Is Life Fair Or Unfair? And If Unfair How Do You Make It Fairer?

 
By Anubhav Srivastava (Register for his Workshop Super Confidence For Super Success here!)

Most of us have gone through times where it seems that life is almost certainly somewhat unfair. While surely there seems to be some correlation between what we deserve and what we get, at other times what we get seems to be the exact opposite of what it seems like we deserve. We work super hard and we get almost nothing in return for our efforts. We do all the “good” things that our parents and society have taught us to do and have the worst things happen to us. On the other hand, many times it seems that lazy people who don’t work hard seem to get things through sheer luck or the worst kinds of people have the best things happen to them.

When you see this happening over and over again, you no doubt will begin to question at some point. Is life really fair? If life was fair, wouldn’t people get things in direct proportion to the good or bad they do? Well here is the deal, life can certainly be unfair at times. For some people life seems fair, especially when what they get is what they know what they objectively deserve. At other times, life brings you punishment after punishment for no reason.

Some things directly correlate with effort. For example if you work hard on physical fitness, you will become fitter. If you spend all day practicing something you will get better at it. On things that are defined as skills the more you work on it, the better they will get. What is not under your control is whether or not you will actually be rewarded for that skill.

For example, if you are talented at singing and also work really hard at it, it certainly guarantees that you will get even better at it, but it doesn’t necessarily mean you can get to be on American Idol or Indian Idol or even make a decent living off it. If you work really hard at your job it guarantees that you will understand it better, but it doesn’t guarantee a promotion. And this is what leads to frustration, this is what leads people to believe that life is unfair because you are supposedly doing all the right things but getting the wrong results.

But here is something to consider. If life is always unfair, then it is unfair to everyone. Wouldn’t that make it fair? 😛 The truth is life is neither fair nor unfair. There is no one above out to get you or reward you for no reason. Life basically throws a bunch of random things all the time and it is your perception of those things that then define life as positive or negative or fair/unfair.

If you think about it, the entire universe tends to do some very random things. Even though things behave in accordance with scientific laws, some things seem to be sheer chance. After all, of all the planets of the solar system, only the earth can sustain life. Some are too hot, some are too cold, most of them don’t have water. And yet, earth managed to be in the right spot and then life evolved from there. Was the earth designated to be some sort of special place by a God or did things just kind of got into place through chance or a lot of lucky breaks? Most scientists believe in the latter. Along the way, there are were many near extinction scenarios, and yet life survived it all to allow our evolution into modern day humans. That in a way makes us a hell of a lot lucky. The very fact that we exist is a result of huge lucky breaks for the earth over billions of years.

Now what about the other planets? Most of them have incredibly harsh conditions and are uninhabitable? IF those planets had a consciousness should they be complaining that the universe is unfair to them? It gave so much to the earth and nothing to them? Shouldn’t the be sitting and whining and crying that God or the Universe gave nothing to them? If this idea seems absurd to you, then the idea that God or the Universe is out to get you or punish you is equally absurd.

Millions of random events are happening to people daily and out of them some will have incredibly positive experiences, others will have incredibly negative experiences and most will have just average experiences. It is not because life is fair or unfair. It is because life is random. For every positive will be a negative and vice versa. Your happiest day maybe someone else’s saddest day. Your saddest day maybe someone else’s happiest day. It’s not because life hates you, it’s just because that’s how things are in the universe. It throws random events. It is we who ascribe it with positive or negative qualities.

Now some people maybe happy after reading this but others will be depressed because it will make them think we have no control over things at all if life is only a bunch of random events happening. Don’t worry that is not the case! You see LIFE will throw random events at you, but the one thing that makes living beings, especially humans so incredibly powerful, and has led to their progress over thousands of years is the power of conscious choice and the power to choose our reactions.

If you win a lottery or have something terrible happen to you, that’s life throwing random events, but how you choose to react to it is then under your control. You have the power to influence life through conscious actions. Suffering a heartbreaking events is not under your control, but doing what it takes to recover from it and not giving up is.

Facing repeated failures in your business or following your dream is not under your control but learning from those failures and refining your strategy is. As a result of those chances, each time you fail and learn, you progressively increase your chances of good things come to you. In other words, you can increase your chances of life becoming “fairer.” Now this in no ways means that life’s randomness suddenly stops playing its role. It is always going to be there and it will always play a big role, but this time, you have the power to influence it as well!

So here are things you can do to increase your chances of life becoming “fairer” to you.

 

1) Develop a killer instinct

If you don’t go after what you want, someone else will. Everything you want in the world, someone else wants it too and unless you go after it with a single minded focus, someone else will get to it first. Cultivate a burning desire with which you approach your goals and you increase your chances of success greatly. Now whether you call it a burning desire, or a killer instinct or the eye of the tiger, it doesn’t matter. They are all the same thing. You have got to want it bad.

Look at all the winners around you, can you find out even one that is indifferent towards winning? Even if they seem calm and collected or indifferent on the surface, deep down they all want to win and they want it badly. Do it and you increase your chances of getting what you want from life. You can learn how to develop a killer instinct in the article – How To Develop The Will To Win

 

2) Provide value

You can be as good as you want at something but it is not going to give you any reward unless you provide value to someone else. Nobody cares if you are a great cook, if you cook only for yourself. Nobody cares if you are a great dancer, if you only dance for yourself in a closed room. Unless you provide value to people in a tangible or intangible way, your skills are as good as worthless (from a career point of view) If you want to know the steps to providing tangible value to people and want to make a living off your passion, read the following article. How to Make Money From Your Passion

 

3) Practice Discipline

For everything you want tomorrow, there is something you need to sacrifice for it today.  Each day your better thought has to win over the thought that distracts you from your goal and it is  your discipline that you are going to have to rely on to get the job done. Without discipline, there is no success. Learn how to cultivate discipline by reading this article. How To Cultivate Self Discipline And Achieve Greatness

4) Practise Smart Persistence

If you think luck isn’t favoring you, then you need to make up for it through your tenacity.Persistence guarantees eventual success because not even the unluckiest person in the world can fail every single time. But each failure is a lesson to be learned from and not to be repeated.

But persistence has to be smart, not stupid. Stupid persistence will get you nowhere. Persistence does not mean banging your head against the wall repeatedly and hoping it shall break one day. That’s just going to break your head. Persistence is about having the common sense to come back with a sledgehammer to break the wall. If that doesn’t work, come back with a bulldozer. If that doesn’t work, use dynamite. If that doesn’t work, find another wall to break! Edison may have failed 10,000 times while trying to invent the light bulb, but he didn’t repeat his mistakes, he learned 10,000 lessons on what not to do. If you want to learn how to practice smart persistence, check out this great article. Banging Your Head Against A Wall? Stop Being Stupid and Practice Smart Persistence!

 

5) Become a Generally Happy Person

Happiness is the indirect objective of everything we want in life. But contrary to popular belief, you don’t need to achieve things to be happy.  Happiness is a state of mind that you can have even when you are facing the worst of circumstances. In fact if you are a generally unhappy person today, even when you achieve your goal, sooner or later you will regress to being the unhappy person you always were. Life is going to push you around all the time, you are going to be knocked down at every step and will have a ton of random events thrown at you that will not be what you wanted. Unless you have adopted the “happy mindset” sooner or later these failures will make you spiral into depression and depression will make future success even harder. So learn how to be happy in the moment. Success will come and go, failures will come and go, but you are the only one who has control over your emotional reaction to success and failure. To learn how you can be more happy, check out the following article. How To Live a Happy Life

 

Good Luck With Your Dreams. Remember life will always throw a bunch of negative things up to you, it is up to you how you can make something positive out of it. Like they say, when life gives you lemons make lemonade. I would add, when life gives you rotten grapes, make wine!