What if you had it worse?

One thing that I appreciate about myself is that if I have an idea that I think will help set me up for future success, I am pretty quick to take action. 

This directly contrasts my lack of action on activities that will have minimal impact on me.

As an example, I wanted to learn Japanese (I still do, it’s just not a current priority for me) so I learned hiragana by taking quizzes on Tofugu until it stuck. 

I recognized that I still couldn’t read Japanese and it seemed like everybody complained about learning kanji so I dove deeper into the internet and found that Tofugu created a program called Wanikani. I was incredibly consistent with this program, following it daily for over a year until I recognized that I still couldn’t read full sentences. 

I dove deeper into the internet and discovered Steve Kaughman who created the program Lingq. My reading began to rapidly progress and I did this program for the next 6 months or so. 

Then there is all of the shit that we have in my garage that I need to give away but have been procrastinating on for over a year. 

This accumulation of stuff leads to a very small decrease in my quality of life so the activation energy required to get rid of it isn’t worth it for me… Or at least, that’s what I tell myself. 

What I find with these areas of my life that are easy to put off is that there comes a time where I simply get fed up with dealing with it and I will rapidly fix everything that has been slowly accumulating due to my lack of action. 

This parallels a larger theme in life.

I am making six figures a year and live what I would deem a good quality of life overall. Like all people, I have problems that pop up that I’m not sure how I will approach solving but having a decent income helps solve a lot of them. 

As my income has risen, so has a sense of security within me. My desire to take action to change my circumstances has significantly decreased. While I want to live a higher quality of life, eliminating the problems that I currently have, the problems I have aren’t as challenging as those earlier in my life. 

My worst case scenario is a target that I aimed to hit for many years. So the activation energy required to pursue my goals is higher than it ever has been before. 

This all came together for me when I heard the question, “Would you take action if your situation was worse?” 

The framing that I give this question is - would I take action if I was making half of what I am making now? 

I can easily say yes to that. 

I have always had high goals and high standards for myself and if I wasn’t sitting in the situation that I am in now - I’d be willing to do whatever it took (within the confines of my ethics) to get back to where I am now. 

So why not just approach my deepest goals that way? 

What prevents this from being my newest low? What could I achieve if every day was the newest low point of my life?

While it may sound like I am contradicting myself by saying that it is easy for me to take action on tasks that I believe will increase the likelihood of me hitting my goals and following that up with how it takes more activation energy to do these tasks because I have reached a higher quality of life that I sought from when I was younger - those two realities aren’t mutually exclusive. 

I am able to take action but I know that if I don’t, I’m living a pretty solid life. That means that every single day, there is an activation energy that is required to move the ball forward that wasn’t there previously when I gave myself no options but moving forward. 

This makes it harder to sustain my effort in the long term, which just so happens to be a skill that I have struggled with since the dawn of my time. 

This reframing of “what would you do if you had it worse?” will be leveraged to help me push my inputs while sustaining my outputs.

I don’t want to live my worst case scenario, nor do I want you to live yours. 

I want you to take note of where you are. Really observe your surroundings. What do you have? What do you love? What do you loathe? Now bring that internally - what do you want out of life? Is your external situation relevant to your internal situation? Do you feel in line with the person that you know you can be if you put in more effort? 

Have you mirrored my path where you reached a certain level of comfort and have allowed yourself to stagnate? What are the differences between the person that you are now and the person that you want to be? What would it take to bridge the gap? What action would you take to bridge that gap if your situation was worse than it is now? 

While I pride myself on my ability to take action on pursuits that will further my progress to my goals, I’d be more relentless in my pursuit if my life was worse. Would you?