January 26, 2026
Every single one of us is going to have a season of life where we experience hard times.
This is not something we can willfully choose to skip in the human experience.
The difference, though, lies in how we choose to handle the burden of the cross when it is placed upon our shoulders.
For most of us, we cave to societal social norms we have cultivated in which we attempt to craft the worst sob story possible as if this is some competition to see who has it the worst.
I can’t stand that narrative nor that approach.
You are not unique, your struggle may be, but all of us will be forced to face these moments.
In the competition to see who has it the worst, the only person that loses is you.
The circus of supporters who reinforce your story do nothing but help you waste more time, energy, and focus, leaving you exactly where you started – in a never ending cycle of victim mentality.
Instead of this mindset, I choose to encourage myself and others to follow people who leverage their hard time as a defining moment in their life.
It is, in fact, just a moment, and if you let it become anything more than that moment it will destroy you.
Yet, when you step back and shed the victim identity, you will realize that the hard time you have been given is an opportunity to strengthen yourself, to deepen your roots, to build a reservoir of resilience and experience that will catapult you forward into the next phase of life.
This view of the struggle, the cross, the “heavy burden” is one that, in my opinion, is optimal for us to embrace.
No more of the “I had it the worst mentality”
What I observe is that people who successfully navigate a hard time in their life will often continue to pursue hard things simply because it allows them to continually elevate their ability to perform through all seasons of their life.
To them, complacency becomes a crutch and if you are not moving forward you are slipping backwards.
The only way to prevent this is to willfully engage in difficult pursuits.
Stop the societal sob story and the circus of victims from reinforcing their narrative in your life.
Be the person who goes out to create their own story of overcoming and then show the world how you did it.
