Your life isn’t fair. Nobody ever said it was going to be fair. Nobody is trying to make it fair for you. Sorry, but nobody has the time for that shit, and that’s the truth.

Unfortunately, we don’t all start from the same point. Maybe you come from a rich upper-class family. Maybe you come from a broken home where nobody had time to worry about what you wanted.

The reality is we aren’t all dealt the same cards. Hell, some people are playing with entirely different decks while the rest of us are out here playing UNO (nothing against UNO)…

The point I’m trying to make is that life isn’t fair. We don’t all start out with equal opportunities and resources. This leaves us all with two separate paths that we can travel down. Your choices are to suck it up and play your hand or sit your ass down and cry about it.

The choice is yours. But if you’re anything like me, I bet you want the make the best of it.

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Quick Disclaimer

Now, as a white guy, I’d never claim to be that poor off, especially because I’ve got a great and supportive family. So I never truly had to struggle through poverty or living in crime-ridden neighborhoods or anything else you might consider “significant hardship”.

So I may be biased with my advice when it comes to this topic, but its simplicity has helped a lot of people, so I’m going to give it anyways. Regardless of who you are and where you start from, your life is going to have struggles and hardship. However, it’s still up to you to make the best of it.

Your struggles may be very different from someone else’s, and by no means are all struggles equal. But nonetheless, everyone has to make do with what they have. For example, someone who is expected to drop out of school to support your family is not the same struggle as being expected to get straight A’s in school continuously.

What Point Am I making?

The point I’m making is that yes, these are very different struggles. Clearly one is significantly more harmful to one’s future opportunities.

But nonetheless, these are both still struggles. So I try my best not to just what people are struggling with, or brush aside someone else’s struggles. I think that type of behavior is rather ignorant.

Every life has some type of struggle. That’s what this all boils down to. And everyone has to make the best of it for themselves.

This means that everyone is going to have to overcome challenges, hurdles, and confront adversity to achieve success. And that’s what’s a great life, if you decide to play that hand well, you can slowly improve your circumstances. You can slowly trade some of those shitty cards for better ones through your grit and perseverance.

Does The Hand We’re Dealt Even Matter?

I think the answer is clearly no, the hand we’re dealt doesn’t matter. Besides, you can’t change the hand you’re dealt. What matters infinitely more is what you do with the cards you’re dealt. That’s what makes all the difference in life.

Think about a poker table, you may be dealt a pair of 4’s whereas your opponent got a pair of aces. Have you already lost? No… your opponent was simply dealt a better hand initially than you. What matters is what happens over the course of your hand, and how you decide to play it.

You might say, the outcome totally depends on the cards the dealer flips, which I have no control over. And I’d say you’re absolute, right, you can’t control that. But unlike poker, your life isn’t entirely out of your control. No, you still don’t choose the hand you’re dealt in life. But you do have some degree of control over the cards that are flipped in your life. And you choose which cards to flip over through your actions, behaviors, and decisions.

Make the Best of It, Or Give In and Pout

Okay, that’s enough talk about that poker analogy. The point I really want to hammer home is this… you could have been dealt the shittiest hand in life, in the entire world even. But unfortunately, there’s no trophy for who has the worst start to life, or who struggled the most. Nobody really cares who started from the lowest point on the ladder.

That may seem unfair, and that’s because it is unfair. Some people have advantages in the world that they were born into. They didn’t earn it. That means they had no more control over the hand they were dealt than you did. So there’s really no point complaining about those things. Nobody can control or change them.

Besides, the more you complain, the fewer people are going to listen to what you have to say. Especially if they don’t see you taking any action to attempt to improve your situation.

Remember This Key Point

Remember, there’s always someone worse off than you. And your personal situation could always be worse! (*If nothing else that’s something 2020 definitely taught us haha*)

But you’ve still got to choose whether or not to play the game. Sure, other people may have a head start, but does that mean you should sit there and cry about it? Or should you get to work?

My vote is that you get a plan in order and get your ass hustling. Because through hard work, commitment, and perseverance, you will slowly start to turn over the right cards. And as the right cards turn over you’ll be surprised by how many opportunities begin presenting themselves to you.

Besides, your only other option is to sit back down and complain. And let’s be honest, that’s never really gotten anybody too far.

In the end, if you want to win, the action is on you. It’s on you to make the best of it. Nobody else is going to save you or do it for you.

Grow Through Your Problems

Now that I have convinced you to make the best of these challenging situations, I want to tell you why this is actually an important opportunity for you.

Because starting from a lower position, with a worse hand, may actually provide you with certain opportunities that aren’t available to other people, regardless of how much money and resources they start out with.

Remember that regardless of how good your position in society is, you still are going to have to confront adversity at one point or another.

The world is going to knock you down, it knocks us all down, a lot, and there will be times when it not only knocks you down but kicks you while you’re down there and tries to destroy you entirely.

Some people call this rock bottom. I call it decision time.

And the more you’re knocked down the more you realize you only truly have two options.

You either learned how to pick yourself back up and keep going. You worked to make the best of it even though you had been knocked down. Or you decided you weren’t meant to be anything more than what you are now. That life was fighting against you, so why even try…

How many times has life put you in these types of positions? Where it forced you to either pick yourself up or call it quits? I bet a lot.

Here’s what most people do

Most people try to escape and avoid these hardships. They run from their struggles and their problems. They spend their entire lives scared and trying to pretend they don’t exist so they don’t have to do any real work confronting them.

This means that whenever presented with an opportunity to confront these hardships, they often opt to take the path of least resistance. They decide to cut corners and passively go through the motions of life rather than actively create their future.

But this is not an effective long-term solution. And since you’re listening to my podcast, I know that you’ve built up your mental toughness enough to confront these hardships rather than run from them.

Besides, sure this helps them to feel good about themselves in the immediate moment, but avoiding your struggles and hardships has a serious long-term flaw, and it’s one that’s often overlooked by many people. That is, that without hardship, struggle, and challenge, there is no growth.

And it’s hard to make the best of it in life if you’re not doing the things you need to do in order to grow and improve.

Demonstrative Example

Say your goal is to run a marathon, so you decide to do cardio by walking every single day to build up your endurance.

There is nothing wrong with starting here. But you improve quickly and before you know it, walking is a breeze for you. So what do you think would be the outcome if you only continued to walk every day? Would you be able to run that marathon by the end of the year?

Probably not right, because if walking is easy for you, you’re not growing very much by repeating this same exercise. You need to challenge yourself. If you instead began to slowly jog, and then each week increased your distance, over the course of the year you very well could achieve your goal and run that marathon by the end!

This is true for nearly any type of skill development. The easier that skill is for you to perform, the less you are growing while performing it.

Sure, it’s important to maintain the skills you’ve developed. But don’t complain if you’re not progressing as quickly as you wanted to if you’re only willing to do the things you’re already good at.

You limit your growth by deciding to remain in your comfort zone. To truly make the best of it you may need to take a few steps beyond.

Real-Life Application

When you start at the bottom of the ladder and look up at everyone ahead of you, regardless of what goal you’re climbing towards it can seem overwhelming and you may feel hopeless.

But there are certain skills you gain from starting at the bottom that people who start higher up don’t have the opportunity to develop.

Your struggles in this situation, yea they may suck, and yea they may feel like a burden. But they also provide you with certain opportunities for growth that others may never get simply because they will not have to struggle the way you do.

Who do you think is going to grow up with a better work ethic? The kid whose parents did everything for them (you know, got him out of trouble, told the teacher he deserved an A instead of a C, the “Karen” parents)… or the kid whose parents taught them to be accountable to their responsibilities and that their decisions have consequences?

Let’s face it, if our lives were perfect and simple, we’d all be weak as HELL.

We wouldn’t learn anything meaningful and we’d likely never experience true growth.

So here’s what I want you to take away from today’s article.

Remember that without struggles and hardship you’d be missing out on critical opportunities to develop a crucial skill essential to success… RESILIENCY.

Final Message for Making the Best of It

Think about it, if you never had to cope with hardship or overcome challenges would you have any need for resiliency? Would you learn how to remain calm and perform effectively under pressure? Would you learn how to handle failures and mistakes?

No to all of the above…

I can’t put it any simpler than that. Without your struggles, you’d lack the mental toughness required to make significant progress towards excellence, whatever your goals may be.

Because here’s the truth, each step up that ladder is going to be harder than your last. As you progress towards your goals, or even achieve them and set your eyes on new heights, things don’t get easier. Each step is going to challenge you in ways that you could never have hoped to prepare for.

But this will also bring about the growth you may never have known you were capable of.

So no, don’t waste your time escaping hardship or avoiding your struggles. Make the best of it. Your life is going to have them regardless of how far you run anyways.

So stop running and stop wishing that things were easier for you.

Pick yourself up, push yourself through the process, embrace your struggles, and become your best self. And that is the person you need to become to achieve your definition of success.

This way, as life tosses obstacles in your path to beat you down, you’ll have the skills you need to simply and easily step over them.

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