Do the difficult things. Because as you train yourself to do difficult things, life gets easier. Because you get stronger. ~ Jim Kwik

I’m taking a marvellous online course offered by Jim Kwik with an advance purchase of his soon-to-be-released book, Limitless. Jim is an expert in brain performance and accelerated learning. And my intuition tells me I can trust him.

Anyway, the quote above was part of yesterday’s learning. I’ve thought a lot about it since I wrote it down in my notebook.

I’ve heard people say similar things over the years, such as: Always do the difficult things first. But that didn’t help me. If I didn’t feel confident, which I often didn’t, the thought of tackling something difficult from the get-go felt completely daunting. So I didn’t.

But Jim Kwik’s teaching makes perfect sense, and encourages me enormously.

In meditating on it I saw clearly that the story I used to tell myself, that I lost all my courage and vital energy because of the difficult people and circumstances in my younger life, wasn’t true. Even though there certainly was a succession of difficult people and circumstances. But in truth, I kept avoiding every opportunity to make my life easier and myself stronger by continually running away from difficulties.

I used booze, emigration, drugs, food, sex, TV… whatever it took to escape.

And unfortunately, as you train yourself to avoid difficult things, life gets harder. Because you get weaker.

This quote shifts my focus away from the temporary discomfort of challenging something difficult to the long-term benefit of becoming stronger. And not just for my own sake. This world needs strong women to help balance out its male-dominated energy.

I’ve always liked having a great “reason why” for doing things! 🙂

Photo by Sarah Cervantes on Unsplash