It's Supposed To Be Challenging

If you’ve ever struggled through life more than you would’ve liked, or feel like life has beat you down more times than you’d like to admit, perhaps this perspective shift will inspire you to push forward.

What if life isn’t meant to be easy? As much as our evolutionary nature prefers comfort, what if all of life’s challenges were serving us in maximizing our human experience?

This idea is featured as the second tenet of Brian Johnson and Heroic’s philosophy about antifragility. Essentially, rather than being fragile and susceptible to breaking, or resilient and more resistant to breaking, when something is antifragile it becomes strengthened with strain. Being antifragile means that the only way we become our strongest is by experiencing challenges, and that hardship is an ingredient to becoming all that we can be.

So the perspective shift is - Rather than being avoidant of the hard things that have come and are coming our way, instead we can use them as the fuel that catalyzes us in accessing our greatest potential.

Alex Hormozi says it in a more relatable way. He says “the bigger the dragon, the bigger the hero”. This suggests that our greatness is quantified by the size of the challenge we overcome. A person who overcomes minor hardship is nowhere near as impressive as the person who hit rock bottom and beat all odds to achieve the remarkable.

There’s even a thread of this in Buddhism. A foundational phrase of Buddhism is “life is suffering”, and while the real essence of this thought is more complicated than a 3-word expression, it suggests that it is human nature to experience constant dissatisfaction and discomfort.

If life is hard, good! It’s supposed to be. That doesn’t mean that you’re doing anything wrong… It just means that you’re alive. And if the difficulty of life is something that is outside of your control, then it’s on you to accept that condition and make the most of it however you can.

How? It starts with this perspective. It’s supposed to be challenging. Now step up to the challenge and give it all you’ve got!