Summary

The article emphasizes the importance of building resilience by embracing challenging tasks and ensuring their completion to strengthen one's self-concept and ability to handle life's adversities.

Abstract

The author of the article advocates for personal growth through tackling difficult challenges and persevering until completion. They suggest that consistently engaging in and finishing hard tasks, such as training for a marathon, reinforces a positive self-image and resilience. This practice helps to put minor setbacks into perspective, reducing their impact on one's ego. The article introduces the concept of the Zeigarnik effect to explain the brain's natural inclination to close 'open loops' and how finishing tasks satisfies this psychological need. The author encourages readers to actively seek out challenging goals, commit to them, and see them through to build a robust foundation for dealing with future obstacles.

Opinions

The author believes that the ability to do hard things and to finish them is crucial for personal development.
Engaging in difficult activities, like running a marathon, is seen as a way to build a constructive ego and validate one's ability to overcome challenges.
Completing hard tasks is described as a method to armor oneself against the negative effects of minor failures or disagreements.
The article suggests that the human brain is wired to dislike unfinished business, which can be harnessed as motivation to complete tasks.
The author posits that the act of finishing what one starts is essential for achieving a sense of universal capability.
Regularly setting and achieving challenging goals is presented as a way to enhance one's ability to cope with unexpected situations in the future.

What Everybody Ought to Know About Being a Badass Version of Yourself

Out of all of the things that I could give someone the power to build a kickass version of themselves, I would give 2 things…

I started writing on Medium as a way to create a whole load of ‘notes to self’. Things that I may have learned but had faded away through inaction or even things I don’t fully get until I write them out as if I’m talking to me when I was younger.

But 2 overriding aspects come up again and again that I feel could be some of the most important lessons you could take on board. Ever.

The ability to do hard stuff

And the ability to finish.

Doing anything hard builds up validation for yourself. If you do enough hard things, you can earn the right to think about applying it universally.

I will use the cliché example of running marathons. They’re a big chunk of your life for a minimum of 12 weeks roughly — you train for it nearly every day, it’s hard!

12 weeks is also a very long time to stay committed to one thing.

You eventually run it and complete it according to what your goals were — just finish it or run it in a specified time.

Even if you never do one again, you’ve done that hard thing — you’ve built up a small bit of ego (the good kind) that tells you ‘Hey, we can do the next hard thing as look at what we’ve done before — what we had to go through.’

The more you feed that good ego, the louder it will shout at you to say ‘Let’s f*cking do it.’ It will also act as bubble wrap for your ego when small things like an argument with a spouse, a failed experiment or burning the Christmas roast — these things will have less of a bearing ego bruising moment as you know you can and have done, better than this before.

Hard stuff doesn’t have to be the stuff you choose to do either. It can be struggles you’ve had to find your way out of or to deal with, anything you now look back at as difficult.

Find things to do that look hard and itch your brain in a good way and start them, but make damn sure you finish them.

Part 2, finish that s*it.

There’s nothing worse than starting something and not finishing it. Our brains even hate it. The Zeigarnik effect is a bitch.

In a nutshell, our brains hate open loops and will do everything in their power to close them fully.

That’s why restaurant waiters are great at remembering what their table has ordered until they pay the bill.

I’d be thrown a load of stuff at work by people who may say it as a passing comment but I will always have it pop up at some random point in the future — they’ve opened a loop in my head that I need to close somehow.

It’s why the concept of revenge is a thing — albeit a bit too much for what we’re talking about, loops are everywhere.

The aim however is to give yourself the hard thing to do, and make sure you do everything in your power to close that loop — it’s the only way you complete the validation to yourself that you can do hard things universally.

This is a state you want to strive for and work hard to get to.

How to apply to your life

Go in search of something you can try hard at — for example; a marathon, creating a big video, earning money through reselling things…
Once you know what the goal is and what success looks like, dial in and close that loop — the more you rinse and repeat, the better equipped you will be to handle whatever is thrown at you in future.
Failing to do anything hard means you fall for any minor inconvenience — e.g. getting upset/ outraged at a TikTok video that has nothing to do with you, but you take issue with it.