Lessons/Reflections from my 20’s [Day 15]

Understanding hard work and using fear effectively.

Have you ever woken up very early in the morning and uninvitedly your mind starts rushing through the things that you have to do and appraises what you’re currently doing with a very realistic and sceptical perspective?

I know you have, because you’re alive.

This happens to everyone from time to time.

I want to talk about the uses of fear and how it relates to hard work.

This experience is a common and useful experience. Sometimes we need to drop the positivity and appraise life in a very cool and sombre way. Otherwise we can get trapped in optimism and paper over the cracks and things fall apart sooner or later due to not being on firm foundations.

These morning trysts with your mind can be terrifying in your early 20’s (and any other time of life depending on much you have your sh*t together) because you see the gap between who you are currently and who you have to be.

When the morning ticks on the flow of life intervenes and you don’t have to think about the fears anymore, they float there like the seaweed when the tide comes in, waiting for the tide to go out again to spread their pungent, awakening aromas.

You might be thinking right now, I thought this was going to be about hard work?

Bear with me.

When you can listen to this sober voice in the morning without completely freaking out, you can get the best guide in your life for what you have to do next. Listen intently to this voice, this voice is literally the best and clearest version of your thinking and when you can win this voices approval in life, you are doing pretty damn well.

Now onto hard work.

This is a topic with, frankly, so much rubbish around it!

I know, because I swallowed every rubbish theory on it, until I actually did hard work.

Let’s say what it’s not first.

It’s not doing 16-hour days.

It’s not showing up.

It’s not working so hard that you give yourself terrible health.

Now we have what it’s not I can tell you what it is.

The meaning of hard work is to overcome yourself and to do things beyond what you like and dislike but that which is beneficial for you in the long term.

This is something I’ve never heard any of the guru’s talk about in their flaunted Facebook/Instagram pictures with them sitting on a rented Lamborghini.

Now doing hard work is actually, you guessed it, really hard work. The reptilian part of brain, the limbic system, fights against doing it tooth and nail.

It’s really a formidable adversary and it takes a lot of consistently applied thinking to overcome it and it’s nonsense, and this is hard work.

The sitting down to do things that you don’t want to do in order to be the person that you want to be.

Often that stuff is boring, repetitive, humble work that has no immediate pay off. So, you’re really really not doing it for the reptilian brain. It just wants to conserve energy but you’re engaging it to do work without the fruit of action nearby.

That’s hard work.

Overcoming your mind is hard work.

Doing tedious, repetitive work is hard work.

Covering all your bases and becoming adept at the basics is hard work.

The mind hates all of these things and would rather race onwards and think about something that happened in the past.

Finally, harness your fears to figure out which direction you can work hard in and go overcome yourself.

I promise you it’s worth it in order to achieve something unique and how wonderful it is to be someone you’re proud of and make a difference with your life.