No problem, according to the creators of 1,000 different diets promising a great body with little to no effort. People don’t want to workout and eat healthy because it’s hard. This “easy” epidemic has reached every aspect of our culture from health to education to relationships. The books and seminars that sell out most quickly are those that promise the easiest steps to a better life - the secrets that have been known for ages by the rich and famous, but somehow managed to escape your radar until this very moment. “He or she is naturally gifted,” we proclaim, inwardly hoping that we too can find our own hidden talent or skill to make us famous, rich, or at least…noticed. With each new fresh-faced superstar, the idea of success as a secret formula to be unlocked rather than something to be worked for is slowly cemented into our brains. Teenage phenoms, reality “stars,” 20-something internet billionaires, and people for whom success and its spoils came swift and early are the new cultural heroes and idols. Let’s face it, the idea of spending years busting your butt at the same job or pursuing the same goal has become downright antiquated, a fool’s game.Ībraham Lincoln and Andrew Carnegie are finding their stories of long persistence quickly displaced by those of the flash-in-the-pan celebrity tabloid genre. In fact, “hard” has become more of a scarlet letter rather than a badge of honor.
Our lives have come to resemble those of tourists - wanting the experience, but not wanting to stay long enough to risk experiencing the realities that come with permanence and commitment. We want everything neatly packaged and ready for immediate consumption - our food, our friends, even our faith. Without a shortcut to the end we often conclude that the journey isn’t worth the time and effort. Everything we long for is easy and instant.
We don’t come across that word too often when discussing heroes or success. The trip planted the team in the Guinness Book of World Records, but what made it remarkable was not that it was long, but that it was hard - brutally, numbingly, painfully…hard. Battling mud, wind, injuries, and sub-zero temperatures, the 5-month journey took them through hundreds of villages, an 800-mile swamp, the Ural mountains, and a culture permanently hardened by the savage taskmaster of communism. In 1989, Wyoming native Mark Jenkins set out with three Americans and four Russians to become the first to bicycle all the way across Siberia, starting at the Pacific port town of Vladivostok and ending 7,500 miles later in Leningrad. “The essential thing ‘in heaven and earth is’…that there should be a long obedience in the same direction there thereby results, and has always resulted in the long run, something which has made life worth living.” -Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
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