Have a go at making sense of these weird real-life contradictions:
- I recently completed a half marathon. I don’t really like running. I find it boring and it gives me shin splints.
- My kids have just left or are about to leave home. Parenting, particularly in the early days, was exhausting. My kids didn’t come with a user manual and I often got frustrated at my parental cack-handedness.
- I run a training company that requires me to work 80 hours a week. I travel a lot. I don’t like working such long hours and I have grown to dislike motorways and budget hotel chains, particularly Travelodges.
- I write books that have such tight deadlines that I sometimes have to stay up until 2am to finish chapters. I don’t like staying up past 10pm. It’s a chore.
All of these four activities have ingredients that I find exceedingly unpleasant. They all require me to set my personal bar ridiculously high to the point that I will sometimes fail. Yet, they are some of the most meaningful moments and activities of my life. They involve pain, effort, struggle, even anger and despair, yet once completed, I look back and get misty-eyed about them.
Why?
Because it’s these sorts of activities that give me purpose. I’m not going to ‘do a Maslow’ on you, but it’s the perpetual pursuit of fulfilling our ideal selves which grants us happiness, regardless of superficial pleasures or pain, regardless of positive or negative emotions. The end results don’t define our ideal selves. It’s not finishing the half marathon that makes me happy, it’s achieving a difficult long-term goal. It’s not the business profits that makes me happy, it’s the process of overcoming all odds with people I care about. It’s not having awesome kids that makes me happy, but knowing that I gave myself up to the growth of another human being that is special. And, to be fair, my wife mucked in as and when.
Big, important sentence alert! The effort of trying to be happy runs the serious risk of making you unhappy. Because to try to be happy implies that you are not already inhabiting your ideal self, you are not aligned with the qualities of who you wish to be. After all, if you were acting out your ideal self, then you wouldn’t feel the need to try to be happy.
A more interesting question, a question that perhaps you’ve never considered before, is what pain do you want in your life? What are you willing to struggle for? Everybody wants to have great qualifications, an amazing job and financial independence but not everyone wants to suffer through 60-hour work weeks, long commutes, two evenings a week at night school or to remain positive while inhabiting the blasé confines of an infinite corporate hell. People want to be rich without the risk, fit without hurting and famous without the talent.
Bottom line? There is significant mental effort in being your best self. It’s a commitment to a way of thinking that you have to do every day for the rest of your life. You never ‘arrive’ at the perfect sculpted mind and, unfortunately, if you have a month off, the bad habits will grow back.
Here’s the truth. Being a positive, effervescent, inspired human being is hard work. But it’s not half as exhausting as being miserable.