“Hard choices, easy life. Easy life, hard choices.”

I think my favorite example of this principle is Danny Meyer, the creator of Shake Shack and other highly successful restaurants.

The story goes that Meyer had a high-paying job (something like $500k a year in today’s dollars) at 25 years old.

He was about to take the exam to access law school and become a lawyer for the rest of his life—the path was laid in front of him. Money was ensured.

However, he was convinced by his uncle—God bless the uncle—to follow his dream of building his own restaurant. The conversation helped him realize that he was going to live only once and that he would later regret becoming a lawyer. Was this really what he wanted?

He ended up taking the test, but instead of going to a fancy college, he decided to come to Europe and work at restaurants. He would learn everything he needed to learn to build his own thing later on.

This was a hard decision to make: it involved way less money and almost no certainty about his future.

But in some sense, it was an easier life to live: happier, in purpose, inspired, excited to go to work, absorbing information without effort because he was thrilled by the restaurant world…

“Hard choices, easy life.”

I think the core of this message is not to expect an actual “easy” life after making a difficult decision.

I mean, I’m pretty sure that Meyer went through hell to build his own restaurants, and even though everything ended up working well for him, he must have gone through some tough times. That’s inevitable.

Life is always going to be hard, and the key is in the TYPE of hardness that we choose. Consciously or unconsciously.

Being a lawyer would’ve been super hard for Meyer as well—law is a tightly crowded world, specially in America. Many ambitious people fight hard every day for a top spot.

So rather than an “easy life” versus a “hard life,” I see it as

Hard and fulfilling life

vs

Hard and UNfulfilling life.

Which one would you choose?

Jeff Bezos is said to have done something similar.

Having a very high-paying job in finance, he was faced with the opportunity to build Amazon—an amazingly hard choice given the risk of failure. His reasoning to make the decision was just marvelous:

“I knew that at 80 years old I would not regret participating in this thing called ‘the internet.’”

Decisions like that are very hard, specially when others try to convince you that you’re crazy for trying something risky and leaving a secure path behind you.

—

Clearly, this “hard choices” concept is best appreciated in life-changing situations like those of Meyer or Bezos, but I believe its biggest potential lays in simpler, every-day decisions:

• The decision to go to the gym after work instead of going straight home from the office.

• To prepare your own meals on the weekend instead of eating out Mon-Fri.

• To quickly inform a mistake you made at work instead of hiding it and praying no one notices (huge one, as being caught is always worse than informing it yourself)…

Small, every-day hard choices make up for a hard AND fulfilling life. More importantly, it is a hardness that you chose, which makes it all the more satisfying.

In contrast, small, every-day easy choices lead to the opposite: a hard AND unfulfilling life, bearing the burden of hardships we didn’t even choose like health issues, bad reputation, and uninteresting jobs that inevitably make us bitter and unhappy. All in exchange for fleeting pleasures that don’t make up for anything in the long run.

“Hard choices, easy life.”

We need to be reminded of this more often.