Why Your Life Should Be Easy
Even though everyone loves a martyr.
If you know me at all by now you know I’m big on gratitude.
But, as a result I struggle with imposter syndrome about how I view my ability to help people.
I launched the newsletter with 2 purposes.
Share my curiosity with others.
Improve their lives in some small way.
Here’s where the imposter syndrome comes in. Who am I to give people advice? Wisdom is a consequence of learning from hardship and failure, two things I don’t have much of, Thankfully.
I view whatever wisdom I’ve acquired as second-order lessons from people who have gone through hardship instead of first-order lessons from personal experience.
Why am I qualified to speak on behalf of others’ lessons?
I brought this up on a podcast I recorded last week with Ed Latimore and he gave me a fantastic reframe that I wanted to share with you.
“People glorify the struggle.”
In a world where all we see is what we observe online, there is zero benefit in saying you arrived at the place you did without any struggle.
All that does is portray to outsiders that you either got lucky, or that they should be entitled to the same success without struggle. And, when they don't see that success they become resentful and unfollow the personality who espoused that view.
This also births a lot of the oppressor/oppressed narrative in popular culture right now.
Thus, people glorify the struggle.
Ed argues that there is one huge flaw in this line of reasoning: Survivorship Bias.
By definition, you’ll never hear from the people who struggle and never succeed. If the end goal is success (however you would like to define it for yourself) it’s actually beneficial to struggle the least amount possible. The more extended the timeframe of struggle, the higher your chances of failure through exhaustion or random bad luck.
For every person like Ed who became successful and grew up in the projects, there are 100 or 1000 who didn’t. In their cases, the struggle was no benefit to them at all.
This conversation unintentionally reinforced my view on gratitude and made me realize again how exceedingly lucky I am in my worldly position.
The takeaway is this:
Take ALL your successes at face value regardless of how much struggle was behind each one.
Aim to minimize struggle. Some is inevitable, extra is foolish and hurts your chances of success.
Recognize the role of dumb luck in the hand you were dealt. Play accordingly.
I’ll leave you with this quote:
“It's said that a wise person learns from his mistakes. A wiser one learns from others' mistakes. But the wisest person of all learns from others' successes.” - John C. Maxwell