Summary

Life is indeed hard, and it is correctly designed to be that way. As soon as we get that, life becomes dramatically more manageable. And we then have a chance to lead our best lives.

Those who cry foul, teaching all who will listen that if life is hard that means that something must be unfair, are doing all of us and our society a huge disservice.

For the next 10 minutes, we will unpack why life being hard is exactly the way it should be.

Transcript

Life is indeed hard, and it is correctly designed to be that way. As soon as we get that, life becomes dramatically more manageable. And we then have a chance to lead our best lives.

Those who cry foul, teaching all who will listen that if life is hard that means that something must be unfair, are doing all of us and our society a huge disservice.

For the next 10 minutes, we will unpack why life being hard is exactly the way it should be.

Let’s start with an observation: We all learn more from the hard times than we do from the easy times. I don’t know anyone for whom that is not true. Do you? And with that hard times learning, we can grow and strengthen ourselves to lead stronger, happier and better lives. Yes, I did say “happier.” There is no conflict between hard and happy, is there?

We all know that to make a muscle stronger, we must work it, and the harder we work it, the stronger it becomes. Our minds are like muscles; we much work them to make them stronger, and the harder we work them, the stronger they become.

It is only when we push ourselves, mentally and/or physically, that we improve, get stronger, and further prepare ourselves for leading our best lives. The corollary is also true: When we don’t challenge ourselves, nothing gets better. If fact, things get worse. These physical and mental muscles will atrophy. And we get a touch lazy in the process.

Life is bad enough when we don’t challenge ourselves, when we don’t take responsibility for getting through the hard times. We are hurting ourselves and those around us, but that is all. It is far worse when powerful voices in leadership tell us that if things are hard, that not only is it proof that things are unfair, but that someone else is responsible for getting us through the hard bits. Why is it their responsibility? Because they are the ones who made it hard for us in the first place. That’s the reason that identity politics were dreamed up and are so often in the news. The idea is to relieve certain groups, those victimized by other groups, of responsibility while placing the blame and the responsibility on other groups. This is called intersectionality. I call it identity group wars.

Remember the part about how we learn much more from our hard times than we do from the easy ones? The only thing that we can learn from someone else easing our hard times by being forced to provide money, housing or more, is that voting for things is a lot easier than working for them. But if we do that, we have been robbed of the learning, the joy, of having done it for ourselves. And we have also been robbed of the perhaps even deeper learning that comes from having tried and failed. Success comes more from previous failures than from previous successes.

Imagine that we, you and I, are at an important high school football game, where we are closely connected to one team, and are rooting loudly for them. Mid-way through the third quarter, our star running back is brought down by and very hard hit from a much bigger opposing player, and is knocked out of the game. It was a clean tackle, and he will be back for the next game, but he is out for the rest of today. Now imagine that the refs stop the game, announcing that is was unfair that our player was put of the game by a much bigger player. Because of that unfairness,