Do difficult things

Contrary to what we usually believe… the best moments in our lives, are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times – although such experiences can also be enjoyable, if we have worked hard to attain them. The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile. – “Flow”, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

I believe in doing hard things, even though I’m not always good at practising what I preach.

Quite a few years ago I got into a habit of doing things that I didn’t feel like doing.

For example, every time I wanted to swim but felt like the pool was too cold for me to jump into, I made myself do it. Or when I didn’t want to eat healthy, I would make myself do the opposite and eat healthy instead.

Then I realised something – most of the things I didn’t feel like doing were things that were good for me, and I didn’t feel like doing them because they felt like a chore. But if I ignored how difficult the activity was and simply did it, I would reap its benefits and feel really… happy.

That’s basically what Csikszentmihalyi’s talking about in the quote above. His two main points are:

(1) Happiness is actually something we can create.

(2) We can create happiness by immersing ourselves in doing difficult but rewarding activities.

He wrote an entire book on this topic, so you can be sure that it’s a much more layered issue than I’ve made it seem, but I think he’s right.

Like a few months ago when I did a pretty big photoshoot in Kuala Lumpur – three full days of shoot, a huge crew, shooting in the blazing hot sun, a long shot list – it was so physically and mentally demanding that by the time we were done with the shoot, the happiness level of the entire crew went through the roof. If it had been a simple one-hour shoot, I don’t think we would have ended it with a good dinner at a famous tze char place in KL and a round of beer and big hugs and a pretty good feeling in our bellies.

Or how like when you have had a long, hard day at work and you come home and you crash on your sofa and you watch a really good show on Netflix like Breaking Bad or Better Call Saul and you think to yourself, ahhhh, now this is heaven. It probably wouldn’t feel the same if you had already been lounging at home the entire day being a couch potato.

We all want to find happiness. Sometimes we find it staring into the eyes of someone we love. Sometimes we find it on an airplane traveling 500 miles per hour towards a new city. But sometimes we find it in a hard and dark place, and when we finally emerge out of it we are drenched with satisfaction, peace and something resembling… happiness.