We live in an age where everyone’s gonna tell you to do hard things and pursue challenges beyond your comfort zone. Today, I come before you to present a different perspective.
What if life was actually easy and things weren’t ever difficult?
Now think about this, when you’re in a junior class prepping for your finals - every subject and every thing seems so hard. It seems like a genuinely challenging thing that you have to overcome - right?
Yet, when you’ve gone through it, a few years later that same thing seems like the simplest most easiest thing ever - right?
Surely, you’ve grown and your brain has grown and you’re learning new things, true.
BUT WHAT IF, JUST WHAT IF…
This was all just a story you're telling yourself.
’Cycling’ was pretty hard, and so was ‘algebra’, but for some reason, I’m remember my child self ‘perceived’ the latter as ‘harder’ than the other.
The story that something is ‘hard’ because everyone says that it is so, and something else is ‘easy’ because everyone says so.
Which means that if it’s all a story, we can tell ourselves a better story. We can start by assuming that everything, yes everything in life is easy.
And that nothing is meant to be straining.
We’re humans, and we can do all that any human can do, without much ‘suffering’ or ‘stress’.
If that convinced you - yay. If that didn’t, that’s okay too. I’ll get to the point.
A lot of times when something doesn’t work out for us, we start thinking of it as ‘hard’ and ‘unachievable’, but it might just be that that perception is the biggest inhibition in us solving the problem.
Yes things take time, yes they take multiple tries, but I’m here to believe that they don’t take excruciating effort of going against some invisible stream of a metaphorical river.
It’s just about feedback loops across iterations, and continuously finding the friction and removing it.
As long as you perceive something as easy, you’ll keep trying it. You might keep failing, but if it doesn’t strain you, you’ll have an open mind towards understanding what went wrong. When you do so, you’ll identify points of friction, points in the process that aren’t working out for you.
When you do so, you’ll be able to change and design the next iteration of the ‘system’ or ‘process’, when you do so, there will come a day when things will work for you.
For example, I wanted to not go out to eat food and make something in my PG.
For breakfast, I learnt about overnight oats, prepping them is super easy and not that time consuming, instantly that started working for me and I started eating breakfast in house.
Yet, for lunch and dinner, prepping it even in bulk takes time and a bit of logistics & management, which is why I haven’t been able to get to it consistently yet.
So what? Will I start thinking the following:
“Making food at home is hard, it’s a long excruciating process, not worth doing.”
Nah, that would be stupidity, so much so that even if I said that to you, you’d reply back with:
“Nah dummy, try this, or that and see how that goes”
Right?
So the perception that this is ‘hard’ didn’t serve me at all, what I should have said is something like the following:
“Making food at home is a problem I’m yet to solve, I tried X,Y & Z and found out A, B & C about my process and what I like. Basis that, I’m gonna try to do Q next.”
Wouldn’t that be more reasonable.
Just like a bug in the code, every problem we face is either not important enough to even solve, or one that is ‘yet to be solved’.
There’s nothing that can’t be dealt with my dear, humans have a superpower, and I call it ‘self-storytelling’ - the ability to change the story you tell yourself.
Others call it attitude or mindset or perception.
Whatever you call it doesn’t matter, what matters is this:
When you change the way you look at the world, the world around you changes.
When you look at things as ‘hard’ and ‘impossible’, they become that. When you look at them as a walk in the park, you come up with ingenious solutions that your stressed self couldn’t ever ever even think of.
And most often than not, these solutions would be to design the ‘system’ or your surroundings in a way that supports whatever goals you have.
Almost like having the universe assist you in whatever you’re trying to do.
Coz as they say - When you help yourself, god (the universe) helps you!
So yeah, go now, help yourself!
bbyee love nmn.