I heard this brilliant phrase from a colleague today, talking about advice she gives to her children. The gist is this: Life is hard. No matter what, life is going to be difficult a lot of the time. But you have some control over what kind of hard it is. Life can be hard because you’re overworked, or hard because you’re broke. Life can be hard because it takes a lot of effort to stay in shape, or it can be hard because you’re unhealthy. It can be hard because you study all the time, or it can be hard because you haven’t accomplished everything you’re capable of.
There are trade-offs to everything, and risk to everything. There are no free lunches. But you can make choices that give you the brand of hard that you’re most equipped to deal with, or that give you, personally, the most reward for the difficulty. Those choices will be different for everyone, but you do have choices.
And if you don’t make them, you tend to get the worst kinds of hard on offer.
The Opportunity Machine 