One of the best advice I ever received was in business school from a non-descript professor. He would often say “life is unfair. get used to it”. It is a rather powerful statement. The meaning of unfair we are going to consider for better understanding this post is “not following the rules of a game.”.
I do not know whether the professor came up with this pearl of wisdom or regurgitated something he heard or learnt somewhere. But the wisdom in these lines is timeless and deep.
The first part states that irrespective of what we expect from life, it was, is and will always be unfair. Sometime you will not get what you believe you deserve and other times you will get an unexpected windfall. Ofcourse, the problem arises when we start believing that the windfall was indeed well deserved and expect likewise from other events in life. And then when we do not get a repeat of the previous windfall, we show a range of emotions from sulking, bitterness, anger, remorse, etc. Likewise when we see others get that lucky break, early stardom, swanky job, we instantly discount their efforts (if there were any) and straightaway attribute all of it to luck.
But whatever you do, the truth is - life is unfair.
The second part is like a medicine. Bitter in taste but you do feel better if you take it. There is not point in wallowing over the fact that life does not always give you what you believe you deserve. Or that life does not give you when you need the results the most. This takes some time getting used to. But you have to get used to it. Once you do, you lower the bar of expected results and refocus your energy on doing from expecting. It is a vicious cycle of doing, expecting, getting or not getting, happiness or disappointment. The only way to break this is to understand that the results that life throws at us are never in our control. But this does not mean we stop trying. On the contrary we try wholeheartedly free from the shackles of expectations.
There is only one way to break the cycle – get used to an unfair life.
While I will write more about this sometime in future, mainly about luck and how I see it, I will leave a few additional readings on this and related topic.
For those who do not want to get into the spiritual angle, but look at this from a perspective of the sporting world, I recommend the book – Performance Thinking.
If you want to get deeper into the topic of desire, I recommend you to look at this (if you are more of a Gen-Z) or this (if you are an old soul).
On life and time 