It’s sad because it’s one of the greatest gifts of them all.
“Friction is the differentiator.
What do you do when you’re faced with it? Fold? Most do.
What if you leaned in, instead? What if you overcome the natural desire to stop the moment things became ‘hard’?
You’d win.
For this reason, the friction is actually the gift.”
-Ray Zingler on Threads
For a long-time I tried to operate my life in “ideal”.
I tried to micromanage everything in my life and adjust every little detail on each given day.
I would pay meticulously close attention to how I slept, how I was feeling, how my nutrition was, my stress levels, my future potential stress levels and so on and so fourth.
I would do this because I was trying my best to auto-regulate myself on a daily basis. I was trying to make as close to perfect choices for each day that I could to make myself as efficient as possible. I was shooting for optimal all the time.
And while I learned a ton about myself doing this, I learned that it was going to be best to upgrade my operations goals to “realistic”.
You might be thinking, how is “realistic” an upgrade from “ideal”.
It’s an upgrade because when you try to live in a glass house you’re hyper-consumed on every little detail being perfect because you know the (perceived) consequences if they are not.
I learned that the stress I was focused on avoiding, was being compounded by my desires to avoid it.
I learned that aiming so hard at sleeping my full 8 hours, eating exactly the way I needed to eat, and avoiding the stress I desired to avoid was sheltering me from acting the way I needed to act in order to get to where I needed to go.
I was avoiding what I know I wanted and needed to do because I was in this supposed “sub-optimal” state, preventing me from acting on my ideal plan.
Then one day, I asked myself, “I know I’m not feeling perfect, I know I have a lot on my plate, but what if my family’s life depended on me acting the way I needed to act, despite not being in the ideal state to do so?”
I’d do it, right? And I did.
I’ve learned that these friction points that most face (which are much smaller than most assume) are gifts.
If you do what you know you need to do, despite friction standing in your way, you will become a far more resilient person by default.
Resilient people win.
Don’t shelter yourself from friction. Lean into the sh*t. It’s a gift.
