There isn’t a single thing you can’t use to your benefit, if you use everything as an opportunity to learn. Every day, you can spend just 5 minutes at the end of your day reviewing how it went, learning from what went right and what didn’t go well. Every week, you can review how things went for the week, and use it as an opportunity to learn and adjust. Every month, every year, you can continually learn.

When I interviewed an animal trainer about behavior change … she said it’s important to be flexible. We often have a fixed idea of how things will go, how we’ll change a habit or achieve a goal. But when things don’t go as planned, we feel disappointed or frustrated, and often will get discouraged and give up. The key, the animal trainer said, is to be flexible. That means when you don’t do as well as you’d hoped with your habit or goals … use it as information.

There’s something magical about doing the hard thing you’re trying to do for something more than yourself: for others, for the world, for your community. The reason is that our best intentions will often go out the door when we’re confronted by uncertainty, fear and discomfort. If we’re doing a hard thing just for ourselves, there’s nothing wrong with that — but then when we are faced with discomfort, wouldn’t stopping doing that hard thing be more benefit to ourselves?

A powerful way to approach anything, any moment, any conversation, any difficult task … is to bring curiosity. It’s a mindset of wanting to know more, wanting to explore, wanting to find out. It’s a mindset of wonder, a childlike way of seeing the world, beginner’s mind. It’s like taking a look at something you’ve seen for years — the back of your hand, your couch — and seeing it as if for the first time, and wondering about it.

This next section — the Zen Stoic — is not required to do hard things. Lots of people have done hard things without this approach. But I’ve found it to be powerful. This approach combines two independent philosophies that have a surprising amount of overlap. Both are incredibly useful and valuable. They both have an approach of acceptance of what is out of our control, of focusing on ethical/virtuous action, of loving what is, of using this precious time we have on earth.