Life Doesn’t Care About What Happens To You
What Are You Going to Do About It?
“Let me tell you something you already know. The world ain’t all sunshine and rainbows. It’s a very mean and nasty place, and I don’t care how tough you are, it will beat you to your knees and keep you there permanently if you let it.” -Rocky Balboa
There’s a definite case against having blind optimism in this world. There are concrete dangers in thinking everything will always be rosy and “okay.” And there are problems with thinking that you’ll always come out on top even when your only weapon against life’s challenges is a positive mind.
Yet no matter our mindset, time and time again we’re struck down by what happens to us as we’re forced to deal with life’s misfortunes. Because as much as we like to think so, we’re not masters of life. Far from it.
Instead of being dangerously optimistic, we can become agents of change in our lives; instead, we can become masters of adaptation and the “pivot” — only then do we really stand a chance at thriving in life and making a difference with our work.
In its own way, life forces us to deal with setbacks and shortcomings. It throws challenges and obstacles that make surmounting those challenges even harder. That’s just how things are and how they will continue to be.
No matter who we are, bad things can happen to us, simply because bad things happen to people, regardless if they’re “good” or “bad.”
So if we don’t learn how to deal with setbacks and shortcomings, we’ll fall back in the race and be lost.
Life Doesn’t Care What Happens To You
Life is hard. Life is pain and struggle. Life is not knowing what to do and having to chin up and bear it when you’re faced with a bunch of overdue bills, mounting credit card statements, health problems, sickness and even deaths in the family.
Deciding what to do when these challenges hit you is part of life. And choosing how to act when adversity strikes is one of life’s biggest challenges.
Facing struggles is part of the point in life. Even if we trip and fail, we can still win.
Failing is part of the equation, because if you do not fail through life, you cannot win.
Life doesn’t reward those who deal with their setbacks. Life doesn’t reward those who don’t, either. Life is indiscriminate. While the deck may or may not be stacked in your favour, life doesn’t care what happens to you. Life is free from racial biases, from bigotry, from hatred and from emancipation.
Life treats everyone equally no matter their hand. It doesn’t care if you think it’s fair. It doesn’t care what you think at all. It simply is and it simply acts however it pleases, and you can learn to accept that or move out of life’s way and hide from it.
Life Isn’t Supposed to Be Easy
That much is clear and always will be, regardless of how much we desire to distort and hide the lens of the truth for all to see.
Why, then, do so many of us successfully escape the traps of life, while so many of us fall and perish to the iron will of life? If we’re built to pivot and adapt from challenges as humans naturally are, why do we fear change so much and give in to inaction so often of the time?
There’s a reason why complaining does nothing for you, except reward your mind for dodging responsibility for your hand in life and getting sympathy recognition from others who are dodging their responsibilities as well. We crave recognition from others so much, so we complain to fit into their model of how life works, and we’re rewarded for it in many ways. We wouldn’t complain about Mondays if others weren’t doing it anyway.
We complain so much because we crave that recognition from others (even from ourselves), and it’s killing our ability to thrive and be free to create our own story in the world.
Depending on how we feed off people’s energies, we necessarily complain more to others or to ourselves, because the mind loves to feel rewarded for dodging the tasks we define for ourselves.
In fact, when has our mind ever shied away from reprimanding us for doing something we’re not supposed to, yet coercing us to not do what we want to at the same time? It’s a contradictory beast and it works in strange ways, but it can be beaten with the right strategies and knowledge in mind.
In the end, it’s how we accept the defeats in our lives and how we view our own setbacks that matters. That attitude and belief is what makes us champions or losers — not by how much we like life’s challenges, but how we deal with things when those challenges come.
As Mohammad Ali famously said, “I hated every minute of training. But I told myself, don’t quit. Suffer now and live the life of a champion.”
Still, knowing that none of this is supposed to be easy, how many of us are hiding behind this excuse of “not feeling” like doing it that continues to fuel our inaction? How many of us are continuing to focus on the things which are easy, so we don’t fail at doing anything we want to do that’s difficult?
In the end, if we don’t fail, we cannot succeed; yet if we do not try, we can never fail (and always succeed at not doing what we crave to do in a strange, circular, self-defeating way).
When Did You Stop Believing in Yourself?
As Rocky tells his son, “somewhere along the line, you changed. You stopped being you. You let people stick a finger in your face and tell you you’re no good. And when things got hard, you started looking for something to blame, like a big shadow.”
Sound familiar? It certainly did to me. He goes on to tell his son that,
“You, me, or nobody is gonna hit as hard as life. But it ain’t about how hard you hit. It’s about how hard you can get hit, and keep moving forward. How much you can take, and keep moving forward. That’s how winning is done!”
That’s how we become champions. We train. We take the hits. We keep on going when everybody else would quit. We keep on going especially when our minds tell us to quit. And we do this by developing the discipline to keep on going no matter what.
Because if we ever lose sight of that, we lose sight of progress itself. And once we do that, it doesn’t take long for us to stop winning at all.
“Now if you know what you’re worth now go out and get what you’re worth. But you gotta be willing to take the hits and not pointing fingers and saying you ain’t where you want to be because of him or her or nobody. Cowards do that and that ain’t you. You’re better than that!”
Are you ready to stop complaining and live your best life? Are you ready to stretch your wings and live your truest life? Are you ready to take full responsibility for everything in your life and be free?
What Are You Going to Do About It?
Gary Vaynerchuk has a new series of content on Instagram which I think is brilliant.
He simply asks his readers to tell them their problems, and then he asks, “And?”
The point isn’t to trivialize your problems — yes, your problems may be big. They may be life-altering. They may seem insurmountable.
The point is to put the control back in your hands; the point is that, yes, these things happened to you. But what are you going to do about it?
Life doesn’t care about your problems. Life doesn’t care how hard it made your life. It simply is.
“What are you going to do about it?”
The Only Moment You Can Change is Now
When did we stop believing that the power to alter our lives was in our hands and ours alone? At what point did we change? At what point did our minds convince us it was okay to stop moving? When did we decide that it was okay to give up on our dreams and to stop moving entirely, choosing to stay stuck in our minds instead?
Did society do this to us? Or maybe it was just the people we surrounded ourselves with, how we told ourselves it was okay to do what others were doing simply because others were doing it?
Maybe it was just ourselves? Or maybe life kicked us too hard and when others put us down for our failures and our misgivings, maybe the problem was that we believed it?
The truth is, how and when you lost belief in yourself doesn’t matter. We’ve all lost confidence in ourselves at one point, and we all experience those moments when we have to take a hard look at our lives and work hard to make things right and to make things better for us and our future.
The only moment that matters is now. That’s when you start to change your life and to become the person you’re meant to become.
Look, I’m not telling you how to live your life or how to act. I only want you to see that the power to change your life at any point in time is entirely up to you. What you choose to do with that power is up to you and you alone.
Are You Willing to Move Forward?
As Rocky tells his son, “until you start believing in yourself, you ain’t gonna have a life.”
Same goes for you.
Forget about everything else. Forget about everyone else.
What matters to you? What dreams drive you?
Focus on that, and then go out and get them. Go out in the world and make them come true no matter what.
Just remember you gotta take the hits and build up an iron will if you ever want to have a chance of making it through all of this.
That’s how winning is done. That’s how champions are made. And that’s how you’ll create the life of your dreams.
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Blake Powell is a writer, dreamer, and doer. He is sharing his journey and his soul every day for 30 days in March, and he aims to inspire writers and creatives as he goes. If you’re looking to grow your audience and engagement on Medium, you can click here to join his free challenge today.
