Let me tell you something personal. When I was a teenager, I was totally fixated on this whole fantasy idea of shortcuts to everything I wanted in life. You know; the old idea, I want all the good stuff with no real effort. Wow, was I a moron! It took me years to finally figure it out, and wake up that I was just lying to myself. That saying about "If wishes were horses, then beggars would ride" really applies.
Here is the major thing about life - you are always going to be positioned somewhere between your start and your desired place. If you don't know where your start point is, then you can never know what you are actually looking for. And if you don't know what you are looking for; you are just wandering aimlessly. It is like expecting GPS to give you directions without entering a destination.
When you think about it, life is filled with fairly straightforward rules. You don't do the work, you don't eat. You don't do the work to get better, you don't get better. You ignore relationships, those relationships fall apart. It's not some sort of magic, it's just how things are. Sure, we hear about people winning the lotto, or inheriting money but that's not the shortcut to success people think it is. Just look at the statistics for lotto winners, a high percentage of these people end up broke because they never learned the hard work process with money.
The hard way is a lot more like making an investment in yourself. There is a great mental construction taking place every time you face a challenge and work through it. When you do everything the hard way, you know that you earned it. That confidence and sense of self-worth is real and palpable, based on your own success and not a winning combination or shortcuts.
Life has a way of eventually turning things back around to the areas we have been avoiding. This is when our perspectives start to shift and we realize that all of those shortcuts have brought us to an empty state inside ourselves. No skills, no relationships, no real accomplishments to take pride in; like running a race and taking so many shortcuts that you actually end up in a completely different destination than you intended.
Do not get me wrong, I am not suggesting that we make our lives harder than they need to be. Working smarter is a great approach to life and oftentimes finding a more efficient way to work is definitely not a bad thing. The problem arises as we begin not to do anything that may actually involve real work or may appear difficult. This is how we end up stuck in jobs that we hate, in relationships that do not meet our expectations or in situations where the effort required to put into it seems overwhelming without realizing that avoiding that hard work is exactly why we are experiencing problems.
The thing is there is no easy way to live a meaningful life. The hard way is the best way, it involves challenges, mistakes, hard work, real life experiences. It just is not what we want to hear, but it is what we must understand if we want a life we can be proud of.