There’s a post I saw this week that really struck me and it goes like this:

“Strangely, life gets harder when you try to make it easy.

Exercising might be hard, but never moving makes life harder.

Uncomfortable conversations are hard, but avoiding every conflict is harder.

Mastering your craft is hard, but not having no skills is harder.

Easy has a cost.”

For some reason, I couldn’t help but think about all of the times in my life when I opted for the easier way out, the path that avoids conflict, challenge, and hardship while only gearing myself to comfort and easy times.

As a high-school student, I cheated my entire way to get by, and that easiness brought me the hard reality that no university had offered me admission even though I applied to a lot of places. The easy path didn’t help me prepare for that moment when it counted.

After college, I only applied to jobs that felt easy and doable. Oftentimes, I’d apply for the type of positions that didn’t require team collaboration or any of that sort. I was looking for a quiet bookkeeping job so everyone can leave me alone at work. That easy path brought me the difficulty of building and engaging my own team since I had no idea how to handle that in a professional setting. Isolating yourself is easy, but never understanding how to connect with people is hard.

I can give many more examples of how the easy path came back to bite me but the point isn’t about me, it’s about understanding that doing nothing and striving for the easy way out has a cost that can actually destroy your life.

Sleeping in is easy, but not waking up to maximize our current energy will be something we’re all going to regret when we’re too old to do anything. That kind of regret must be a hard one to swallow.

Today or perhaps this weekend when you have some time, think about what “easy” has cost you so far in life. Where in life did you decide to take the easy way only to find out it made things much harder for you later on?

We oftentimes only look at the effort of hard work but never the cost of easy work and how that can detriment you over time almost like a slow death sentence you’re serving to yourself.

If easy was the enemy of our past, then hard and difficulty shall be our companions moving forward because we know that only by going through the difficulty will we be able to come out stronger and perhaps even come out happier towards an easier life. Think about it…..

JIA & the WORK Team (6AM & Synthetik Minds)