Push Yourself!!

Bad times have scientific value. Instead of crying over the situation, fight back. These are occasions a good learner would not miss.

The key to life is accepting challenges. Once someone stops doing that, they are done. The challenge is to change the situation more than it changes you.

Being challenged in life is inevitable. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all. So don’t run away from a challenge because you are afraid. Run towards it, because the only way to escape fear is to trample it beneath your foot. Simple as that.

The challenge does not wait

Life sets us a challenge to test our courage exactly when we least expect it. At such a moment, there is no point pretending nothing has happened, or saying that we are not ready yet.

The challenge will not wait. Life does not look back.

Nobody is ever ready, by the way. That is worth saying plainly, because “I’m not ready yet” is the most convincing excuse there is - it sounds responsible rather than frightened.

But readiness is not a state you arrive at before doing something hard. It is something you acquire during. Everyone you have ever admired for handling a difficult thing well was, at the start of it, badly underqualified and quietly terrified. They just did not have the option of waiting, so they began, and the capability showed up somewhere in the middle.

Success comes in a very prickly package. Whether you choose to accept it is up to you.

Choose the people carefully

It is about what you choose to do with it, and the people you choose to surround yourself with.

Always choose people who are better than you. Always choose people who challenge you and are smarter than you.

This one is harder than it reads, because being the least impressive person in the room is genuinely uncomfortable. The ego wants rooms where it is safe. There is a real pull towards company that makes you feel accomplished rather than company that makes you want to improve.

But you will absorb the standards of whoever you spend your time with, whether you intend to or not. That happens quietly and it happens regardless of your goals. So the single highest-leverage decision most people never think of as a decision is simply: who is around.

Life’s challenges are not supposed to paralyse you. They are supposed to help you discover who you are. Hope and change are hard-fought things.

Remember: a challenge only becomes an obstacle when you bow to it.

When it gets overwhelming

Life sometimes demands struggle, and when those times come it is easy to become overwhelmed.

Being defeated is often a temporary condition. Giving up is what makes it permanent.

I keep that line close, because it draws the only distinction that matters. Losing is an event. It happened, it is over, and it says nothing permanent about you. Quitting is a decision, and it is the one that actually closes the door.

Almost nobody is stopped by the defeat itself. They are stopped by what they decided about themselves afterwards.

Whenever you want to achieve something, keep your eyes open, concentrate, and make sure you know exactly what it is that you want. After all, no one hits a target with their eyes closed.

It is during our darkest moments that we must focus to see the light. And remember that the bad times won’t last forever.

Where the line is

One honest closing note, because “push yourself” can be taken too far.

There is a difference between pushing and grinding. Pushing is going past what you thought you could do, and coming back afterwards with more capacity than you started with. Grinding is going past what you can recover from, repeatedly, until something gives.

They feel identical in the moment. The difference only shows in whether you come back stronger or come back depleted.

So push. Then rest properly, on purpose, and treat the rest as part of the work rather than a break from it.

-Kashish