I thought majoring in English and studying great works of literature would make me a writer. I read countless literary classics and equally as many lesser known works. I even enrolled in three creative writing classes and wrote a dozen short stories. None of it made me a writer.
Only when I write am I writer.
I thought moving to Taipei, Taiwan would make me learn Chinese (Mandarin). Although I took private lessons with multiple teachers, conversed with numerous native speakers, and finally reached a level of fluency where I can now speak with my mom in 90% Chinese, I still remember how I spent my evenings while living in Taipei staying up late watching Mad Men or reading books in English. Despite being immersed in an environment where I wasn’t just surrounded by Chinese but drowning in it, none of it made me speak Chinese.
It always required fumbling through my fear of failing in my attempts at speaking. Improving, I realized, meant seeking where I still struggled and struggling there until it became easy.
And after that became easy, if I wanted to continue improving, I had to find something that was hard again.
I thought moving to Shanghai would finally make me into the type of person I always wanted to be ever since I decided to move to Asia: adventurous, attractive, intelligent, accomplished. Instead, I woke up in bed after yet another late night of partying with a hollow disappointment. The realization had set in that waking up in a different city wouldn’t make me wake up as a different person.
If we seek something we don’t already have, to create the change of having it, it comes at a cost.
That cost could be time or it could cost effort.
Or change might also cost comfort, our identity, relationships, opportunities, our sense of competence (until we earn it back again), fractions of a lifestyle that provides regular short-term pleasure.
Example Cost Worth Paying #1
Spending 6 months to learn a new professional skill in order to change careers will likely cost us the 3 hours we spend every evening watching Netflix, but it could change the way we feel during the 9 hours we have to work every day now that we finally have a job we actually enjoy and feel appreciated at.
Example Cost Worth Paying #2
Becoming the type of person who wakes up every morning to exercise might cost us our daily happy hour with friends as they often turn into happy hours and dinners and after hours too, but it might save us tens of thousands of dollars in medical bills decades later.
Example Cost Worth Paying #3
Publishing daily might cost us 1–2 hours per day and the comfort of not having to generate and commit to an idea or the spontaneity for debauchery while traveling, but it up opportunities for like-minded thinkers, creatives, and professionals to meet you 24/7.
It’s important to be able to discern which changes, if successfully created, are exponentially expansive in reward but asymmetrically negligible in cost.
The bad news is that those costs must still be paid. The good news is that paying those costs are only temporary. Because what you must sacrifice in order to pay those costs, a minor change in your daily life style, an incremental fraction of your life, will still be there if you ever want it back.
We can always go back to what we used to know and preferred to do.
But we can’t obtain what we don’t already have until we put in the work to earn it.
And if what we want to earn are changes that matters to us, a life minimized of regret, a sense of pride we tried regardless of outcome, those are always the costs of those changes are worth paying for.
