By 
I can’t tell you how to live your life.
Well, okay. That’s a lie. I can and do all the time. Here, watch. I’ll do it some more right now.
Eat more vegetables.
Take steps to try to better yourself.
Share this post with at least ten people after you read it, and God will love you more.
My point is just that you don’t have to listen to anything I say. You can nod along for a few paragraphs and say, “Whatever weirdo,” exit out of this page, share it with no one, and accept that God hates you.
But I hope you don’t, because I do know of one piece of advice that you might not get in your life, and I think it’s absolutely crucial to getting what you want. And it’s this:
Do what you hate.
Not in general, but sometimes. Sometimes do what you hate. Sometimes, you should really make yourself miserable. Sometimes your primary thought while you’re doing something should be “Someone please shoot me in the face.”
Here’s what I mean.
We’re told from early on in our lives to do what you love, and I’m not saying that the intent of that is bad advice. It’s not. After all, the best possible life you could live would of course somehow involve you doing what you love most of the time.
But because we’ve been told to do what we love over and over and over, it fucks with our head. As a result, we develop an expectation to always be loving what we do. We have this thought inside that every moment of our pursuit of what we love should be wonderful, and full of orgasms, and on some level, easy.
We feel like if what we’re doing right now doesn’t feel this way, then fuck everything. This is all bullshit, and fuck you, mom. We’re going to listen to Linkin Park in our room.
But the fact of the matter is, for basically all of us, a huge part of getting to do what you love—especially for a living—is doing a lot of shit you hate. This is inevitable. This is happening. Get used to it.
If you want to be a doctor, you have to deal with the stresses of medical school, you have to dive deep into debt, and no matter what your specialty is, you also have to spend way too much time looking at peoples’ assholes.
If you want to own your own pie shop, you have to do boring cost-benefit analyses, you have to waste a ton of food on trial and error, and you have to put up with shithead customers who pointed at strawberry rhubarb but insist they really wanted blueberry, and say “I think I should at least get a BOGO or something.”
If you want to be a writer, you have to sell yourself, you have to write to the standards of other people, and you have to…
*vomits for forty minutes straight*
…network.
You have to be prepared for this. You have to be ready for it to come. You have to go into your first time getting a tattoo knowing it will hurt, or else you’ll just say, “Ow fuck!” and storm out of the parlor with nothing but a random swirl near your nipple.
This goes beyond work too. In order to fall in love with somebody you have to put up with at least a little bit of boring small talk, emotional risk, and time investment.
In order to look the way you want, you have to eat tasteless food and move your jiggly body way more than you could ever want.
In order to get in your in-laws’ good graces, you have to laugh at their jokes and not openly boo their political opinions.
That’s all tough. That’s all worth hating and worth doing.
If you’re ill-prepared for any of the shit you have to put up with, you will flounder, and quit, and eventually realize there is nothing cool out there that you find to be worth the actual effort.
Which just means that you’ll never really try for anything cool, and your odds of ending up 48 with a dead end job and telling 12-year-olds on X-Box Live that you fucked their mom just skyrocketed.
So how do we avoid this? How do prepare ourselves for the shit sandwiches coming our way? How do we become tolerant of that which we hate?
Simple: We do things we hate right now.
The brain is, in many ways, a muscle. It gets stronger in certain contexts. It grows more tolerant of certain experiences the same way an arm can grow more tolerant of lifting weights.
So it’s important that, starting right now, you throw some shit you hate into the recipe of your life. Vaccinate yourself with boredom, mental anguish and sore muscles. Go on. Do it. Get your brain into the weight room, and lift, bro. Do it now. Pump that iron. Get swole (not literally. I think a swollen brain can like…kill you).
Now what do we mean by this?
Do we mean that you should just start sniffing paint, drinking battery acid, watching Dr. Phil because you would theoretically “hate” these things? Well duh, of course not.
You should find an activity you hate that’s also good for you. This means you can start to eat more celery instead of Doritos, read an educational book instead of watching a tiny house show, or run instead of watching a tiny house show while eating Doritos.
Running is one of my most common choices. I’m not unhealthy, I don’t care much about how my body looks, and I don’t lead a particularly physical lifestyle. Running doesn’t seem like it would be that necessary for me. It does help to center me a little, but the real key to my life that running fulfills is that I fucking hate it.
I get no runner’s high. I’m convinced all of you who talk about a runner’s high are lying. I despise every God damn minute of running. It’s hard, and boring. It’s like doing pull-ups while talking to a stranger in an elevator.
I’m convinced anyone who likes running has a mental illness. Running is torture.
But that’s the power of it. When I run even though I don’t want to, it helps to rewire my brain. It helps me to write when I don’t want to. It helps me to do dishes when I don’t want to. It helps me to peak at my bank account when I don’t want to. Running is the key that unlocks productivity, because it helps to un-spoil me. I get used to doing what I hate.
Now of course, you can find your own activity. The key here is in doing something that helps to develop a stronger self-discipline.
Let go of the idea that you need to always be doing what you love, and you’ll be more able to accomplish all of the shitty, boring, mind-numbing tasks that are necessary to actually getting to do what you love. This gives you an opportunity to go for what you want like never before.
So get excited. Go on, get out there and finally, truly, go for what you want.
Congratulations. This is the start of a whole new life for you. You’re going to hate it.
