There’s no such thing as a free lunch. If you’ve ever heard that expression, it was likely in the context of discovering a fundamental principle in free market economics. Like how “free snacks” on an airplane aren’t really free. There isn’t some magical machine in the back of the plane 3D printing peanuts and chips out of thin air. The cost of your snacks is bundled into the price of the ticket itself.
The concept of “free” is merely a marketing ploy. It’s an illusion. Everything has a cost. Every cause has its effect. Every action, an equal or opposite reaction, to quote Newton’s third law of motion.
In other words, anything you want to obtain in life will come with a respective cost. The more valuable the thing you want, the greater the cost will be to acquire it. A house is obviously more costly and thus harder to acquire than a pack of gum.
Transformation is priceless
The most valuable things in life are often priceless. They don’t have a monetary cost, and yet they are undeniably valuable. Transformation is the most valuable thing you can acquire in life. You can spend money to help move the process along, but personal transformation doesn’t have a strict dollar amount attached to it.
Becoming someone smarter, stronger, and more capable than you were yesterday comes with a specific cost. Whether it’s reading books, lifting weights, or practicing a certain profession. It requires you to move from one state to another. From somebody who isn’t well read, to somebody who is well read. From weak to strong. From incompetence, to competence.
Becoming smart will cost you the luxury of simple entertainment. Becoming strong will cost you a lifestyle of comfort and indulgence. Becoming capable will cost you your pride so you can learn from others.
Any movement from a current state to a desired state requires you to shed an old version of yourself. Actually no, it requires you to wrestle that version of yourself to the death. The cost of transformation is blood. You are moving through certain patterns, behaviors, and cycles that are already natural to you. These movements are familiar, and familiar is comfortable.
Change is violent
That’s why transformation feels so violent. You are quite literally wrestling with a version of yourself you’ve already been for years. Possibly your entire life. Real change requires a funeral for the person you used to be, and that person never goes quietly.
You can’t win a fight against someone or something you don’t understand. Which is why you need to know what you’re up against. You have to study your enemy, which is really just you. Or at least the parts of you that get in the way of the life you actually want to have and the work that is necessary to get there.
Originating from Greek antiquity, the maxim ‘know thyself’ has been relevant for centuries. That’s because it’s a fundamental building block for anybody who is seeking meaningful and lasting change. If you don’t know who you are, why you do what you do, and what actually matters to you, how can you expect to change your circumstances in a way that you could reasonably call an improvement? You don’t even know what the baseline of your reality is. You’re building on quicksand.
Audit your desires
To gain anything in life requires you to understand the cost of what it takes to get it. The most powerful thing you can do for yourself is ask what you are willing to sacrifice to get what you want. You need to know what it is that you are willing to pay to get what you want out of life, otherwise you may end up with buyers remorse. This isn’t to give you an excuse out of the necessary work that needs to be done, but to make sure you are fighting for the right thing in your life. To ensure that you are prepared to pay the price of whatever it is that you are looking to acquire.
Some things are just too expensive. The reason why some people never quite change is because whether they know it or not, they are not willing to pay the blood cost of wrestling a new version of themselves into existence. It’s a balancing issue. They run the numbers and find that change is simply unaffordable. They are not willing to trade their current reality for something that may turn out to be even better. It’s not worth it to them. They have become domesticated by the familiar.
This isn’t inherently a problem, some people just like the way things are. If this isn’t you, then you need to get comfortable with the idea of paying a price to achieve a meaningful change in your life.
In sum, there are no free peanuts. Every single thing that you have in your life has a respective cost. When we look at the world in this way, it helps us confront the most difficult part of any transformation; the sacrifice we must make in order to get what we want.
If you ignore the price tag on the things that you want, you either won’t be able to purchase them, or you will regret having paid too much. There are fundamental principles in this world, and when we pay attention to them it makes our lives easier to navigate. Understanding the cost associated with our desires provides an unmistakable texture to the decisions we make every day.
What price are you willing to pay for the life you want to live?