NOW OR LATER

Life is hard. Choose your hard.

“After all, we are the sum total of our choices. We become what we constantly choose.”

Hi!

It should be common knowledge now, dear friend, that whatever you are choosing now, you will get the exact opposite of, in the future.

It took a long while to arrive at this, but it's the truth. Especially for this thing called life. That for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

Look around you, and you can almost tell how your future will be like, by this same logic.

If you have been constantly choosing comfort, pleasure, gratification in the present moment, in what you can call the formative years — when you still have the time, energy, and opportunity to choose differently, you are automatically subscribing to hardship in the future.

If you spend all your time bingewatching Netflix, or on the couch playing video games, or on your bed sleeping inordinately, when you are supposed to be putting in the work and putting in energy into what you hope to become and things you hope to achieve, then you will spend the future putting in all the work, when the energy has diminished, and when there are no hopes that you will enjoy the fruits of the work.

Constantly choosing comfort now is you automatically subscribing to hardship in the future.

In short, if you eat the scraps of fruits that you have now, instead of digging the ground and burying these fruits for future purposes, you will either beg in the future, or have to use your diminished energy in the future to dig the ground and bury your seeds. God help you live long enough to see them grow!

Don't get me wrong, this newsletter is not about not having fun, or not watching Netflix, or not enjoying pleasure of whatever kind.

Of course, you can do that occasionally. You can use them as rewards after planting seeds. Your life doesn't have to be sad and forlorn just because you want gigantic trees of delicious fruits in the future.

The message in this newsletter is this; when you consistently choose pleasure and comfort today, you are voting for discomfort tomorrow.

We see this in food, sleep, sex, etc. Constantly chewing sweets and sugar now will kill your teeth in the future teeth. Constantly choosing sleep instead of gym will tell on your future health. And don't even get me started with what happens when you are constantly choosing sex. This is the truth of life.

Life is going to be hard at a point, however, you have the power to choose what point you want life to be hard at. If you choose hard right now, it means you are choosing ease later; and if you choose ease now, you are invariably choosing hard later.

You have the power to choose what point you want life to be hard at. Now or later.

Dear reader, you don't have to think for too long before you figure out what you have been choosing consistently.

You would know if you have been choosing comfort, or discomfort, and depending on what you have been choosing, you can absolutely already see how your future will look like.

If it isn't already obvious, you should know that American Psychologists embarked on a study some years back and they concluded that "people who delay gratification are more likely to be successful."

Delayed gratification is putting off enjoyment and pleasure for later. It is saving and planting your seeds for the future when other people are eating their seeds right now.

If you save resources, you are delaying spending, and this helps you take advantage when portals of opportunities that will help you multiply the resources you have saved opens up in the future. Imagine you have eaten up the resources earlier?!

See why people who plant their seeds and push pleasure until later, delaying gratification, are more likely to be successful?

This applies to so many things. Your physical health, your career, your finances, your relationships, every single thing that truly matters.

If you consider it important enough, worthy enough the wait, you will pay the price now in form of discomfort, hardship, pain, patience, prayer, and sweat, so you can eat the fruits in the future.

Life will be hard, but you decide, by what you choose today, if you want your own hard now, or later.

Poll Question: If you read till this point, kindly comment.

If an Angel appears to you now, and tells you, that you have to pick between enjoying all the world’s pleasures for the next five years, and then pay the price of these pleasures for the rest of your life, or paying the price, sacrificing for six years and enjoying pleasures for the rest of your life after that; what will you choose?

As you comment, think on these things as you go into the week.

To your growth,

Your Coach,

Abiola Okunsanya,

Handzinspired.