I am now convinced that nothing comes for free and everything worthwhile requires sacrifice. But we may be in luck.

Did I find a magic way to avoid sacrifice and still get the benefits? No, I won’t say that, but I have realized that the sooner you sacrifice to get what is meaningful to you, the easier. Or to put in another perspective, the more you delay sacrifice, the harder it will be.

For example, if you do a small sacrifice and wash your teeth regularly, you will not need to do a major sacrifice later in life to have your teeth fixed by a dentist costing you thousands of dollars and huge pain.

Another example is by sacrificing the instant gratification of junk food and avoiding the much harder sacrifice of trying to lose weight or even having a health condition because of bad nutrition.

A friend of mine is trying to have a baby. I remember her saying things like “having a baby is too hard to handle” or “why waste youth with raising a baby while being free to do anything?”.

I totally understand and support her way of thinking and I am not in any way judging her decisions. What I realized, and this came through her words, is that now she is sacrificing everything she has just for the possibility to have a baby. The doctor told her that if she was younger, the chances would be much higher.

I know, there are millions of implications on the above case and I don’t want to get into medical details because I would be saying things I have no idea of. The reason I am writing this article is that her situation gave us both a realization. The sooner you go through the pain the better.

This won’t make the pain easier. We still have to walk through fire to get the most out of life. But the sooner we do the better our future looks.

Here is a vague list of “hard things” I keep in mind to do to avoid harder things later:

  • brush your teeth
  • work out
  • make that phone call
  • through that away / give it away
  • note that down
  • pay that bill
  • plan it out

And more that I can’t think of now but I’m sure you got the point.

Here’s a quote I keep in mind:

“Life’s easy if you live it the hard way, and hard if you live it the easy way.”