More from the Rich Roll episode featuring Brad Stulberg that I already blogged about:
There’s a point in the show where he is talking about approaches in life, and he says there are two separate aisles for self-help in book stores. One aisle is for books written by football coaches and Navy Seals saying you need to go hard on yourself, don’t quit, kick ass. And the other is written by yoga gurus and the like, saying life is hard, you have to be kind to yourself. They seem completely opposite. And they are.
But there is also yin and yang at work. You need to strike a balance. At times you need one more than the other. Society is very binary. We see things very simplistically in terms of right and wrong, good and bad, black and white. You either need to be tough or be kind. One or the other. And that’s not how life is. It’s just not the truth. Life is messy.
And this is where human beings struggle, because human beings really suck at processing complexity. We really suck at understanding and accepting duality. But that’s how life is. Life is complex, and two seemingly opposite things can both be true. The task is for us to be able to strike a balance. And it’s not always a down-the-center balance. Sometimes you need one side more, sometimes you need the other side more. That’s why life is difficult.
But there’s value in the task at hand. That’s part of the journey of life. That’s part of the experience of being human. And we just need to try our best to keep in mind that at different times, each is needed.
And as we judge which one is right here, don’t overthink it. You can’t be emotional about it. There’s no clear answer. It’s not easy. This is a difficult task.
The best way to form judgement, to form the skill of judgement, is to have experience. I think back to hikes and races, and workouts, and I like to think my judgement is pretty good on most of that now. When to push, when to dial it back. When to push to a summit, and when to turn around. It can certainly be better at times. But my understanding and judgment of those things has been honed through years and years of trial and error, success and failure.
That’s how most things in life are. You only get better through experience. And, as you try to strike a balance in these things – whether navigating life or fitness – you’re going to have bumps in the road, you’re going to have episodes of failure. It doesn’t mean one way is better than the other. It means through the accumulation of experiences, you will get better at judging these things.
And you will always be able to get better because you will never attain perfect judgement. You will still screw up. That’s just life. You just have to be accepting that life is tough, it’s not clean cut, that’s just how it is. Accept it. Don’t resist it. It’s uncomfortable to accept, but don’t resist it. Once you do, once you make peace with that, it becomes a little bit easier to navigate.