I Work Way Harder Than I Should (Because I Deserve To)

I’m sitting in a bar one night, sipping on my beer, talking with one of my best friends about how’s life lately and suddenly the question comes. Maybe you’ve heard it too.

“Why do you do it? I rarely see you now, it seems like you never have time. You’ve quit smoking, you work all the time and you almost never drink now. Why do you do all that? What’s the point of all that? I mean, you don’t have to do it man.”

And so I sit there, sipping on my beer and I don’t say anything. Because it’s so hard to explain and because almost no one gets it, even the people who are closest to me.

Yeah, I don’t have to do it. Any of it. I come from money and I wouldn’t have to work twenty hours a day, paying for my own life, handling three different jobs at a time. I don’t have to wake up at 6 a.m. every day, and grind as hard as I can since the moment I open my eyes. I could easily just sit on my ass all day, take money from my parents, do whatever I’d please and don’t care about anything at all. I could easily stop with the morning runs and late night workouts because there’s no one forcing me to do it. No one but myself. So why do I do it?

Because I need to find out how far I can go. What can I accomplish. They tell you that you can do anything and I don’t know if that’s true or not, but I chose to believe it is.

Do I know it for sure? No. But what I do know is that you’re not going to achieve anything or get anywhere, if you’re just gonna keep sitting on your ass. I’ve been given a lot, more than most people get, a healthy body and mind to start with. And I’m not going to waste it. I refuse to look for excuses why I can’t do something. I don’t want to look back years from now and think with regrets about what I could have done if I just worked a bit harder back then.

“But isn’t it hard?” Yeah, you bet it is. Because refusing the easy way is. When there are ten thousand streams that fan out like a river delta before you, each one promising the path of least resistance but you just keep heading upstream anyway, you know it’s gonna get hard.

But the thing is – hard is good. I don’t want to escape and evade the hardships, the struggles of life. I want to face them, challenge them and then burn them to the ground.

I don’t want to take the easy way and go around – I want to fight my way right through anything that life puts in front of me. I need to do it – so I’ll know that I can make it. That’s where my motivation comes from. That’s the basis of my obsession, my addiction, the reason that gets me up every morning when there are million voices in my head telling me to hit the snooze button and go back to sleep.

I don’t want to live in that nice little bubble that so many people live in. The bubble where everything is pretty, easy and comfortable.

I don’t want to back down when anything that would take just a tiny bit of effort comes, something that would be kind of unpleasant and that might maybe hurt a bit. And I don’t want to get crushed when it actually does get hard. If you’ve never even stepped out of your comfort zone, you’re gonna break when life throws at you something that you can’t handle.

So that’s why. That’s why I keep pushing myself to do all those things when all the fibers in my body scream out not to. That’s why I keep giving myself my personal challenges that no one’s forcing me to fulfill and that I don’t tell anyone about. That’s why I am being a dick to myself, when nothing I do is good enough – for me. And that’s why I don’t ask life go easy on me. Instead I challenge life to give me all it has. To give me as many lemons as it can, to put as many obstacles as it can in my way. So I can run right through them and prove myself that I can make it.

That’s why I do it.