Two Simple Life Changing Sentences
An analysis that might just flip your world view on its head
There is a new “bro” in the self-improvement space named Michael Smoak (@higherupwellness). He has a little tagline at the end of each of his posts where he says, “It isn’t easy, but it is simple. Don’t overcomplicate it.” This is intuitive knowledge that I fully believe in and have been thinking about for years ever since the thought “wait… what if I can have it all and my life goes amazingly well” popped into my ignorant, overly ambitious 16-year-old mind.
So let’s break down this seemingly simple and trite advice:
It isn’t easy, but it is simple. Don’t overcomplicate it.
It isn’t easy
What is not easy? Well, life is not easy. Through a pessimistic lens, life is simply suffering. It is struggling, striving, pursuing, and clawing your way into some realm of success and happiness (however you want to define those).
That is quite broad, so what else isn’t easy? Well, anything worth having isn’t easy. Getting a girlfriend or boyfriend requires lots of intentional effort. It means going out of your comfort zone through multiple dates, maybe even dabbling in the dreaded war zone of tedious swiping on dating apps. It means being open and vulnerable with someone else, which can always feel icky. It means spending lots of time and money on a person to impress and connect with them. All in hopes of finding a partner.
Finding a job isn’t easy; getting in shape or building muscle isn’t easy; getting wealthy isn’t easy; achieving peace and a calm mind is NOT EASY.
If something is not easy, therefore it is difficult and hard (duh). If something is difficult and hard, is it worth doing? From my experience, the fact that it is difficult is the very signal that it is worth doing. No one achieved anything great that was easy. If it is easy, then that means most people can do it, which means it is therefore an average thing to achieve and accomplish, which decreases its value. However, the difficult goal/mission/dream is an exceptional thing to achieve because it is a narrow path that many people will fall off of because of the grueling effort it takes to stay on the path.
Most people don’t want hard; they want easy. Most people look at the hard thing someone accomplished and then drastically downplay it by calling it easy, usually to fix the status hierarchy in their mind, usually to protect their ego. Most people don’t yet understand that doing the easy thing now will only lead to a more difficult life down the road, but doing the difficult thing now will lead to an easy life down the road.
Never assume your idols’ achievements were easy. If the surface of the iceberg is the achievements, success, and glory, then the huge unseen part is full of struggle, sacrifice, failures, reflection, iteration, and practice. Most of the desires you deeply want to fulfill will be difficult; if it is easy, maybe you picked the wrong desire.
Okay, so now we have acknowledged that most (not all) things worth doing and getting aren’t easy and that that is a good thing. Maybe the hard path is worth it. “But how can you call the difficult path simple? It clearly can’t be simple.” To that thought you may have had, I say, “Why not?”
, but it is simple.
Why can’t walking down the difficult path be simple? Why can’t the wall that high achievers climb be straightforward? Why can’t you do that thing that seems ‘too hard’ and ‘too much’, even though deep down part of your soul flickers when you think about doing that thing, as it waits for your action to spark its light?
The reality is IT IS THAT SIMPLE. The blunt truth is that deep down you know exactly how to get what you say you want. This is sometimes referred to as the knowing-doing gap. The phenomenon where people understand what they should do, or at least what would help, but avoid acting on that knowledge. They don’t do it because of a lack of willpower, agency, discipline, ambition, care, and in some cases more knowledge, to name a few.
Jimmy’s New Year’s Resolution was to put on 5 lbs of muscle this year and get in better shape. Jimmy is a skinny guy with a claimed ‘fast metabolism’ that is the apparent reason he is still skinny. Jimmy also is chronically on his laptop for his remote job at home. Jimmy also doom-scrolls like everyone else and has seen a variety of fitness and health videos on his algorithm feeding him little bouts of workout plans, diet tips, mindset changes, etc. If Jimmy was honest with himself, he would admit that he knows how to achieve his goal. He knows he lives 10 minutes from a gym, he knows his ‘fast metabolism’ (though possibly true) is an excuse to not increase his calories enough to put on size, and he knows going on more walks or even a run would get him in great shape. But even with this information, Jimmy never follows through on any of it.
So why is hypothetical Jimmy not taking action when he has the knowledge he needs to start? Well, in short, he doesn’t want to. If his desire was great enough, if he was ready to change his ways, if he actually wanted the extra 5 pounds of muscle and to get in shape, then he would in fact take action with his knowledge. It is, in fact, that simple.
It is simply a matter of having the knowledge, which most people who can be VERY honest with themselves already have, then taking action towards that single outcome that you want to achieve in that area of your life. Ask yourself: What do I say I want but act like I don’t know how to get? During this introspection, be brutally honest with yourself. Maybe even ask this follow-up question: No bullshit, how do I get what I want, what is it I can actually do to get it? You will then have a flood of ideas come to mind. “Ohhhh, if I want a girlfriend, I just go up to and talk to more girls I find attractive, I go to locations that attract the person I’d be interested in more often, I use dating apps and send messages instead of random likes. Wow, it really is that simple.”
More often than not, yes, it is that simple. It is just a matter of using the knowledge you have and taking immediate action on it, even if that immediate action is just the first step. Be impatient with your actions and patient with the results.
Don’t overcomplicate it.
At this point, your mind will try to play a plethora of tricks on you. It will tell you that it is much more complicated than that, it is not that simple, it is a lot of effort and very hard (butttt... we already accepted that thought, and are becoming okay with doing what is hard... right?!). One should remain focused on their outcome and the actions they know to take to get that outcome. A powerful mindset shift is to expect the best. Expect that you will get the outcome you are hoping for. Expect that it could be easier than you expected. Expect that if you take the simple step-by-step actions they will work out in your favor. You must constantly fight the lies that will keep coming up. If you don’t, your mind will find the perfect justification for why it is in fact not simple but complicated, or how it is easy and therefore you can get it another time, or even that you are better off in your current situation (hint: there is likely a good reason that desire is so strong in you). To rebut those kinds of excuses, I like to remind myself of a fabulously true quote from Richard Feynman:
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.
Here are some extra tips that might help you not fool yourself on this topic:
Focus on taking action one step at a time. After that step is complete, take the next step. Don’t focus on all the steps you must take, just take the one right in front of you that you know you can take.
Fear only exists in the mind. It might feel real and in your face, but remember no matter what, it only exists in the mind.
Feeling too out of your comfort zone? Good, that’s called making a change (ideally for the better). Embrace and smile in the uncomfortable zone; it is where growth occurs.
Ironically, everything you have just read might seem daunting. You might feel overwhelmed after I have, hopefully, lifted the veil of delusion from your eyes so you can see reality a bit clearer for what it is. Apropos of these feelings and the new life awaiting you, feel free to just go back to this one simple reminder:
It isn’t easy, but it is simple. Don’t overcomplicate it.
Each of these explanations can be taken back to the two sentences I analyzed during this read. Feel free to disagree with this, but do test it out in your own life before writing it off. Be open-minded and ask yourself, “wait… what if I can have it all (just not all at once) and my life goes amazingly well?” I suspect this level of rational optimism will radically improve your life, it has and continues to radically improve mine.
Payton