Choose Your Hard
There was an image that went around social media several weeks ago where someone had written in a notebook a few contradictory things, each being hard.
Marriage is Hard
Divorce is Hard
Choose your Hard
Obesity is Hard
Being Fit is Hard
Choose your Hard
Being in Debt is Hard
Being Financially Disciplined is Hard
Choose your Hard
Communication is Hard
Not Communicating is Hard
Choose your Hard
Life will never be easy. It will always be hard. But we can choose our hard. Choose wisely.
After reflecting on this edict I wanted to come up with things in my own life that are hard.
Dating and Friendships/Loneliness
Being Weak/Being Strong
Failure/Success
Employee/Business Owner
Lying/Honesty
Division/Unity
Losing/Winning
Hate/Love
Ignorance/Learning
Following/Leading
Giving up/Perseverance
Idleness/Action
The dichotomy of these options is clear. The outcomes of each of our daily decisions add up, creating who we are today. Each option is arguably just as hard as the other, but at different times and for different reasons.
We all have dozens of these examples. Either that we’ve experienced for ourselves or we learned from observing someone else. And just like these, in most cases, the “better” one is pretty obvious. But often the more difficult of the two right now.
You have to make the choice! Choose whether to be fat or fit. Healthy or unhealthy. Choose to work on a relationship or ruin it. Choose to stay in a relationship that’s harmful, or get out and start again. Choose to lie or be honest.
It’s your choice. And I promise if you sit down and think about any of these choices for more than a split second, you know which one you WANT. Which one is RIGHT.
That moment is the pivotal moment. When you KNOW what you need to do, and you have the chance to do it.
Think you can’t do it? Make a plan to. Want to get healthy? Get off the couch. Don’t tell yourself to run a marathon. That’s unattainable right now. Getting off the couch though? You can do that.
Want to better a relationship? All you have to do is send a text, make a phone call. That’s it. Once you do that, the rest will flow! It doesn’t take grandiose gestures, romantic or platonic, to make a relationship work.
Want to be strong physically? You don’t just go put 300 pounds on the bar and push it. You start with 50, maybe less. Emotionally, mentally, spiritually? It’s exactly the same! Pick one thing that you can do just a LITTLE bit better. Say you’re sorry, tell yourself you ARE worth something, read a couple verses of scripture.
Little things add up. Eventually you can be the “guy” or that “girl” who “has it all.”
Not because it was given to you, but because you went and got it. Slowly but consistently.
How then? How do you go from “zero to hero”?
Andy Frisella talks about something he calls his Power List. Some people make to-do lists, others call it something else. Personally, to-do lists stress me out more than I already am about what I want to do! What makes his stand out to me is how goal-oriented the list is. It’s about achieving your higher goals. If your goal is to own a home, maybe today your power list item is to make no purchases on Amazon!
Now you can pick 2-4 more goals, create ONE THING you can do TOMORROW to inch yourself closer to achieving that goal. Want a clean house/apartment, put away 5 articles of clothing or other cluttered items every day for a week. Learn an instrument? Practice it for 10 minutes. Not 30, not an hour. Just 10. Most likely, once you get into the groove of it, you won’t want to stop at 10 minutes, you’ll forget you had a timer at all. A buddy of mine had a power-list item to get up on the first alarm.
If you do a handful of these little things EVERY SINGLE DAY, YOU WIN THE DAY as Frisella says. Then you win the week. Then, you achieve your goals. Then you set new ones, and you do it again! And guess what? If you miss a day, tomorrow is a new day, and you can do it again.
For example, a couple of my power list items are: make my bed every day for 30 days (Big goal? To have an orderly home.), 15 minutes minimum studying for my flight exam (each day I select a specific topic to study), write 500 words (I can substitute this out for recording or editing a podcast, again with the larger goal to build my business), read 10 pages in a nonfiction book.
Each of these items is so doable! It sounds far easier than reading 20 books this year, or passing my flying test. Those are so ambiguous and abstract. But if you break it down into daily, bite sized actions, you’ll look back and see how far you’ve come, and just how far you really can go.
Let us not be afraid of the wrestle! That is often when we learn the most about ourselves and gain the greatest insight into the problem we're tackling. Each time we face a challenge head on, rather than avoiding it or putting it off, we ACHIEVE something. Maybe it doesn’t feel like it, maybe it doesn’t look like it. But we do! If nothing else, we learn another way that doesn’t work.
Give it a shot! If you’re struggling with HARD things, turn them into power list items and tackle them little by little. If you give it a few days or weeks, you’ll look back and see a clear difference. I know because I’ve been doing it. My family noticed. My friends noticed. My coworkers noticed. If they have all seen a change in me, then it must be working.
The day you take control of your dreams and your actions is the day pigs fly.
These books have truly inspired me to reflect on topics like this one. They’ve helped me gain insight into how I can reach my potential and recognize who I can really become. Check them out for yourself and see what you can accomplish!
