If You Want a Boring Life Never Challenge Yourself
Or Live Life As You Should
You have to challenge yourself. Staying in comfort is not going to improve anything in your life. Learning is hard. Change is difficult. But not as painful as staying in comfort for too long.
You might learn some by staying where you are. If you do learn anything you’ll learn it slowly. It’s going to be so slow that one of two things will happen:
1. You’ll never reach your goal and you’ll be somehow okay with that.
2. You’ll realize that you gave up and are now not living the life you want.
Lesson 6 — You’ve Never Gotten Better When Things Were Easy.
Writing this post is difficult. I could skip this lesson of Dan Martell’s and move on to something “easier” to write about. Nope. There has to be a greater story here. Also skipping would be cheating on my goal of writing about all 45 of his lessons he shared in his video: I’m 45. If you’re in your 20s or 30s, watch this. (For the previous lessons: 45 Lessons)
Dan Martell is a successful entrepreneur. He is now dedicated to teaching others so they can achieve their dreams just as he has. If they are willing to put in the work. In this video, he shares and briefly explains 45 lessons he found on his way to the success he has today.
Why? Why am I going to go through every single one of the 45 lessons Dan shares? So I can learn and pass on what I have learned to you.
You have to say yes so you can learn what works for you and doesn’t work. You have to say yes so you can challenge yourself.
You Survived Your Impossibles
Have you ever gone skiing down a route you thought was beyond your ability? Or did a hiked a difficult route you thought you would not be able finish? Or have you passed the course you thought there was no way you’d pass?
Life is full of “I Survived!” moments. Life if full of “I did it!” moments. Those moments are the times when you focused. When you dug deep to keep going. When you faced your fears and rose to the challenge. You might of been terrified the whole time and you still survived.
After you went down that ski slope and looked back did you wonder why you were afraid to go down it because at the bottom it never looks as steep.
It is the same for all challenges in our lives. As Dan explains, it is on the backend of challenging yourself that you realize what you learned and you are capable of more.
Increasing the Reps.
Anyone who has ever studied a new language or music would know that a major part of learning is repetition. Where you spend a lot of time practicing the same line over and over.
At the same time of repeating that same line, a bit more is added. Eventually you can play the whole song seamlessly.
Increasing your reps helps you to build. You can learn one bit at time and keep layering things more challenges on. At regular intervals you step backwards to increase your mastery of a previous part. Over time your baseline changes.
Maybe at first you could only do 5 proper pushups in a row. Now your basic starting point is twenty. How did you get to there? The answer is simple. You got there by the consistent addition of more to make it harder and commitment to regularly do pushups.
Another not so common example of increasing the reps is completing a fourth year capstone project in university. I remember sitting on campus in my first year thinking I would never be able to do that fourth year project. Everything I learned in the 3-years leading up to it built me up to where I could handle it.
What about studying for the LSAT or MCAT? At first that test is impossible. With consistent studying and practice it is possible to pass. But it is not just learning endurance to answer as many questions as possible fast. It is learning the question types and building up your abilities to quickly recognize them and know the strategy for answering them.
If you want to learn something. Then commit to learn at a pace that will move your baseline. Your baseline is not time or abilities separately it is training them both in tandem. It will be hard. That is required.
Doing Difficult Things Gives You Stories to Share
Bilbo Baggins in The Hobbit (by JRR Tolkien) would not have a story to share if he had stayed at home in the Shire with everything and everyone he knew and understood. A place where rarely anything out of the ordinary ever happened.
People love to share stories of their lives. They share stories from vacations, from their childhood, and what happened on the weekend.
How interesting to you is a story of someone who sat a home and binged watched movies all weekend? It isn’t.
The stories that entertain are the ones where people accomplished something.
Even the story your solving your way through right now is the story someone else needs to hear. So they too know it is possible to achieve anything.
Doing difficult things will give you lessons and stories to tell others. Whether it is to entertain, teach or both. Stories are from experience.
Do Difficult Things in The Easy Times
“A healthy man wants a thousand things,
a sick man only wants one.” ~Confucius
Athletes, musicians, doctors, pilots, nurses, first responders, armed forces members train a lot.
They train almost constantly. When it is time to perform they are so well prepared they don’t have to think. Their bodies and minds know how to process information so they can react without hesitation.
Training hard in the easy times might sound redundant. It isn’t. This is the time to learn so when the time comes to put the training to work you know you are capable.
When things are easy it is tempting to stay complacent with life. You don’t think you need to spend time building your skill set.
But what would you do if you knew there was a promotion opportunity coming in 6-months. Would you not take advantage to work on your skills so you can be strong candidate for it? You would.
What would you do if you knew that 6-months from know you’d get a diagnosis that you could have prevented if you had made healthy lifestyle changes today?
Yet in life we don’t always know what is going to happen in six months from now let alone the next 24-hours. If you want to keep moving forward in life, challenge yourself in the easy times. So when the opportunity comes you are prepared.
Never Challenge Yourself If You Want a Boring Life
If you want a boring life, never challenge yourself. Never do anything new. Never redefine your boundaries.
Never learn new skills that will open heavier doors. Never try for something new. Never apply for a new job in a different industry when you could build on your skills and gain more.
If you want an exciting life. Challenge yourself. Learn new skills. Build up your ability so you can do the 100-pushups. Teach yourself. Don’t wait for someone else suggest you should learn a new skill.
Achieving hard things means you get to be proud of yourself. You also get to have stories to share so others will be inspired. Your experiences will give you what you need to help those behind you.
It’s easy to not work when life is easy. Easy never made a success story.
To each there comes in their lifetime a special moment when they are figuratively tapped on the shoulder and offered the chance to do a very special thing, unique to them and fitted to their talents. What a tragedy if that moment finds them unprepared or unqualified for that which could have been their finest hour.
~ Sir Winston Churchill
Always be challenging yourself. As Sir Winston Churchill once pointed out, you could be the perfect person for something if you are prepared and qualified. Learn in the easy times. So you can answer the call when the opportunity knocks.
You’ve never gotten better when things were easy.
Challenge yourself to skill up.
By the way, even though I qualify for payments on my stories I have decided to stop. I want to help those who are like me. Who are on the starting line and need someone to show them it is possible. I want them to have access to stories that can inspire them to keep going. If you are able and wish to support me, you can do so through buymeacoffee.com/cliffviewlife. Thank you. (Yes, I drink coffee!)
