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Distributing the Difficulty of Life By Time
You don't get to pick the difficulty of life, but you get to pick when in your life it becomes difficult and for how long
Background
As I look back in life, one of the things that is quite apparent in my experience is - if you choose a harder life at the start, your life gets easier later. So you can basically shift the difficulty of life, by doing it earlier, or distributing it by time. Thereâs probably edge cases to this, but for the most part itâs quite accurate (at least for me).
If youâve been following my blog series, you would have known that in the blog âLight at the end of the Pipelineâ was all about the amazing opportunities I got after all the hard work I put in my life. However, I donât want to build on top of that - I want to do the opposite. What if I did the opposite? What if, I just:
didnât decide to pick up a part-time job earlier on in my life
stuck on my course - without learning anything else outside of it
where would I have ended up?
The Exponential Effect of Learning
âEverything builds up to form who you are, what decisions you make, and what you knowâ
You probably already know that every single day - youâre becoming a person more equipped to deal with lifeâs challenges.
All the things youâve failed at - youâre reinforcing what not do do.
All the things youâve succeeded - youâre reinforcing what to do
All the things you learned from a course on how to do things
All of which influences influences the quality of decisions you make, and the level of risk youâre willing to take.
And you probably know that the more experience you have in life, the more it opens up opportunities and outcomes that comes to you! And this is quite exponential effect!
This is assuming that the rate of experience you gain is uniform.
Point being is if you put a lot of emphasis in gaining lots of experience in your early years, it will have a significant effect to you in a couple of years time.
Now hereâs the a question - if we know that itâs exponential, wouldnât it be good to put a lot of effort at the start to gain experience?
Thatâs one of the biggest reasons why it may be good to put in the hard work in the early days.
Let me quote a good one I heard over these years (itâs not mine - but i cant remember where it came from)
âThe best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is nowâ
The cumulative effective if a good experience is just too good especially for starting out.
Thatâs the theory at least - why donât we look at some examples?
Some things you have to learn eventually
High school is probably one of the places where it teaches you base fundamentals in life such as arithmetics that helps you understand things like finance, biology that helps you understand and appreciate importance of going to the doctor and taking care of your health, chemistry to help you have a basic understanding of effects of certain important drugs like âparacetamolâ and vitamins.
Because of the importance of these fundamentals - we can (hopefully) all agree that itâs something youâll have to learn eventually in life, whether it be in class in the blackboard, or learn it by mistake because youâve found out that all these years in a blood test that you feel fatigued because you lack Vitamin B in your body đ .
Wouldnât it be better if you learned that knowledge way before youâve made a mistake (or before it affected you)?
Life would have been easier if you put that extra hours/effort being more curious and learning things in life. Yes - because youâre putting more effort - thereâs going to be âhigher difficultyâ than just âcruisingâ at the start, but itâs visibly something that will make your life easier.
I am not saying âgrades are everythingâ, but I am just saying the things you learn in those early years will help avoid mistakes or troubles that would cause your life to be harder.
Getting a part-time job in early days
Moving to Australia, Iâve been fortunate enough that you could get a part-time job in high school.
If I look back now, I kinda have two choices - to get a job, and not to get a job.
I chose to get a job in McDonalds, and looking back now - while it was an extra effort of 20 hours per week, it had these effects on me:
(obviously) I was able to afford some stuff đ , and some not so obvious ones
Iâve become more confident in talking to people generally
It gave me empathy on the life of minimum wage workers
It gave me an appreciation and baseline of what working in the world looks like
To a certain degree, this benefits would have made it easier for me to get my future jobs, and also gave me motivation to âstrive for a better lifeâ. Yes it was definitely âmore difficultâ compared to not getting a job (probably couldâve been cruising, binge watching, and playing lots of video games). However, if we expand across the time horizon⌠If I didnât get a job at that time, I probably would have been less experienced in years time, and I probably wouldnât have gotten the âperspectivesâ and âappreciationâ. Because of what I will lack in that area, it wouldâve been probably harder to get a job, harder to get the motivation to âstrive for a better lifeâ.
Variety of Experience is Important (even if itâs unconventional)
Thereâs this other perspective of - if I didnât get a job, I would have that extra 20 hours to do something else - and thatâs certainly true. Iâll tell you the other side of it đ, thereâs a point in my life where I would have spent that extra 20 hours playing videogames đ (because thatâs what young me wanted to do). Some people would know that I reached 1000 hours of game time in Company of Heroes 2 (1000 hours - thatâs like 62 days of my waking life).
When I reached that 1000 hours, I suddenly felt a couple of change:
My appetite to play the game drastically dropped
I felt to a certain degree that I am wasting my life
Now because I spent those â62 days of my waking lifeâ playing that game during my high school years, it gave me a perspective of what I donât want to do in the next parts of my life. For example, it has helped me remain more focused when I got to university because every time I open my gaming laptop âthe steam 1000 hours just dissuades me to close itâ. In other words - it was relatively easier for me to focus on what I wanted to accomplish. Those university days weâre quite crucial to me because those times are the ones where I am applying for jobs - so those times were more crucial or critical than my high school years. (yeah i know - quite contradictory to learning earlier is better⌠but just the timing of life, and who says making this mistake is not productive).
What an unconventional way of saying âyeah me playing that game for 1000 hoursâ had a quite a positive outcome in my life. đ
The Grind in the University
Those days weâre rough - balancing job, studies, volunteering, and the extra learning I had to do outside of that. I remember those days where I am allocating an extra 10-20 hours on extra learning on top of my already existing 50 hours workload (20 hours for work, 20 hours for studies, 5 hours volunteering, 5 hours job hunting). Those extra learnings are to help me with learning how to build full-scale apps.
Let say I didnât do thatâŚ
would university been able to teach me enough what I needed to know? probably not⌠itâs too disjointed to teach you everything involved end-to-end
would it have differentiated me from all the other students learning the same course? also probably not⌠my portfolio would have been empty
would I have the confidence to go to an interview and say âyes I can deliver value to your company because I can do x,y and zâ? also probably notâŚ
In that case, I guess two questions comes in to play:
Which one would have been easier?
Option 1: Put the extra 10-20 hours a week to learn something different
Option 2: Be more lenient to oneself and use that 10-20 hours as buffer time
Option 2 would have been easierâŚ
Now the same questionâŚ
Which one would have been easier?
Option 3: Applying for jobs knowing that you have more experience (such as building apps that came from earlier hard work)
Option 4: Applying for jobs while having to juggle a lot more preparation in the immediate time (more crammed studying, and practice)
Option 1 wouldâve been easier.
Now letâs put both togetherâŚ
Which one would have been easier:
Option 1 + Option 3: You put the hard work earlier, now you have to apply for jobs
Option 2 + Option 4: Youâre applying for jobs, but you have to do more concentrated learning in a short amount of time available
Option 2 + Option 4 probably has more âperceived difficulty due to concentrationâ, but can be more or less equal in difficulty as Option 1 and Option 3, but just distributed in time.
So this becomes a point of âlife however you do it, the difficulty will always be there - itâs just a matter of do you want difficulty to happen now or later? and do you want the difficulty to spread over weeks and months, or just days!â. The choice is yours!
Donât forget to take care of yourself
While I do say that learning early on is exponential thats why you should put a lot of efforts day by day, you you have to remember to take care of yourself. Itâs not sustainable to be pushing yourself to the limit every single day!
If you donât - then burnout is going to make you hate your life "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy". So⌠you really have to treat yourself sometimes, not just âoh yeah the grindsetâ.
If you do choose to apply this advise, at least get sometime to reap its rewards after putting it in place. For example, after putting a lot of hard work (maybe graduating and getting a job), spend sometime going on good and relaxing vacation! Or⌠putting less effort in the usual way you progress life (such as a career), to make sometime in wonder, doing things you like, or rediscovering some passion in the world!
Conclusion
Hopefully as you end this blog - Iâve been able to tell you and convince you why putting the effort today, will make your life easier later! Yeah - life overall probably doesnât get easier, but you can distribute difficulty by time, so the âperceived difficultyâ is not too high.
And also - iâve instilled you something relaxing or fulfilling that comes after your âgrind stageâ.
If youâve like this blog, you might wanna check out âThe Usual Goal Settings Suckâ, where I talked about an effective way to be able to put more effort in order to achieve what you want!