7 Reasons Why You Should Never Bitch About a Tough Life

No one plans on having a tough life. It’s quite literally the last thing anyone wants or even expects. But even so, unfortunately sometimes it just happens. Even to the best of us.

More often than not, it’s the result of some poor life choices. As they say, you live and learn.

But other times, it just comes down to plain old bad luck. No one’s fault. Some unfortunate souls are just dealt a bad hand right out of the gate.

Either way, when you do happen to find that your life is tougher than you might have envisaged, you basically have two choices.

You can feel bitter, feel sorry for yourself, and let it cast a black cloud over your entire life and where it takes you.

Or, you can look for the positives in your life through the tough times, use them as learning and growing experiences, and move forward in your life wiser and stronger.

Here are 7 reasons why having a tough life doesn’t make you a failure and doesn’t necessarily make your life a disaster. And why choosing to focus on the positive side of a tough life is always the only choice you should ever consider.

1. Tough times don’t last forever

The only constant in life is change. Nothing ever stays the same.

Nothing.

Good times turn to bad times, and bad times turn to good times. Blessings become curses, and curses become blessings.

That’s the normal cycle of life. It’s the natural order of things.

It’s possible to look back on your life so far and conclude that it’s been tough. But even so, you just don’t know what tomorrow will bring. You can’t assume it’s going to continue the same way.

Things can change at the drop of a hat.

And life can suddenly turn around beyond your wildest imagination.

The important thing is to stay optimistic and keep your eyes open for opportunities. Life often has an uncanny way of delivering solutions to your problems when you do.

And more often than not, it does so just when you need them. Even when you’re not expecting it.

Opportunities can come in many forms. It can happen through meeting someone, a new job, some new-found piece of information, a change in the economy, or even just a totally random situation.

You’ll only recognise an opportunity, however, if you’re keeping your mind open to the possibility of things changing. If all you focus on is just more misery, that’s most likely exactly what you’ll get.

2. Someone else has it worse than you

How do you define a tough life?

A person just struggling to get ahead in life and make ends meet in a dirty, physically demanding job would probably consider their life to be tough.

Someone living in poverty and hunger, however, would no doubt be happy to exchange that life for theirs. At least they would be making some money, which would enable them and their family to eat.

A prison inmate serving a life sentence might understandably prefer any life of freedom to his own.

Any parent who’s lived through the loss of a child has suffered arguably the worst pain of what a tough life can throw at someone.

The fact is, there is no true definition of a tough life.

No matter what you’ve experienced in your life, there’s always someone who’s had an easier life, and someone who’s had a tougher one.

Some years ago while backpacking through South America, I found myself sitting next to a Peruvian Indian farmer, known as a “campesino”, on a bus trip between Arequipa and Nazca. As we exchanged stories about our very different lives, he explained that he was a father to three young children.

He then shocked me by offering me his eldest daughter, suggesting I take her back home to Australia with me to raise here. Because life was so difficult for his family and offered so few opportunities for a better future, his hope was that she could have a better life somehow in Australia.

Of course, I declined the farmer’s offer. But I still think about him to this day. It’s hard to imagine how desperate someone’s life must be to consider offering their own child to a total stranger in the hope that he may provide her with a brighter future.

It makes me both sad for him and his family, and extremely grateful for the good fortune I’ve had in my life. It’s not something I ever take for granted.

As far as comparing your difficult life to that of others, there’s really no point.

It might make you feel better in the moment to sulk over your lot and compare it to someone’s better fortune, but it’s a disgrace to do so. No matter what you’re contending with in your life, there’s always someone who would love to switch places with you.

No one ever said life was fair. Get over it.

There’s someone in the world right now to whom life is being even more unfair.

3. Perception is reality

What does that mean, “Perception is reality”?

In simple terms, it means that your reality isn’t the result of what happens to you, so much as how you think about, or perceive, what happens to you.

If you make the choice to perceive hardships and challenges in your life as horrible, painful things, then that’s exactly what they’ll be for you. Perceive them as offering something positive, on the other hand, and that’s what your reality will be.

There’s one thing for certain: if you believe that your future will be a tough, miserable one, then it will be. Not because you’ll cause bad things to happen to you by some black magic. But because regardless of what does happen to you, your mindset will perceive it as a problem and that will be your experience.

The fact is, every experience in life has both a positive and negative side to it. It’s up to you to decide which one you want to focus on.

If an experience is inherently a positive one, then of course it’s easy to see the positivity in it.

But not so with a negative one.

That takes a lot more effort. But it’s there, just the same. If you look for it. And when you find it, you’ll be the better for it.

It might be a learning experience, where you learn a lesson or inherit a dose of wisdom. It might be that it makes you emotionally or mentally stronger. It could increase your appreciation for people in your life or what you have.

The list goes on.

Hardships can bring you many rewards. You just need to be open to accepting them.

I’m not saying you should go out of your way to invite hardship into your life, of course. But if it’s going to happen, you may as well make the best of it.

4. Hardship is what gives success its value

Although some may disagree, there’s far more to life than just coasting through and having a good time. After all, contrary to what Prince claimed, life isn’t just a party.

We humans are complex creatures.

And ironically, although a major focus of our life is the need to constantly improve our standard of living and level of comfort, if we accomplish this too successfully we actually end up with a life lacking any substance, meaning, or fulfilment.

What does provide meaning and fulfilment in life is achievement. And of course, the greater the achievement, the better.

Think about a tennis champion. If all of his opponents on the way to the championship were old, frail, physically incapable and unskilled players, how much meaning would that championship have?

How proud would he be of his accomplishment?

Not very. Right?

If all of his opponents were the best in the world, on the other hand, and made things as tough and challenging as possible for him, pushing him to his very limits, then how proud would he be of being the champion?

Suddenly, it would mean something.

It would mean a lot to beat the best in the world.

The very thing that made it so tough is what would give it its value.

It’s the same with all of life.

Hardship and success are two sides of the same coin. True success, and the fulfilment and meaning that comes with it, can’t exist without hardship.

Taken from this perspective, it becomes clear that hardship can often be a friend in your life rather than just a hindrance.

5. Complaining reinforces the victim mentality

Although it may make you feel better in the moment, complaining about something that’s unavoidable serves only to reinforce the victim mentality, and conditions you to become more powerless.

It conditions you to believe that life is something that’s happening to you, and that you’re powerless to change your life’s direction.

The problem with this thinking is that it keeps you stuck.

By convincing yourself that external factors such as other people, the government, the economy, or just plain bad luck are the cause of all your struggles, you focus on blaming rather than looking for solutions.

You close your mind.

You worry about what you can’t do rather than what you can do.

Which means that when potential solutions do come your way, you’re blind to them.

By refusing to complain about your difficulties, you become motivated to take ownership of the situation.

Instead of asking “Why did this happen to me?”, you instead ask “What can I do to change this?”

This simple shift in mindset is what separates those who remain stuck from those who find a way out of their troubles.

Life isn’t always fair. That’s not news.

Just as valid a question as “Why me?” is the question, “Why not me?”

“Why” really doesn’t matter. It doesn’t change anything.

Life will always involve challenges. But we always have a choice of how to face them. We can either allow ourselves to become a victim, or we can choose to overcome.

6. Struggles build strength and character

Tough times are life’s ultimate training ground. Just like your muscles grow stronger by training them in the gym, your mind, your character, and your emotional resilience all develop whenever you face and overcome adversity in your life.

Difficult experiences force you to adapt, learn, and grow.

When life is easy and comfortable, there’s no need to push yourself beyond where you currently are. There’s no need to develop problem-solving skills, or build mental toughness.

That would be fine if you were sure that hard times would never, ever come your way.

But we all know that life doesn’t work that way.

Sooner or later, life will inevitably somehow challenge you. And when it does, you’ll be forced to dig deep and depend on whatever strength you have inside you.

Quite often, people around you will be relying on you as well.

Every struggle you endure and overcome in life is like a battle scar that proves you’re capable of handling adversity.

And the more struggles you overcome, the more unshakable you become.

Think back to your first emotional break-up or betrayal. Most likely, you were absolutely devastated. You probably wondered how you could possibly go on with your life.

But once it happened a second time, a third time, and so on, although it still hurt you knew that you would get by and move on eventually.

Because you knew that you’d done it before.

You knew that you had the strength.

You were proven.

A survivor.

And that gave you confidence.

Once you stop seeing difficulties as problems and start seeing them as opportunities to strengthen your mind, your heart, and your character, that’s growth.

Easy lives don’t create strong people. Tough times do.

7. Extraordinary people are forged through hardship

If you look around at the most successful, inspiring, and extraordinary people throughout history – the ones you look up to as heroes, you’ll see that there’s a common thread among them: they didn’t have it easy.

They all have a story to tell.

They either started from nothing and scratched and clawed their way to the top, or they overcame huge obstacles to get to where they are.

Often, their journeys were filled with failures, rejections, and hardships. But they kept moving forward.

Very few, if any, truly great people have a story that goes, “It was a piece of cake! Everything went pretty smoothly, and I had no real challenges.”

That’s because comfort doesn’t create greatness.

Adversity does.

Hardship forces people to develop grit, perseverance, and the ability to think outside the box. It fuels their hunger for success and gives them the kind of wisdom that only comes from real-world experience.

Had they given in to self-pity or complaining, they wouldn’t have achieved what they did. And no one would ever have heard of them.

Your hardships aren’t a reason to complain, they’re your story in the making.

Only when you stop seeing struggles as unfair and start seeing them as part of your journey to greatness can you unlock your true potential.

Rather than thinking about how difficult your journey is therefore, instead think about how great your story will be.