Stop Waiting for Easy. It’s Not Coming.

I spent most of my life wondering if there was something wrong with me.

Like it constantly felt that every single time I was making a breakthrough in my life, and I was finally catching the break that I needed to start making actual progress, and feel a sense of happiness and security, I was faced with another more challenging, difficult problem.

And because my childhood was so challenging and we were faced with so much adversity, it felt like God was punishing me.

I was constantly feeling overwhelmed and feeling sorry for myself because I felt unlucky, I felt rejected, and I felt inadequate.

I came home from my second deployment to Afghanistan to an empty house on the cusp of divorce, and at that moment it felt like I had hit absolute rock bottom, and I couldn't help but sit and wonder and ask and pray to God, why me? When am I going to catch a break? And I think that has a lot to do with the fact that most of the time I was just trying to do my best to do what I thought was the right thing.

Before I get into the mechanism of how this actually works, I want to lay out the whole chain first, because the individual pieces don't make sense without the map.

The chain goes like this: you're operating on a hidden assumption that difficulty is temporary, so every hardship gets filed as an interruption instead of information, which means you spend your energy waiting for the interruption to end rather than extracting anything from it, and because you extracted nothing, the same category of problem returns in a different costume, and each return feels like proof that you're cursed rather than proof that you skipped a lesson.

Now zoom into the first link, because that assumption is where everything breaks.

That's the fact that as a man, especially, you're not going to get a break.

And it's almost like you live with this mindset where it's like, when I get here, I'm finally going to have this.

When I hit that income number, I'll relax. When the kids are older, I'll have time. When the business finally stabilizes, some quieter version of me will show up, the one who can just exhale.

And we come to this point in our lives where we continue to become more and more discouraged because every time we take one step forward, we're faced with another setback that makes us feel like we're taking two steps back.

The discouragement isn't coming from the setbacks themselves, because you handled setbacks fine when you were younger and had nothing to lose. It's coming from the gap between what you expected and what showed up, the quiet assumption that at some point the difficulty would run its course and let you off the hook, and instead it just kept arriving on schedule. So the difficulty now carries a second layer of pain on top of the original one, which is the pain of being wrong about how life works.

Remove the expectation and you remove the second layer entirely.

And these adversities that you face are helping you to shift your mindset, gain skills and level up so that you can become the next version of yourself, and there's actual research behind that claim rather than just a nice thing to tell yourself at three in the morning.

Bruce Ellis and colleagues published work in Development and Psychopathology in 2022 on what they call hidden talents in harsh environments, which is the idea that people who grow up under chronic stress and unpredictability don't just accumulate deficits, they also develop specific cognitive abilities that people raised in stable conditions don't have.

The traditional model looked at kids from difficult backgrounds and measured what was missing. Lower scores on standard tests, more behavioral problems, worse outcomes on paper. That model is correct about what it measures, and I'm not going to pretend adversity is free, because it isn't.

But the Ellis work measured something the traditional tests never looked for.

When you test people from unpredictable environments on skills that actually matter in unpredictable environments, things like rapidly switching attention between tasks, updating your mental picture when the situation changes, detecting shifts in social dynamics before they're obvious, they outperform, and the margin isn't small or incidental. They show enhanced performance on exactly the abilities their environment demanded of them.

Rather than simply wearing them down, the stress trained them for something specific.

The catch is that these abilities are context-dependent, which means they show up when the environment feels threatening or uncertain and they go quiet when everything is calm. Which explains something a lot of men experience and can't name, where they perform brilliantly under pressure and then fall apart during easy stretches.

The calm isn't what broke you. You just stopped running the operating system you were actually built for.

That research also explains something about how the brain treats stability. If you spend twenty years training your nervous system to expect and manage chaos, and then you finally reach the calm you were chasing, your system doesn't relax. It scans for the next threat, because that's what it got good at. The peace you were waiting for arrives and you can't feel it.

So the pursuit was always going to end in disappointment. The problem wasn't that you didn't get there. It's that getting there wouldn't have delivered what you thought.

There's a realization that has to occur if you want to solve this problem with having a sense of meaning in your life.

That's the fact that no matter what happens, you're going to feel some sense of pain.

The difference is the type of pain that you're going to face, which is one of two things.

Either you pay the price of discipline or you pay the price of regret.

Discipline means being willing to do the things that no one is willing to do so that you can have the things that no one is willing to have and be persecuted by those who want that thing but aren't willing to put the work in.

Regret is knowing you could have and should have, and instead you spent the window worrying about what people thought or worrying that you'd fail, and now the window is closed.

The two forms of pain are not equal in structure, and this is where most men get it wrong when they weigh the decision.

The pain of discipline arrives early and has an edge to it, but it also has a shape you can plan around and an end point you can see, since it produces a skill or an asset or a version of you that persists after the pain stops, and it decays over time as the thing you're doing becomes normal.

Regret works the opposite way, arriving quietly and then multiplying with every year you let pass. It starts as almost nothing, a slight ache you can ignore for years, and it grows because every additional year you didn't act adds to the total and removes an option that used to be available.

You're choosing between a debt with a payment plan and a debt that gains interest forever.

When I started my online fitness company, I was $80,000 in debt facing bankruptcy and getting ready to lose my job because I had no money.

The government job I had required a security clearance, and you cannot hold a security clearance if you can't pay your bills. The debt wasn't only a financial strain then; it functioned as a countdown clock ticking against the one income I had left.

At one point my house was in foreclosure, I had cars being repossessed, and I was struggling to keep the lights on. And I still went all in on building the business, because I knew that to have the things I wanted, I had to experience the hardship necessary to get there.

The option to stay was right there, with a six figure salary, real benefits, and real security.

But in exchange for that, I was then banishing myself to 20 years of misery.

Most people never run this calculation correctly, and here's why. Twenty years of low-grade daily deadness gets scored as safe because no single day of it hurts enough to notice. Two years of acute financial terror gets scored as reckless because every day of it hurts. But you're comparing a small number multiplied by a large number against a large number multiplied by a small number, and when you actually do the multiplication the safe option is the more expensive one.

And this is the part that you have to understand is that life tests you when you're at your weakest, your most vulnerable, when you're most fatigued, when you don't want to get up, when you've been knocked down, when you're exhausted, when bills are due, and when your family needs you and everybody's looking at you for the answers, that's when you're being tested.

There's a reason the timing works that way, and it has nothing to do with cruelty.

A test administered when you're rested and resourced tells you nothing about your capacity, because anyone performs well under ideal conditions. The only way to measure what a system can actually handle is to load it past comfortable and see what holds. That's true of a bridge, it's true of a muscle, and it's true of a man.

Which is why so many men can only perform when conditions are perfect. They've never been loaded, so their capacity has never been established, not even to themselves.

Muscle growth works the same way, and it's worth sitting with the mechanism for a second. You lift, you create mechanical tension and microscopic damage, your body reads that damage as a signal that current capacity is insufficient, and it rebuilds slightly stronger so the same load won't threaten it next time. Without that damage signal, the adaptation simply never gets triggered. The stimulus has to exceed what you're currently equipped for or nothing happens.

And most men, they stop at 75% when they start to feel a little bit of discomfort or pain.

And that's right before the growth actually starts to happen.

Seventy-five percent is where the set stops feeling like exercise and starts feeling like effort, which is exactly the point where the fibers you've never recruited before finally get called in. Everything up to that point was just warm-up, and the set itself hadn't even begun until the difficulty showed up.

Men run their entire lives at 75 percent and then wonder why they've plateaued in every area at once.

Realize that the pain you're undergoing in your life is not punishment. The adversity, the uncertainty, the self-doubt, the fear, those are teachers.

That's your curriculum.

And a curriculum has a specific property that makes this practical rather than poetic, which is that it repeats the material until you demonstrate you've learned it.

You'll notice the same problem showing up with different faces, a different job carrying the same conflict with authority, a different woman triggering the same breakdown in communication, a different business exposing the same failure to delegate. The costume changes and the lesson underneath does not.

And once you learn that lesson, that's when you graduate to the next level.

So the useful question stops being why is this happening to me and becomes what is this here to teach me, because the first question has no answer that helps you and the second one has an answer you can act on today.

After my divorce, I spent years pointing the finger at her. But I was the one who allowed her into my life. I chose her to be my wife and the mother of my children, and the fact is I wasn't ready to be a dad and I wasn't ready to be a husband, and I failed to fulfill the commitments I made to her.

Things started to shift once I began taking ownership, once I accepted that everything in my life is my fault, even when it technically isn't.

That phrasing bothers people, and I understand why, because it sounds like accepting blame for things you didn't cause. What it actually describes is where you're standing when you look at the problem. If the cause sits outside you, then so does the solution, and you're stuck waiting for someone else to move. If you take the position that it's yours to solve regardless of who caused it, you get to act.

Ownership works as a stance you choose, not a verdict handed down about who's guilty.

So here's the practical version, starting with the simplest piece before anything gets complicated.

Pick one thing you've been avoiding and do it this week. Not a system, not a plan, one avoided thing. The avoidance itself is the signal, because your nervous system files threats before your conscious mind does, and the thing you keep sliding down the list is almost always the thing carrying the lesson.

Then add resistance on purpose, the same way you'd progressively overload a lift, because if you don't choose the load, life will choose it for you and it won't ask about your schedule.

And if you're deep in a season where the pressure is already extreme and nothing you're doing is working, that's not a signal to add more. You're already mid-rep, so the job now is just to finish it.

Here's the lesson that took me over 20 years to understand.

When my mother told me that I'd never get a break, she wasn't being cruel. She was trying to free me from the prison I'd created for myself of being the victim to my own life.

Because once you stop waiting for easier, that's when you can start focusing on building the version of yourself that you're meant to be.

Once you accept that problems don't end, that's when you can start seeing them as the lessons that you need.

And once you choose discipline and the pain that comes with that over the pain of regret, that's when you can take control of the suffering in your life and direct your life so that you are leading it instead of having it lead you.

The men who win didn't find a shorter route. They stopped measuring their lives against a standard of ease that was never going to be met, and they started measuring against something they could actually control, which is whether they got stronger this year than they were last year.

Everything you've been calling bad luck was the load. And you've been trying to put it down when you were supposed to be lifting it.

References:

Ellis BJ, Abrams LS, Masten AS et al.. Hidden talents in harsh environments. Dev Psychopathol. 2022. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32672144/