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Every wise man, from the inception of thought until right this minute, has shared one single sentiment: Life is filled with STRUGGLES. Jesus said, “In this world you will have trouble.” Buddha’s first truth is that “life is suffering.” Other wise men have echoed the very same. We’re not that wise nor eloquent, but at The Fittest, we know enough to know these men are right, and we don’t mince words. We’re not sages or revered across time, so we simply say… sometimes shit sucks.
Occasionally that mountain of suck is a matter of circumstance, but oftentimes, it’s not circumstantial at all. Instead, it’s ACQUIRED through laziness, through bad decisions, and through passivity. That means you receive that particular hardship, usually through inaction. We call that “passive struggle” and it’s a result of nothing more than sheer and utter weakness and a "victim mindset." In this scenario, you are letting life happen to you.
The other, more noble struggle… the struggle that’s chosen by the STRONG… by the warrior… that shit is called “active struggle” which, 9 times out of 10, leads to a profound lack of passive struggle.
You see, ladies and gentlemen, you WILL struggle, but we guarantee you that passive struggle will always suck way more than active struggle.
What do we mean? Here’s an example:
Get after it in the gym with blood-burning, I’m gonna die, everything hurts, labored breathing, heart pounding out of your chest effort. Eat a nose-to-tail, horns-to-hooves, bones-to-blood diet. Skip the late night out drinking with the crew to prioritize quality sleep. Be disciplined as hell. Sounds hard, right? It is. Sometimes it sucks.
Don’t do any of that hard shit. Be fat. Have diabetes. Your heart will still pound and your breathing will still be labored, but not from working out… just from climbing the stairs to the bedroom or walking your ass to the fridge to get beer and Cheetos. Sounds hard, right? It is. It sucks way more than the active struggle.
Multiply the suck of that passive struggle by all of the split second decisions not to do hard shit and you’re looking at sheer misery. It’s that dire.
But…
If you CHOOSE to do the hard things in life, the passive struggles are few and far between AND they’re far easier to deal with. I know, for example, if I get up EARLY: like, REALLY EARLY and hit the heavy weights, get a hard sprint session in… do the HARDEST things first, the rest of the challenges of the day seem like they’ve had the volume turned down. I CHOSE to suffer in a controlled, calculated way, and everything is easy by comparison. It allows you to face the other hard things with relative ease because you become a hardened badass instead of a weak, passive individual who is stricken with fear when something difficult is facing you: the hard conversation, the financial struggle, the tough decision, or the emergency.
We don’t say this to motivate you hoorah style, trying to push you to be the next David Goggins. We say this to show you there’s a softer, easier way to struggle than going the passive route where the struggle chooses you and not the other way around. Active struggle makes life worth living. Passive struggle… all bets are off.
If you want to learn to struggle actively, email our performance experts NOW.
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