Do the Hard Work, Especially When You Don't Feel Like It

You’re not getting a happy retirement.

If you behave as if you're retired NOW, you're gonna be racing to put out fires LATER.

“What the hell are you talking about, Kevin?”

Put simply:

If you want a pleasant life later, you need to work on clearing the obstacles in your life now so that you can avoid the buildup of your laziness.

Now, I'm not one of those weirdos who thinks you should be productive 24/7, work weekends, and be extremely busy until you're dead. 

Far from it.

However, you need to do uncomfortable things to ultimately get what you want.

Whether it's fitness, mental clarity, acquiring knowledge, or even a vinyl collection, there are things that you need to suffer through before you can get those rewards.

With fitness (in this case, nutrition), eating those extra foods you like would be great, but those extra calories will hinder your progress. You'll need to forego that short-term pleasure for long-term rewards. Delayed gratification is key to getting those important rewards.

Following that fitness (nutrition) example, what could you do to make those short-term sacrifices less painful? Make it so that there's nothing to sacrifice. 

One way to do this is by creating a system to help you out. Setting up systems can make the hard work easier to do, as discipline beats motivation.

If you intentionally avoid having certain hard-to-stop-eating foods in your home, you won't need to do all this extra mental work to not eat them. They won't be there to be eaten!

Let's say you really want to learn something that's in a long book, but reading a lot is challenging and painful for you (this is a whole separate problem, by the way). What can you do? Create a system.

Set that book or e-reader next to your bed. Every night, it'll be extremely to read in bed since you made it very easy for yourself. 

Then, even if that habit is challenging, you'll at least make progress with it very often  because you've made the process so easy. Whether it takes a year or longer, it doesn't matter. Your system has made it so that you cannot fail, as long as you keep taking advantage of what you've set up.

The issue is that it still kinda sucks. Doing hard things is how you make your life better, but it’s uncomfortable in the moment.

Due to this, many say things like:

• It's hard.

• I'll do it later.

• I don't feel like it.

• It won't work, so why bother?

Here's why you should bother:

• You'll achieve more of your goals.

• Your life will feel better overall going forward.

• Your baseline happiness will be higher, and you will be more satisfied.

I've run through this sequence many times:

• Yes, losing weight required work and sacrifice.

• So did switching gears to IT.

• So did starting a business.

• So will entrepreneurship.

If you don't plant the painful seeds now, you'll have nothing to reap later.

Plant these:

1. Get on a program, and stick to it religiously.

2. Think about the endgame so that you see the plan to completion.

3. Make it easy for yourself by setting up your future "sessions" ahead of time.

Your future self is gonna be really happy because of you.