How Small Acts Make a Big Life

Photo by Karsten Winegeart on Unsplash

“Hard choices, easy life. Easy choices, hard life.” — Jerzy Gregorek

Working in your jammies from 9 am to 5 pm is one definition of comfort.

Mental discomfort is something entirely different. When you get a flutter in your stomach, you’re thinking about it the night before and bad dreams of all the things that could go wrong.

That’s the kind of discomfort I’m talking about.

Comfort leads to a hard life

“Cut the crap. Literally, cut the unnecessary distractions out of your life — delete apps, unfriend and unfollow toxic people, stop committing to activities you don’t care about. Life is too short.”- Mark Manson

Being comfortable is summed up by making easy choices. Here are a few that come to mind:

• Skipping the exercise

• Foregoing the meditation

• Avoiding the hard conversations

• Not acting on the feelings you’ve had for a long while

These choices make life hard in the long run because they allow problems to ferment. Problems sit and fester until that tiny issue has turned into a full-blown car crash.

Comfort leads to a hard life.

Discomfort leads to an easy life

Creating a habit is hard work.

Convincing your brain to repeatedly do a task with nothing in return is hard. It’s cold outside. People will laugh at you. What if it goes wrong. But if you can do it for long enough, doing hard things will become a habit.

Professor Ann Graybiel, a member of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT said that:

“We’ve always thought — and I still do — that the value of a habit is you don’t have to think about it. It frees up your brain to do other things,”

Charles Duhigg and James Clear largely conclude the same thing: habits are hard to make but once you do, they’re even harder to break.

Those people that can make a habit of doing the hard things are usually the ones that realise their dreams.

Training your brain to take the hard route

Start small, you won’t stick at it if you go big and tell yourself you need to run a marathon, eat lettuce and save 90% of your income by next week.

It just doesn’t work like that.

Think of it like building a wall, you don’t throw all the bricks and cement together in one day throw it at the ground and hope it sticks. You know it’ll just fall down. The same is true for habit building. It’s brick by brick.

As James Clear wrote:

“Do less. Keep returning to one thing and continue to refine it.”

Act small

You don’t need to conquer the world.

You need to make one more hard decision today than you did yesterday. The deal is that when you a faced with a decision you question yourself and push yourself to act in favour of what’s hard, not what is easy.

So when your morning alarm goes off at 6 am make the hard decision.

Allow your mind to reel through all the reasons you shouldn’t. Then smile. Toss the covers off. Breathe in the air. And get up.

It’s a small act but it’s a deal you’re making with yourself to do what you said you were going to do. Often the power of your voice gets lost in your inaction.

Build small:

• Get up at 6am

• Read for 15 minutes

• Meditate for 5 minutes

• Go for a 10-minute run

Comfort is the enemy

The easy decisions in life are the ones that lead to a hard life later down the line. Spend now, have no money later. Skip the exercise now, have poor health later. Eat rubbish today, feel horrible tomorrow.

It’s easy to take the comfortable route.

But comfort isn’t where your mind is challenged, where progress is made or where great people are built. Comfort is where the majority of people stay. Learning to get comfortable with discomfort, is where your life will change.

That’s how you act small and make a big life.

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