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 we want to obtain in life has a respective cost. The more valuable the thing we 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. We 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 we were yesterday comes with a specific cost. Whether it’s reading books, lifting weights, or practicing a certain profession. It requires us 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 us the luxury of simple entertainment. Becoming strong will cost us a lifestyle of comfort and indulgence. Becoming capable will cost us our pride so we can learn from others.
Any movement from a current state to a desired state requires us to shed an old version of ourselves. Actually no, it requires us to wrestle that version of ourselves to the death. The cost of transformation is blood. We are moving through certain patterns, behaviors, and cycles that are already natural to us. These movements are familiar, and familiar is comfortable.
Change is violent
That’s why transformation feels so violent. We are quite literally wrestling with a version of ourselves we’ve already been for years. Possibly our entire lives. Real change requires a funeral for the person we used to be, and that person never goes quietly.
We can’t win a fight against someone or something we don’t understand. Which is why we need to know what we’re up against. We have to study our enemy, which is really just ourselves. Or at least the parts of us that get in the way of the life we 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 we don’t know who we are, why we do what we do, and what actually matters to us, how can we expect to change our circumstances in a way that we could reasonably call an improvement? We don’t even know what the baseline of our reality is. We’re building on quicksand.
Audit your desires
To gain anything in life requires us to understand the cost of what it takes to get it. The most powerful thing we can do for ourselves is ask what we are willing to sacrifice to get what we want. We need to know what it is that we are willing to pay to get what we want out of life, otherwise we may end up with buyers remorse. This isn’t to give ourselves an excuse out of the necessary work that needs to be done, but to make sure we’re fighting for the right thing in our lives. To ensure that we are prepared to pay the price of whatever it is that we 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 we have in our lives 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 we ignore the price tag on the things that we want, we either won’t be able to purchase them, or we 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?