We all have some degree of stubbornness in our lives, and that’s what gives us a bit of a personality. Without our stubbornness or insistence on our default mode of thinking, we would all just be bland water. I mean, if things actually came to that it would be fine but imagining that kind of a world while being in a world full of people with individual characteristics seems a bit bland.
Too much stubbornness, needless to say, tends to lead to suffering. But did you know that stubbornness can also be a reason why you don’t take action?
Predicted Difficulty
With everything we do, there’s some level of willingness to it and an unwillingness to it. For example, I like going surfing. I love floating on top of my board and watching dolphins jump around. It’s a peaceful moment I get to enjoy early in the morning. But I can’t say I like tying my board onto my car, driving to and from the beach taking the 405 freeway, changing in and out of my wetsuit, having sand all over my car and such.
The more you get familiar with an action the stronger your predicted outcomes become. We get a better and better sense of what will happen once we take the action. So if your predicted outcome has some negativity in it, it will get stronger with time.
Like going to work for a boss you hate. God, they’re going to blabber on and on about something they’re fixated with, and criticize me with the smallest nits, blah blah… So the more you think along these lines, the more you dread the 1:1 meetings. But what if you have to initiate a conversation with your boss with something important to let them know? You’ll procrastinate on scheduling that meeting.
When we close doors because of predicted difficulties, it has an unintended side effect: it closes the doors of unknown opportunities. How many times have you been pleasantly surprised by an unexpected result? It doesn’t have to be exclusively about results. How many times have you noticed something cool as you were walking or driving to your destination? Or just notice how beautiful the sky and flowers are?
We know theoretically that out-of-ordinary experiences can happen but our unconscious insists on holding on to our predicted difficulties instead of those chances. So we keep on intentionally closing doors, leading to procrastination.
One caveat to opening doors is, just like how you can be pleasantly surprised you can also be unexpectedly disappointed. The unfortunate fact of life is, you can do everything right and things can still go wrong. And this is where I tell you my second point.
Impermanence
We can experience something that feels bad in one time to later find that it was a good thing. For me I think being fired felt completely horrible but it ended up being a very great life lesson for me. Harland Sanders, the KFC Colonel, had a very tumultuous life but because of it he developed the ability to cook food and read traffic well enough to target tourist-heavy restaurants who he first franchised his recipes to.
We can experience setbacks and occasional bumps in the road. But nothing lasts forever and so do bad experiences. You see, when you live life consciously life tends to develop a direction of growth. This means while you have ample opportunities to make life BETTER from your old situations, good situations and life lessons won’t turn sour and make your life worse.
In the end, we all have the same conclusion: death. But until we die, we suffer primarily because of a big umbrella reason called ignorance. We don’t understand life and reality so we keep operating on our own assumptions of what reality is, and when reality proves itself to you you suffer. This is how gamblers blow away all of their money, this is how people learn to be disappointed to the point where they become cynical.
As you open more doors in your life, you will open more possibilities for unexpected results. Some of them will feel good. Great, you can take them for free. Some of them will feel bad. But the more time you give it and the more intentional learning and understanding you do from the experience, the more likely it will turn into something great.
Seen in this way, there’s less reason to close doors and more reasons to open doors of opportunities. Sure, you will have to do things you predictably hate. But who knows? One day you may wake up to realize, “hey, that thing I thought I hated; turns out it’s not that bad after all”. What makes that moment more likely is, taking action.
