When I was in school, there was this vacation job we went for during the holidays. After that, we were paid. Some of my friends decided to buy a lot of luxury things like clothes, expensive perfumes, went for outings, spent lavishly etc, because they thought they did not have responsibilities. I just got some basic things, then saved the rest. Not because I could not join them to spend lavishly, but because I was considering tomorrow. It was not long and an emergency project trip came up in the faculty, and we were asked to make contributions for it. At that point, those other people began looking for money to pay up, but I simply withdrew mine and paid. The hard choice I made to save the money then was what made it easier for me to pay without stress. Your choices in life are part of what defines your life.
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In life, there is no daily choice that you make that is without effects. For example, the comfort you will enjoy tomorrow might just be a product of the discomfort you experience today. This is why it has been said that "hard choices lead to an easy life," but even the reverse also holds true in most cases. There are times that you may not feel like taking a step, and you may not feel like doing something, but when you consider the future, then you will understand that sacrifices have to be made. The hard choices you endure today might open you up to some very soft and easy life in the future.
Hard choices are rarely comfortable. As a student for example, imagine waking up in the middle of the night to study your books for two hours when sleep would have been a sweeter and easy option. It is definitely uncomfortable, but at the end, when you achieve academic excellence, you will see the benefits of the hard choices. Everyday you live, life will always throw a couple of choices at you. These choices, over time, will make you who you are. In the morning for example, you have a choice to continue sleeping and stretching yourself, or the choice of getting up and hitting the road for your day's hustles. You may have the freedom to make your choice the way you like, but just know that the choices will definitely come with their own effects, which you will not have choice but to welcome.
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I once read a particular story of a farmer whose store barn started to leak water while it rained. The leak did not seem too much to him, so he felt there was no need to fix it. He said to himself that the rainy season was almost over, and there was not need to fix it. He convinced himself that he would fix it before the coming of the next rainy season, but he never did. He made an easy choice of overlooking the crack. However, by the time the next rainy season came, it came with heavy rain, and the first few days of the rain, the barn was wrecked. He got the effect of the easy choice that he made. So he had to spend more to rebuild the barn than he would have spent to fix the crack.
It is worthy to note that the difference between making a hard choice and an easy choice may not even be some very dramatic decision. Sometimes, it might just be the small daily decisions that you make that may make the difference in what is happening in your life. The decisions may even seem insignificant at that time, but over time, they may become the foundation upon which your future is built on. Like choosing the perform an action on time instead of procrastinating, choosing to make plans for your life instead of hoping that things will work out fine on its own. The people you think are lucky might not even be more privileged than you, but they may just be result of the decisions they took in the past and the sacrifices they made.
Understand that making the hard choice does not mean choosing unhappy or joyless life. It actually creates deeper joy later in life. Like the satisfaction you derived from learning a skill, the peace of making the right choice, the confidence that comes with being self-disciplined, etc. Always have in mind that the choices you make will affect you even in ways you may not know about, and will make you who you are.
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