are you sacrificing your future for short-term comfort?
embrace sacrifice today, live the life you truly want tomorrow
Why do you prioritise short-term pleasures over long-term rewards?
You do this to be happy and comfortable now.
The desire to be happy now leads to bad decision-making.
Imagine you wanted to improve your physical health.
You know eating cookies every day is going to make you fat.
You know drinking excessively on the weekend is going to make you ill.
You know spending no time in the gym is going to make you weak.
You still decide to eat those cookies.
You still go out on the weekend.
You still sit on the sofa instead of going to the gym.
Over time, these decisions catch up with you. Excessive weight, poor liver health, and constant muscle soreness become part of your life.
Short-term thinking inevitably leads to long-term pain.
Eventually, you’ll realise this isn’t what you wanted.
what do you actually want from life?
True happiness comes from pursuing your dreams.
To achieve this, you need to embrace sacrifice now, even if it means enduring discomfort in the short term.
If you don’t know what you want from life, here’s what your life will look like.
You wake up, hit snooze 10 times, roll out of bed, commute to a job you’re only doing because of the paycheck, come home, eat food which doesn’t fuel you, throw yourself on the couch, go to bed, and repeat the same thing tomorrow. Soon enough, 10 years have passed by. Nothing has changed. You realise how much time you wasted. You can’t make a change now because it’s too late. You don’t know what to do with yourself. You were too late.
So many people live like this — and we are completely oblivious to it. That’s the scariest part — how normal it feels to live this way.
You may read this and think I take life too seriously — you are right.
For the last 27 years, I lived like everyone else.
Following the herd.
Not having a plan.
Wandering around aimlessly.
Doing things because it’s what everyone else was doing.
Making decisions based on what was expected of me.
Suppressing my desires.
Shying away from doing hard things.
Thinking my skill set was fixed.
Living comfortably.
Now, I’m making a change because I refuse to sacrifice my dreams and desires.
everyone has two lives — and the second begins the moment you realise you only have one — Confucius
You only get one life.
Don’t waste it on things that don’t matter. I spoke about this in last week’s post.
Never realise you have a second chance, and you’ll inevitably remain stuck in the same life forever.
Admit most of what you’re doing serves no purpose.
If you want a meaningful life, you need to make conscious sacrifices now. It means giving up bad habits, negative influences, or comfortable routines that don’t align with your goals.
The short-term discomfort is worth the long-term reward.
Remember, a sacrifice is an investment in yourself.
You won’t get your time back.
You won’t get your energy back.
Guard them both fiercely. As if your life depended on it. Because it does.
If you don’t, what matters to you will be the sacrifice instead. You won’t achieve what matters if you can’t even spend time and energy figuring this out.
If you already know what you want, make the sacrifices for what you want. Stop being lazy about it.
your life, your choice
In the end, it’s up to you. Nobody can make these decisions for you. If you don’t take the time to figure out what you want, you will realise too late that you sacrificed the wrong things.
Make the most of the one life you have.
Sacrifice for what truly matters.
Your future self will thank you.
I hope this was Good To Know.
Talk soon,
Stefano
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I wrote a post fuelled by the same type of energy on Monday so I'm really here for this. We get one chance on this rollercoaster, don't get off early!
@Mayank This made me think of your latest post too, you might find this one by Stefano interesting and vice versa.
Being responsible for yourself is key. I read this mindset somewhere that you should treat yourself as your own child & you only allow yourself the activities that will be beneficial for you as child