😅 Choose your hard.
Or: why your younger years should be spent on things that earn you the right to work on hard things of your choosing later.
It’s all hard. This life thing. So where possible, choose your hard. And when you’re young, choose the hard that might lead to a little more palatable hard later on.
Growing up, my parents always said, “If you work hard now, you’ll get to enjoy an easy life later.” They had the right to wish that for me - their life was filled with hards not of their choosing.
But on this side of it, I have a slightly different wish for my girls: “If you work hard now, and go towards even harder things, eventually, you’ll find yourself on a wonderful frontier where you get to choose to spend your days doing hard things of your choosing.”
It’s all subjective - I find building a start-up easier than a sales job or a finance one. Or: I’d rather deal with the unpredictability of new places than routine of old.
The point is: for a lot of us, if we don’t come from circumstances that allow us a lot of choice at younger ages, we have to work to transcend matters of economic security, material goods, safety net. So it becomes a matter of working on it in a direction that will get you closer to a life where you can venture out and risk more. Want more.
It’s led me to this place filled with such blessings:
A family built with a husband and partner. Kids who teach and delight me everyday. A purpose in the form of a company that employees others and creates material value everyday.
A lot of people wouldn’t make the choices I have - starting companies as I was starting a family. Constantly optimizing two things - family, company, over and over again, often to the exclusion of social life, hobbies and sleep.
But these are my hards that I’ve worked my way to over years and years.
It doesn’t matter, I don’t think, if your hard is moving to a new city or starting a company. Training to go to the Olympics or writing a novel. Teaching your kids how to ride a bike and holding their hand when someone bruised their heart. Or being by your parents as they grow older, seeing their faces lined with pride but having to deal with the realities of aging.
If it’s going to be one of those obituary, one-wild-and-precious-life sort of things, then hard is implied. It’s part of the package.
I think it’s why people say to follow your curiosity and your love and your obsession to extreme lengths. Because then it’s so much easier to then spend 10,000 hours, many times over, on a thing. Until the hard things to an outsider don’t seem like the hard thing to you. And you’re onto uncharted territory on your own design.
You don’t get to choose hard. That part is pretty much guaranteed.
Instead, choose your hard that fills your days.