Why the right thing to do is always hard?

Hello, my fellow humans! I am so sorry I left you hanging for so long, but I would hate it if I had to write just for the sake of writing. As with everything in my life, I guide my decisions based on the quality vs quantity philosophy, and I only wish to present you finished thoughts. This particular topic has been nagging me for a while, but it hasn’t been as acute until today. So without further ado, let’s break it down.

When I originally started getting into the science of business management and retail, we had all these different disciplines to learn, and a lot of theoretical information had to get through my mind. At first, I thought business was about money, laws, spreadsheets, products, delivery, clients, design, taxes, websites, and all these different types of things. As I continued to grow and learn more about human psychology, it kind of opened my eyes that no matter what the company is – it is always going to be about people. It is about stories, relationships, and communities. That’s where it starts and that’s where it ends. As later on in my career I became a project manager, this belief only got deeper – all I do the whole day is people management. It can get tedious sometimes, but never boring and pushes you to evolve. Now, why is that important to me?

With very few exceptions, most people live surrounded by their fellow humans, and communication is practically unavoidable. We have to talk to our partners, family members, friends, colleagues, neighbors, even strangers on the street sometimes. We exchange information, talk about our feelings, discuss recent occurrences, debate philosophical questions, or complain about the trains always being late. Getting a hold of this new information leaves our brains with another question – what do I do with this?

We can choose to stay in our old ways or we can choose to change. We can decide to be upset about something or simply say nothing. We can aspire to be better than our conversation partner or just gossip about them behind their back. We can try and reach a compromise or start a fight. It is estimated, that an average adult makes around 35,000 decisions a day, which includes both conscious and subconscious choices. Since I am no Freudian-biologist, I will choose to focus today on the so-called conscious decisions and how they influence our interpersonal relations.

Probably every one of us has faced a moral dilemma in our lives. Challenges, conflicts, ego, and resolutions are a big part of being alive. Very often these obstacles have two possible outcomes – the easy one and the right one. It is natural for human nature to look for shortcuts in life and to lie in order to save peace. It is very normal to want to protect another person’s feelings or to avoid difficult conversations. Taking the easy route might solve the uneasiness in the moment, but the truth has a way of always coming out, and the heaviness of our past choices often catches up to us. What I’ve witnessed personally, is that the hard thing to do is almost always the right thing as well. It is not easy to act selflessly, and that’s why we praise people, who choose the morally right thing to do, when faced with unusual circumstances. Of course, not every situation in life is black and white, and it very often depends on the specifics of the case. In a perfect world, everybody would act right and only make ethically correct decisions, but it is not the world we live in. I’d like to think, that by nature we are good and want to do the right thing, but some circumstances make it difficult for us, because not everyone chooses the right path all the time. Everyone is fighting a silent fight and sometimes without even realizing it. And it might feel hard at first to stand on our ground and protect our boundaries, to say ‘no’, to decline or to invite the person, that nobody wants to see for some reason. But I like to think of this inner discourse as our moral compass trying to get through to us and show, that we are better, so we ought to live by the example. And maybe, one day, someone else will follow our lead or at least we get to go to bed knowing, that we can be proud of ourselves today.

The first time is always the hardest, but it gets easier from here.

Love,

Faja