Stop Making Everything a Struggle

I have a friend who seems to coast through challenge after challenge effortlessly. He doesn’t run through walls, as much as those walls simply crumble in his presence.

I’ve always been in awe of that and decided to finally ask him, “What is your secret to pushing ahead, no matter what?”

“Secret? What secret? There’s no such thing.”

Yes, so many of us are obsessed with secret ways to “hack” this and “optimize” that. To figure out how to cheat life, get a step ahead, tap into some magical source of unending motivation, become better, faster, more perfect versions of ourselves.

So I continued… “Alright, no secrets then. How do you climb all these mountains? I get halfway up, already exhausted, realize I how far I still have to go, and it’s crushing. I continue to slog up the mountain, sometimes driven by nothing more than fear of failure or the shame of quitting, but I’m miserable the whole way. I climb, and I climb, and sometimes I overcome and reach the top, only to look into the distance and find the next even higher mountain to climb. The struggle seems to never to end. There is always another mountain waiting for me.”

“You used the word mountain over and over. You’re viewing everything as a struggle! Everything is something you are working against, trying to fight, trying to overcome. That word overcome implies hardship and suffering right from the very beginning. You’re priming yourself every time for the same miserable experience. There are no mountains. You create them.”

For days after that conversation, every time I felt that little thought float up, “This is going to be horrible, but I’m a fighter. Let’s do this!” I heard his words, “There are no mountains, Seth.”

What my friend was saying is that when you view the world through an antagonistic lens, everything becomes a mountain to climb. Something that you have to persevere and suffer for. It’s baked in from step one, polluting your projects and goals before they have even had a chance to thrive.

If you prime yourself for suffering, you will indeed suffer. As soon as you are aware of that, you can take back control of your perception of the world around you, you can take back control over your attitude, and begin to reshape everything in a much more positive way.