How to Make Life Easier... The Hard Way

I pushed myself further up the hill, digging in deeper, trying to keep a quick cadence. I thought about my New Years Resolution a few years ago (to take more risks). I had done so, but I still had a long way to go to get out of my comfort zone. I realized that I was finally pushing myself out of it on this run through the park. I was breathing hard, my legs were aching, my face was numb from the cold. Exercise is a really easy way to get yourself out of your own comfort zone. Usually, you are pushing yourself to do better and better which involves you inching out further and further from what make your feel comfortable.

The big take away from this is that once you have pushed yourself harder and further than before it is much easier to do things - anything. Paradoxically, the harder you push yourself in life, the easier it becomes. Or at least the easier everything below it becomes. Think of life as a video game. Everything is harder the more levels you go up, but you yourself become bigger, better, faster, stronger, and then when you look back, the first few levels seem like a joke.

If you stack all of the activities on your to do list in order of difficulty. Then you knock out the hardest one on the list. The other ones are going to seem like a piece of cake. This is not only true with activities from the same category (example: after you run a marathon a 5k is easy). I believe that you can benefit from pushing yourself in other categories. What I'm saying is that the category is not quite as important as the difficulty (example: after you run a marathon, everything task you value as easier than a marathon become not only easier but achievable). Since you pushed yourself to accomplish something hard, you know you can achieve other successes. The harder you push, the more you can accomplish (even in other areas of life).

My main take away
Try pushing yourself outside your comfort zone. Then you might realize that things you once thought were hard may become a little easier.