she discovered the flat. She doesn’t have a car. So she ended up walking to the doctor’s office. To make it worse, it also started to rain after a few minutes into her walk.
She barely made it. I thought, “Man, I’m lucky. I have an easy life.” But then I also thought, “I did a lot of hard things to get here.”
I remember the days of not having much. When I was 17, I had a full-time job during the entire summer at a call center. One day I was cycling to work and a massive downpour started about halfway through.
If I stopped to get shelter from the rain, I would’ve been late. I also couldn’t return to get the bus. I had to keep cycling.
Man, I still remember how I felt when I showed up at work, completely SOAKED in water, from my socks to my underwear. I sat down, at 9 AM and started making my calls.
During my breaks, I went to the bathroom and tried to dry my clothes piece by piece with the electric hand dryer. That whole day I sat in my chair with wet clothes, cursing at everything in my mind.
I was livid. I didn’t want a hard life like that.
A hard life versus doing hard things
Looking back, I’m grateful for experiences like that when I was in my teens and early twenties. It taught me that a hard life can be like a black hole that you can’t get out from.
My luck was that after the summer, I went to college. My parents, who never went to college, forced me to study. I really wanted to keep working because I thought that having my own money would make my life easy.
They knew better. Having a salary and nothing else is the road to a hard life. The path to an easier life is to get educated.
- Getting educated is hard.
- Learning new skills is hard.
- Exercising regularly is hard.
- Eating healthy is hard.
- Sleeping at the same time every day is hard.
- Seeing your friends having fun and going out is hard.
But the truth is that these things are only hard during the moment. Because what’s the alternative? I bet you have family members or friends who also have hard lives. What makes your life hard?
- A dead-end job.
- Bad health.
- No free time.
- Feeling caged by responsibilities.
Ultimately, it’s a lack of freedom that makes a hard life. To obtain freedom, we must do the “other” hard things.
We must sweat, study, focus, sacrifice, and strive for betterment every single day. And yes, that will always stay hard.
The real prize: An easy life
I had such a limited life that I wanted to do whatever it took to get an abundant life. This is why I never shied away from doing hard things.
Now that I have the freedom to do work I like and live my life on my terms, I feel my life is easy compared to the past.
As Theodore Roosevelt once said:
”Nothing worth having comes easy.”
Remember this as you go through life. If you run into challenges and think it’s too hard, remember why you do what you do.
You might be doing hard things, but you do it because you don’t want to have a hard life.
Having the freedom to do what you want and being comfortable doesn’t come easy. We must work hard for that privilege every single day. And we will never reach an end state where our lives will always be easy.
It’s something we keep working for. Day in and day out. But it’s all worth it.
