How To Turn Hardship Into Happiness

Do you know what sets successful entrepreneurs from people caught in the rat race?

When problems and adversity come up in an entrepreneurs life, they embrace the challenge. So many people today are too lazy. As soon as things start to get difficult, they get scared and give up.

I wanna talk about what I call embracing what is difficult.

About six months ago I was having dinner with my buddy Alex. Alex is a highly successful entrepreneur, over the last five years, he built a company that's doing $300 million dollars in sales from scratch.

I was telling him a new idea I had for a business, and I said, "Aw, I don't know if I should do it. It's pretty hard."

He looked at me, and he's like, "Tai, no, you wanna do it if it's hard. You only make money doing stuff that's hard."

It reminded me of what Elon Musk once said "You get paid in direct proportion to the difficulty of the problems you solve."

Now, he's one of the only people ever to start three companies worth a billion dollars, so pretty sure he knows the payoff of fixing big problems.

Think about it like this.

If you solve a hard problem, you get a chance to make a lot of money. If you solve an easy problem, you probably won't get much money. If you work at McDonald's, how difficult of a problem are you solving? You're just handing somebody a hamburger and taking $5 from them. It’s not a very difficult thing to do, and therefore, you're not gonna make a lot of money.

Now, if you are like Elon Musk and you start a company called SpaceX, and you figure out how to build spaceships and put people into space, well guess what. You're probably gonna be a billionaire.

That’s just how the world works.

You can complain about it all you want. I'm not here to say what's fair. It's probably not fair. But I will tell you this: it's predictable. That’s the way the world works. So I highly recommend you embrace what's difficult in every area of your life.

Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Prize Laureate Psychologist, says there are two kinds of happiness that we have. One's momentary, moment by moment happiness, and the second is memory happiness. He says Hollywood pushes the idea of moment by moment happiness. You try to be happy every moment of the day. But he says that's the weaker form of happiness.

There's another form, memory happiness. Memory happiness is what we remember achieving in our life. There's three paths to happiness. There's the momentary path, there's the authentic one, and what he calls “the meaningful life”, and the better ones, which are the highest levels of happiness that we can achieve in our life are when we are using our strengths and being pushed and challenged every day.

So you gotta embrace the hard in your life. Let's talk about some specific areas. When it comes to the four areas in life that I focus on, health, wealth, love, and higher purpose, I like to use Arnold Schwarzenegger as a role model, because he has achieved them all.

He’s got one of the greatest physiques of any man probably ever, and what was his key? He learned that no pain, no gain. He learned to embrace what was difficult. He was lucky to have an amazing mom and dad when he was a little kid. At five years old, before he could get breakfast, his dad would say, "Give me three push-ups." It was hard for Arnold. He was this little guy. But then he'd get breakfast, and what was his dad doing? His dad was slowly rewiring Arnold's brain to associate challenging, difficult, pain with rewards of food, and that brain was getting rewired every year.

Guess what happened?

By the time Arnold Schwarzenegger was 18, he became one of the fittest guys in the world. He would say "When I'm lifting weights and it's burning and it's hurting to push," he's like, "that's like an orgasm. It's even better than an orgasm for me." Just think how profound that is. He had rewired his brain to make pain pleasurable.

If you can embrace challenge and associate it with success, the world is yours.

Think about all the great things that you could have in your life right now if you had learned that philosophy. It’s like Tony Robbins says, "You wanna generate the ability to change? Contemplate all the losses that you've had 'cause you gave up too early, and all the things you gave up on."

Go out there and find a challenge. Start with your health. Let’s say you’re in good shape already, so you wanna make more money? Go learn a skill that you've been putting off because it's difficult. You wanna earn more money? Be happier? Go read a book every three days.

I know it's hard. And if you want to give up that’s fine, but I don’t wanna hear you whining about not getting what you want.

If you wanna be happy and succeed in your life, challenge yourself everyday. Learn something new, or give up a bad habit, and stick to it. Self discipline is a great challenge, and will always be beneficial.

You get what you deserve, and the greater the challenge, the greater the pay off.

Find some new way to challenge yourself everyday. It doesn’t have to be huge, you can start small, but you gotta stick to it.

Stay Strong