Do Something Hard in 2010
When was the last time you did something hard?
I don’t mean “hard” as in trying to drive to work in the snow. I mean something really hard, like earning a college degree or starting a successful side business or losing 20 pounds.
If you’re familiar with the LDS faith you are probably aware that many young LDS men serve a two-year mission when they are about 19 years old; they are certainly expected to.
I teach a Sunday School class comprised of high-school-age youth, and not long ago as I was preparing the lesson I could see that this topic was going to come up. I thought about my own mission, which I served in southern Spain from 1991 to 1993. I was preparing to tell them something I’d found to be true about my own mission, which was that although it was very hard to do, I’ve never regretted having done it for an instant. I know that same statement holds true for pretty much every person I know who’s done it. And I also have many friends who did not go, and the general consensus among them is regret — regret for not having done it.
I thought about how true that is about many things in life. I thought about some other hard things I’ve done, like graduating from college, proposing and shipping a controversial product, or raising a family. It isn’t just that you are ultimately glad that you did those hard things. When you look back on your life, you realize that a lot of the things that define your life, a lot of those things you are most proud of, were difficult things that you probably didn’t really want to do at the time.
Isn’t it odd how much we resist doing those hard things, even when we know how meaningful those experiences will be later? I’ve never heard of a person who said, “Yeah, instead of going to college I just wasted five years of my life playing video games all day long in my parent’s basement, and boy am I glad I made that choice.”
This has been a humbling but important realization for me going into 2010. There are a number of really important, hard things that I need to get started on right now. I took the opportunity to look ahead and imagine myself five or ten years from now. I imagined looking back at 2010 as if I had done those hard things. I thought about how relieved and pleased I’d be that I had chosen to do those hard things back then, and I could imagine how much better my life would be after having done these hard things. I could also see how my life would be if, instead of doing those hard things, I kept doing things the way I’m doing them now, that is to say, easier but not life-altering.
Having done this introspection, I know now I’ll look back, either way, at 2010. It will either be the pivotal year when I made the big changes to improve my life, or it will be just another year in my life where I chose the easy road to mediocrity.
So, I’m doing some hard things this year. Some of them have to do with my career, so you’ll find out about them. Some of them are personal, so I’ll only talk about them in generalities. Either way, 2010 will be a year to remember for me. It’s going to be a hard year, one that I won’t regret.
