Can One Achieve in Life Without Experiencing Struggle?

It would be awesome to achieve great accomplishments in life with a breeze.

No struggle. No hustle. Just enjoying the life.

You know what? This actually happens. But the problem is that this happens only occasionally. Just once or twice during lifetime. Therefore I don’t think that is the right way to approach the life. It’s more like gambling. There is a chance to win, but there is higher chance to loose.

I’ve experienced multiple occasions when gambling didn’t work out.

However there is one which became a success.

This happened at high school. In my country of origin there was a system which opened up university doors wide for the best school graduates. It was tough, but highly rewarding. A student needed to have the highest grade in every subject during the last three years at school. Then person would not only bypass exams to join university, but also have a chance to apply to multiple universities (back then regular school graduates could apply only to one university).

How did I achieve this without any struggle?

I believe I had a mix of three factors leading to this.

Having a natural talent

First of all studying was easy for me.

It was easy to grasp knowledge and apply it. I just have a natural talent to learn new things. Often I cannot memorise facts. But I see systems and logical connections very well. And I visualise information a lot. I could easily cope with fact-based subjects like history by building chains instead of memorising dates.

Recently my wife and I had to learn German. Although I was putting much less effort compared to my wife, I have great result. I couldn’t be able to do this if not my natural talent to absorb patterns.

When you have a talent in the field, naturally it’s easier to walk the way.

Being in comfort zone

Secondly I was in my comfort zone at high school.

I had a good relations with classmates and teachers. The workload in the last two years was actually lighter than two years before. Last two years were mostly about refreshing previous knowledge to prepare to final exams. There was not so much new material to learn. Since I had a great background and obtained stable knowledge in prio years, closing years at school were a light breeze.

Being in comfort zone allows to complete things with minimum possible effort.

Having luck

Luck doesn’t always bring immediate result. Sometimes it’s an enabler.

It comes in different forms. Usually we think about luck as having an unexpectedly good result without an effort (like guessing a tricky question on exam correctly). Sure that was a part of my life at school as well.

But believe it or not, luck came to me mostly in a different form. I was lucky to have great teachers in middle school. So I had a great knowledge stepping into high school.

I believe that luck played important role in this triangle of factors.

This story from my high school days sounds awesome, right? But don’t be charmed by it, because it’s the only occasion in my life so far. Every other achievement tasted a bitter of struggle. Sometime less, sometimes more. Sometimes mental, sometimes physical.

Expecting multiple great achievements in life without a struggle is like trying to grow a kitchen garden without watering it. Obviously some plants (like watermelon) can give a harvest. Although the majority will dry up.

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