Pick Your Hard

The Buddy Moving to Tennessee

A buddy of mine is moving to Tennessee.

He has been getting his ass kicked out here. Life has been hard. Harder than he wants it to be.

So he is packing up and heading somewhere cheaper, somewhere slower, somewhere he can catch his breath and reset the board.

I understand the move.

I have made it myself.

Sometimes you need to step back from the fight, get your wind, and come back stronger.

Sometimes the environment is the problem and the only smart play is to change the environment.

But I have also seen guys use a move like this as a way to quit without admitting they quit.

They tell themselves they are resetting.

They are actually retreating.

And there is a difference, even if it is hard to see from the inside.

There is a phrase I think about when I watch people face this decision.

So pick your hard.

Every path has a cost.

The question is which cost you are willing to pay.

The DWP Guys

I spent decades in construction.

I worked my way up from apprentice to foreman on jobs that pushed everyone to their limit.

The work was hard.

The hours were long.

The environment was loud and dirty and full of personalities that would test a saint.

Some guys could not hack it.

That is not a judgment. That is a fact.

The work broke them, or they decided the juice was not worth the squeeze, or they looked around one day and realized they did not want to be fifty years old and still humping conduit up a ladder.

Two guys I knew left the new construction side of the union and switched over to the DWP, working for the utility companies.

The Department of Water and Power. Government work. Predictable hours and a ton of overtime. A slower pace. A break from the grind.

They wanted easier. And they got it.

Here is the thing.

I did not leave construction because it was hard.

I stayed for decades. I challenged myself to learn the lessons inside the difficulty.

• The idiots on the crew taught me patience
• The long hours taught me endurance
• The pressure taught me focus

I walked into that environment as an apprentice who knew nothing and I walked out as a foreman who could run multi-million-dollar projects.

The hardness was the point.

It was the thing that made me capable of things I could not have done otherwise.

My buddies who left for the DWP were not chasing growth.

They were chasing comfort. That is a slippery slope.

One easy decision leads to another.

Pretty soon you have built a life around avoiding difficulty, and the person you become is not someone who can handle difficulty when it finds you anyway.

I Was Twenty and Completely Lost

I know what it feels like to need a reset. I have been there.

When I was twenty years old, I was living at home with my mom in Honolulu.

I was working about twenty hours a week at a restaurant.

I was training in aikido, which was the one good thing I had going.

Everything else was a mess.

I had barely graduated high school. A C-minus average.

I did not apply myself. I did not care.

School felt like a hoop to jump through and I was not interested in jumping.

I tried to join the Air Force. They rejected me.

I tried to join the Navy. They rejected me too.

My asthma was too debilitating.

The military looked at my medical records and said no thanks.

So I enrolled at the local community college. I did lousy there too.

No direction.

No plan.

No reason to show up other than the vague sense that I was supposed to.

And I had distractions.

Honolulu is called the melting pot of the Pacific.

It is beautiful. The beaches are world-class.

The clubs run all night, last call at 3:45am.

The wahines are everywhere.

The recreational escapes are easy to find. Alcohol. Weed. Other stuff.

I was not a disaster, but I was not going anywhere either.

I was treading water in paradise, and nobody notices when you are treading water in paradise because the water is warm and the sun is out.

I was lost. Flat-out, no-excuses, no-plan lost.

The Decision

At some point I realized something.

My life was not going to change unless I changed it. Honolulu was all I knew, but it was not working.

The environment was not the whole problem, but it was part of the problem. It was too comfortable. Too familiar.

Too easy to do the same thing tomorrow that I did today because tomorrow was going to be seventy-eight degrees and sunny no matter what.

I made a decision. I left.

I moved to Glendale, California, and lived in my aunt's den. A den.

Not a bedroom. A converted space with a pullout couch and a suitcase and no idea what I was doing.

It was not a lateral move. It was an upgrade in opportunity.

Los Angeles had as much, if not more, to offer than Honolulu. The job market was bigger. The path forward was clearer, even if I could not see it yet.

I got a job at a hotel. It sucked. The pay was bad. The work was mindless.

But while I was working there, a fire alarm company was there doing an upgrade. I talked to the guy working on the panels. He told me they were hiring.

I had never thought about being an low-voltage electrician. I had never thought about the trades at all. But I listened.

That hotel job led to the fire alarm company.

The fire alarm company led to the union.

The union led to an apprenticeship.

The apprenticeship led to a career that gave me a comfortable livelihood, a quality of life I could not have imagined at twenty, and the skills that eventually made me a foreman on billion-dollar jobs.

None of that would have happened if I had not taken the first step.

If I had stayed in Honolulu, doing the same things, waiting for something to change on its own.

I did not leave because it was too hard. I left because where I was, was not leading anywhere I wanted to go.

The Fine Line

Here is the part that is hard to explain.

There is a fine line between resetting the board and quitting too soon.

And sometimes, when you are standing in the middle of your own life, you cannot tell which side of the line you are on.

I have watched guys leave jobs because the work was hard and tell themselves they were making a strategic career move.

I have watched guys leave relationships because things got difficult and tell themselves they were prioritizing their own growth.

I have watched guys leave cities, leave training, leave commitments, and every time they had a story about why it was the right call.

Some of them were right. Some of them were lying to themselves. The difference was in the answer to a few questions.

Three Questions

Over the years, I developed three questions I ask myself whenever I am standing in front of a big decision that involves leaving something behind.

They have saved me from bad moves more than once.

First: do I want to leave because it is too hard, or because it is not leading me toward the life I want to live?

This is the most important question.

The two things look similar from the outside.

Both involve walking away. But one is running from pain and the other is running toward purpose.

I did not leave construction because of the idiots on the crew or the hard sweaty work.

I challenged myself to stay inside the difficulty and learn the lessons it was teaching me.

I left Honolulu because the environment was not building anything. It was just holding me in place.

The Tennessee move is a good one if my buddy is running toward something.

• A slower pace so he can think clearly
• A lower cost of living so he can build savings
• A fresh start where he can apply the lessons he learned the hard way

It is a bad move if he is just running away from difficulty, because difficulty follows you. The geography changes. The math does not.

Second: is this a lateral shift or an upgrade?

Do not do lateral shifts.

A lateral shift is when you change the scenery but keep the same problems.

• Same job, different company
• Same relationship dynamics, different person
• Same habits, different zip code

Los Angeles was an upgrade over Honolulu.

More opportunity. More jobs. More paths I had not even seen yet.

When other electrical shops offered me work during my career, I always asked myself: are they offering a promotion, or just the same job with a different name on the truck?

If it was the same job, it was not worth the risk of burning bridges or damaging my reputation.

Third: am I challenging myself to be better, or am I trying to make my life easier?

One leads to growth. The other leads to weakness.

That is not a metaphor. Every time you choose the easier path, you get a little weaker.

Every time you choose the harder path and survive it, you get a little stronger.

Compound that over twenty years and the gap between the two versions of you is unbridgeable.

The DWP guys wanted easier. They found it.

And maybe that was the right call for them.

But the version of me that stayed in the union and fought through the hard years is capable of things the version of me that left for government work would not be.

The Hard You Choose

Here is what I have learned after forty-plus years of working and training and starting over and failing and getting back up.

Life is going to be hard no matter what you do.

That is not pessimism. That is math. The question is which hard you are going to choose.

It is hard to stay in a place that is not working and grind until you figure it out.

It is also hard to leave everything you know and start over somewhere new.

Both are hard. Pick the hard that leads somewhere.

It is hard to stay in a job that pushes you past your limits every day.

It is also hard to leave a steady paycheck and retrain in a new industry.

Both are hard. Pick the hard that builds the person you want to become.

It is hard to stay in the gym when you are getting smashed every round.

It is also hard to quit and know you quit.

Both are hard. Pick the hard you can respect.

The people who build lives they are proud of are not the ones who avoided difficulty.

They are the ones who chose the right difficulty and refused to flinch.

I cannot tell you whether to stay or go.

Nobody can tell you that.

The only person who knows whether you are resetting the board or quitting too soon is you, and only if you are honest with yourself.

But I will tell you this. I was twenty years old, living at home, going nowhere, and I made a call that changed everything.

It was not the easy call. It was terrifying.

I left everything I knew for a den in Glendale and a future I could not see.

And it worked.

Not because I was smart. Not because I was talented. Because I was willing to take the first step and then keep walking.

Challenge yourself to be better. Not to make life easier.

One leads to growth. The other leads to weakness.

You already know which one you are running toward.

Pick the hard you can be proud of.

⚔ The Dojo Drill

Today’s training:

The Reputation Drill

Ask yourself:

Adjust behavior accordingly.

📚 Leader’s Library

Book I recommend this week:

​The Personal MBA — Josh Kaufman​

Why?

Because it's was one of my first and to this day, one of my favorite books, to learn about entrepreneurship, business and how to work on and with yourself and others.
​
(But get the paperback version, not the audio or digital, you will thank me later.)

P.S. Know a martial arts gym owner who’s stressed about money or student numbers?

Do them a favor: send them to The Leader's Dōjō, my website where I help owners get more students and keep them longer with simple systems.

One forward from you could change their gym: The Leader's Dōjō​

Chuck