Habits - Confront harsh challenges and difficult things to transform yourself

Sit with a difficult question, difficult topic, difficult task, difficult exercise, difficult video

These are the things that propel you forward.

Bargaining with Pain and Sacrifice

Pain and Sacrifice can be bargained with. They take certain things from us, but they can also give back. It just depends on which pain, which sacrifice we choose to embrace.

Pick your sacrifice. What will you sacrifice?

by Jordan Peterson

1. Why we need to keep making changes in life to make things better?
2. If we don’t pay attention, things will fall apart around us in ways that we cannot imagine.
3. We cannot say, things are not perfect and I am having a rough time.
   1. You cannot just admit to your suffering and give up on life.
4. Your suffering should be treated as evidence that you are not doing something quite right yet.
5. It should be treated as evidence that you are wrong.
6. There is something important that you are doing that is wrong.
7. This understanding is harsh.
8. But good things can come from this understanding.
9. If life is not how it should be, then you have a primary responsibily to do something about it. And the place to start looking is, look to your own errors and fix them.
   1. That is a safe bet because you are probably doing something that you wouldn’t have to be doing - that if you fix things, it would make things better.
   2. It is time to let go and to sacrifice who you are for who you could become.

Not everyone who is suffering is doing something wrong. e.g. This does not apply to people who get diagnosed with medical conditions. People do not do anything to deserve such a fate. It is not a moral failing.

Push yourself. Unlock your potential.

by Jordan Peterson

This is a powerful secret to unlocking your potential

First, You need goals and vision. Stop wasting your Life.

Identify something that you are avoiding, that you need to do but you are not doing it, because you are afraid. Voluntarily confront it. Break it down into smaller and smaller pieces. The pieces should be small enough that you will do it. Then, put the next piece on and the next piece on.

What happens if you push yourself to do difficult things?

You don’t get less afraid - you get braver.

Why?

1. You do something new and thats informative.
   1. There is information in the action and you can incorporate that information and turn it into a skill and turn it into a transformation of your perceptions.
   2. So there is more to you because you tried something new.
2. If you put yourself in a new situation,
   1. genes code for new proteins and new neural structures and new nervous system structures.
   2. Similar to what happens when you work out and your muscles are responding to the load.
   3. Your nervous system does that too.
   4. There is biological evidence to support this.
   5. There is a lot of potential you locked in your genetic code. And if you put yourself in a new situation, then the situational stress produced by that particular situation unlocks those genes and builds new parts of you. Who knows how much there is locked inside of you.

Lets assume that it scales as you take on heavier and heavier loads. You get more and more informed because you are doing more and more difficult things. More and more of you gets unlocked.

What would that imply?

If you got to the point where you look at the darkest things, the deepest abyss, the harshest things, the most brutal parts of the suffering of the world, and the malevelance of people and society, if you could look at that straight and directly, that would turn you on maximally.

Push yourself and it will turn you into who you could be.

You are the potential composite of all the ancestral wisdom that is locked inside of you biologically.

But that is not going to come out at all unless you stress yourself - unless you challenge yourself.

The bigger the challenge you take on, the more that is going to turn on.

As you take on broader and broader range of challenges, and you push yourself harder, more and more of what you could be turns on. It is equivalent to transforming yourself into the ancestral father. You are the consequence of all the living beings that came before you.

Push yourself and it will turn you into who you could be.

Inaction is a slow death

It is hard to take action. It is painful. Washing the dishes is not fun. Meditation can be tedious. Waking up early is hard.

The discomfort we feel in the face of action often paralyzes us from doing anything at all. So we don’t feel like doing those tasks. Instead, we seek alternatives. We get lost in the rabbit holes of Youtube, pinterest,.. letting clickbait provide comfort for us - while our lives slip into disarray.

We resign to inaction as the solution to avoid the pain of action, subconsciously aware of the fact that our stagnation breeds destruction.

By avoiding the pain of action, we allow something worse to fester: the horror of watching opportunities pass us by, our relationships grow distant, our bills stack up, our families grow old; Pain is all around us. It is as much a part of life as death itself. No matter how impoverished or affluent your upbringing, pain is inescapable. It will follow you wherever you go. And this sobering reality leads many into nihilism and despair.

But not everyone knows that there is another way to look at things.

Pain can be bargained with. It takes from us, but it can also give back. It just depends on which pain we choose to embrace.

There are two types of pain. The pain of action and the pain of inaction. The pain of action is blunt, in your face, and forces you to grow. For every hour we suffer through sharpening our skills, being proactive, and restoring order, we don’t reduce the amount of pain we face, but rather we take it on the chin, we sign up for it up front. And because of this voluntary acceptance day after day, we gain the strength to shoulder it. By embracing pain instead of running from it, we are simultaneously transformed by it. We become someone we are proud of, someone that others can depend upon, which in turn gives meaning to the pain.

And it is this feeling of growth and progress that helps us feel useful to ourselves, useful to others, which gives the suffering a purpose.

The pain of inaction, however, is the pain that eats away at you, a poison. It is slow-burning, draining your will and decaying your soul. By descending into apathy, things disintegrate. Entropy. By letting ourselves go, we lose self-respect. Negligence. By vegging out on the couch for days on end, things fall into disorder.

Inaction is the holiday of fools who trade temporary discomfort for long-term existential suffering.

So which pain will we choose? Action is a life-giving breath. Inaction is a slow death.

Confront the difficult things you’ve been putting off

Learn to Sit with a difficult question

Two of our most obvious flaws are being

1. seduced by busyness, and
2. avoiding conflict;

And of course, one feeds the other.

Start your days by writing out your answers to two questions.

1. First, What would meaningful progress look like today? That word meaningful should make you allows very little wriggle room in thinking that just crossing off tasks is a good use of your time.
2. Second, What am I pretending not to know? That question should make you nervous every time. It should force you to confess to not only what might not be working, but your role in what might not be working. It should spur you on to be more courageous than you might otherwise be.

Book recommendations

1. The Wall Street Journal bestseller The Coaching Habit
2. The Advice Trap, Michael Bungay Stanier

Tags

1. Embrace Stretch Goals
2. Confront the brutal facts - Yet never lose faith