032 | 3 Timeless Mantras to Endure Any Hardship.

My life was relatively void of any real struggle or hardship until I turned 18.

Over the span of those next two years, I lost my grandfather to leukemia, spent two weeks in a behavioral hospital for drug-induced psychosis, and watched my own father lose a hard-fought battle to esophageal cancer at the height of the COVID pandemic. Through it all, I was pursuing a Master of Architecture degree, figuring out what it actually means to be an adult.

It was a dark period of my life, and my idyllic childhood left me unequipped to handle it. I was emotionally scrawny until life forced my heart to bench 300 pounds on the first try.

As my world broke apart, I was painfully rebuilding a new one from scratch. Shifting my focus to positive mindset and personal growth is what pulled me through. This is why I still find myself so interested in the topics I discuss; I know these ideas can work for others, because they worked for me.

This Sunday, I’m sharing three powerful mantras I rely on when shit gets rough. These aren’t feel-good, “you can do it!”, kind of mantras (baseless affirmations make me nauseous).

What I find much more effective is positing a few big ideas, each rooted in reality and proven with simple reasoning. Each one leverages our past, present, and future respectively - helping us endure hard times and keep chugging on.

Let’s begin.

Think of everything you’ve been through already. Your first high-school heartbreak. The unforeseen layoff, the grieving of a loved one. Chances are, you’ve been through worse than whatever you’re going through right now.

Most encouragement asks you to believe something you can’t prove. You hear people say “things will get better” and “you’re stronger than you know” and it feels like you’re being lied to. This line points back to yourself - a clear statistic that’s undeniably true. You relocate authority and draw conclusions by looking back at your own (perfect) track record. Through everything, good and bad, you’re still standing. That in itself is an accomplishment.

This line doesn’t ask you to be grateful or gain perspective. It’s not aiming to make you feel guilty by reminding you how other people have it worse. It simply states a fact, and leaves as quick as it came.

This line leverages the past and restores your power to handle the present.

This is a modern spin on a line from the New Testament, taking a step away from its religious roots into something more practical, timely, and succinct.

There are many reasons to feel all kinds of emotions about the future. It can’t be controlled, it’s inevitable, and it’s largely uncertain. Anything you could possibly do to make the future better, you can only do “today”. Put differently, whenever you take any action - past, present, or future - you will call it “today” when it happens. It has always been today and always will be. This is the only day we ever have any control over.

It doesn’t mean everything will always work out in your favor or that you shouldn’t think long-term. It simply means the only time you can ever act is in the present moment.

I don’t know if I’ll be healthy in ten years, but I can eat my vegetables and get my annual checkups and wear a bike helmet today. I don’t know if I’ll have to shut down my business in the distant future, but I know that I can put a solid effort to decrease those odds today. I can’t be 100% certain my girlfriend will marry me, but I can treat her with kindness and take the trash out and maybe treat her to a nice dinner - today.

Everything can only be dealt with today. The future will be handled by a future version of you - a version with more knowledge, experience, and wisdom than you do. If you’re worried about the future, do what you can to influence it. If your worries are outside of anything you can actively influence, it’s simply not worth thinking about.

If you can’t control it, it’ll either happen or it won’t. Your worries have little use.

I resort back to this one a lot, given my current situation. I’m struggling with one particular circumstance right now, one that I will only discuss once it’s behind me.

The byproduct of these struggles have rippled into adjacent issues with personal self-worth, confidence, and my inability to be the best person I can be for the people I care about most. As I’m building a business for the first time, I still experience wide-ranging mood swings, from joy to despair to everything in between. But I’ve realized that the only way out is through.

That said, this is no reason to send pity. I love my life as a whole and I wouldn’t trade it for anyone else’s. The life I’m living, complete with its wonders and its struggles, is the story I’ll tell someday.

When an older-me reminisces about his life, he’ll talk about the hard times.

Older-me will harp on about the time he ate cashews and rice for a week because he spent all his money on rent, maxed out the credit card, and wouldn’t be paid ‘til next Friday. He’ll share those disorienting, strange weeks he spent in that behavioral facility, where he was forbidden from listening to music or going outside even once.

He could jam on about the years he spent in construction - digging trenches, shoveling rocks, driving trucks, and pouring concrete for 10 to 12 hours a day - both in the blistering heat and the freezing cold.

He’ll recall the day he was laid off from his only corporate job without notice in the midst of the worst job markets in recent history.

I won’t share these stories just to relive the moments of my life, but to find the people going through the same struggles and help them feel less alone. Somewhere in the world, there’s a young man who just lost his father, a high schooler slowly re-stabilizing from psychosis, and a recent college grad who didn’t expect they’d still need to work two jobs just to exist.

I will help them find hope that there is a way forward, that one day they’ll be on the other side of this struggle, just to find a new one they never expected.

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But maybe our problems are what make life meaningful in the first place. Perhaps we should actually seek out more problems, instead of wishing to be free of them. When I look back at my life so far, the most meaningful times have also been the hardest to get through. The easiest times have been largely forgotten.

Earlier this week, Kris Smith, a fellow Substack writer, wrote to me: “The only people without problems are dead and I want big problems.” I’d never heard it framed this way before.

I feel the same - not because it’s always jolly ol’ time dealing with serious hardship, but because I know I’ll become a different person on the other side of it. A new version of me will emerge. One with a greater ability to endure challenges, face hardship, and keep pushing onward.

I’ll send you into the week with one question.

Which of your ongoing struggles are problems to be solved, and which ones are feelings to be outgrown?

-KPG