ADVICE
Choose the Hard Path and Reap Rewards In the Future
An easy path leads to a hard life! Think of the long-term consequences, not how you feel today. Challenge yourself and beat 90% of all people. (Letters to my daughter)
Dear daughter,
Today, I wanted to talk to you about deliberately challenging yourself and, when given a choice, opting for the hard path. A simple fact of life, my dear one, is that we are often presented with two options:
- The path of least resistance, the easy way, or
- The harder path, one with more challenges but greater reward.
People are generally lazy by nature.
I’m no exception. We don’t like working out, eating right, learning new things, taking the long view, and slowly working toward a worthy goal. We prefer the quick fix, instant gratification, and indulging in what feels good at the moment. It’s only natural.
However, in life, work, health, and relationships, we end up paying a price for choosing the easy way.
Nothing worthwhile is ever easy
If we give in to our laziness and don’t care for our bodies, we will pay a hefty price somewhere down the line. When we give in to temptations to eat everything we desire and let our weight get out of hand, we will subject our bodies to weakness, sickness, and an early grave.
Maintaining weight, strength, and conditioning is incomparably easier than losing weight once it’s gotten out of hand and rebuilding our bodies. The first is choosing the hard path, and the second is choosing the easy path.
In life, choosing the easy path ends up causing us to have a hard life.
The simplest analogy is eating vs. working out. When we eat, we consume calories. Ignoring the rest, eating 1,000 calories is a “piece of cake.” Figuratively and literally in this case. Losing 1,000 calories, on the other hand, takes hours and hours of hard workout!
It’s much wiser to stay strong and refrain from eating those additional 1,000 calories than it is to try to sweat them out eventually.
Furthermore, if we continue on this “easy” path of emotional eating and don’t keep an eye on our weight, we will end up with a fat, heavy, slow, weak, and sickly body. Our lives will be filled with pain, regret, and shame.
Relationships done right aren’t easy in the beginning.
In relationships, it’s easy just to have fun and ignore any and all potential problems that are beginning to emerge between two people. It’s comfortable to avoid tough talks, expose ourselves to emotional pain, and openly discuss our thoughts with our partners. It’s easy to dismiss setting boundaries and correcting unwanted behavior.
Ignoring small problems, though, leads to bigger problems later on.
It’s much wiser to talk things through when they present themselves head-on than trying to resolve our differences when we are full of resentment, anger, or sadness years later.
It’s easier to give your children everything they want and cave into their demands, even though you know you shouldn’t. It keeps them happy and quiet and requires less effort in parenting. But it teaches our kids the wrong lessons, and we all pay the price, either with impossible-to-handle behavior or severe consequences down the line.
I always try to choose the right — more challenging path with you, dear girl. To the best of my abilities and knowledge, of course. I do the difficult things not because I like to make life harder for us all but because you deserve it! You may hate me for it today, but you’ll thank me in a couple of decades. I’m okay with that.
Doing the right thing is anything but easy.
When we choose to do the right thing over the easy and perhaps more sociably acceptable or profitable thing, resisting peer pressure perhaps, we will suffer unpleasant consequences in the short term. But in the long run, we will have built a circle of good people who love and accept us and share our values. We may lose some opportunities to make money now, but we will sleep like babies knowing we did the right thing. We never harmed anyone, cheated, or lied. We stood by our values. We kept our integrity!
It’s easy to give into passion, especially far away from prying eyes.
You simply do what you want in the moment, disregarding all consequences. You give in to passion and lust. But repairing broken relationships, regaining trust, seeing the pain in your lover’s eyes, and living with yourself once you’ve lost all integrity is not. Especially if you have kids. The consequences of a few hours of fun can be decades of pain for all involved!
Always choose the hard path and do the right thing!
I know you’re smart enough to know what that is. I also know you don’t feel like doing the right thing and taking the more challenging path. None of us do. But I promise you, the rewards of a disciplined, intentional, and honorable life are well worth it.
How do you make choosing the hard path effortless?
With consistency and discipline. The more times you make the right choice, the easier it gets. Your discipline in one area of life will flow into another. This is why it’s paramount to be disciplined and make the right choices consistently. You get used to taking the hard path, and when you see the results, you begin to adopt this sort of philosophy and habit.
The more you do something, the easier it gets. The more often you make the right decision, the easier it gets to make the right choices despite momentary discomfort or pain.
The price you pay now is almost always smaller than what you will pay later. Choose well, baby girl, for you will pay the price either way.
Love, Dad
I write weekly letters to my daughter and to all the daughters of the world. If this is the only content you’re here for, you can choose to subscribe and only receive these letters, or on Medium, you can follow the publication Letters to My Dear Daughter. But you’ll be missing out. :)
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