Episode 75. Learn to Hate Before You Love

What in life deserves our time and attention and what things don't. I hope that as we consider that question along with other topics on this show, that we can all learn to live our lives just a little more intentionally. This is Seth Roberts. Thanks for joining me on Skipping Stones - “Learn to Hate Before You Love.”

If you really want to love a thing, sometimes you need to learn to hate it.  First, real love is when you can still appreciate something even after the shine has worn off. Imagine you're dating in person. Generally, you wouldn't decide to marry them after a day or two of fun, not because that person is a bad fit, but because you have no clue who that person is yet you haven't seen any of their flaws.

The reason we try to date for a while is because no one can legitimately say they like a person until they've had a chance to see them at their worst. Only after you've seen their worst can you even somewhat understand another person in their entirety. We have to see the parts we don't like in order to see the whole picture and decide if there's still someone that we can admire.

There are few things in life that only get better the more you grow to understand them. Most things only get better after they've gotten worse. First, nowhere was this concept made more clear to me than when I lived abroad. So I had two opportunities to live abroad, and one of 'em was just a semester abroad in the Middle East and the other one was.

Literally a few years long in the Philippines. Of the two of those places, the one that I learned to love was the Philippines, but it didn't start out that way. For the first few weeks, everything there was novel and exciting, but the longer I stayed, the more I found myself uncomfortable with all of the differences.

It really just adds up until the point that you feel so completely uncomfortable that you can hardly stand it. At one point, I was dying to go home, but fortunately that wasn't really an option for me at the time. It's actually pretty normal to become really uncomfortable in a new place after a little while.

It's called culture shock, and it doesn't happen on a two week vacation. It happens to people when they're settling in for a longer term stay. The good news though, is it does go away. That discomfort slowly ebbs away over time, and everything begins to be just a little more familiar. Each day, you adapt and grow, and you learn to accept the differences.

People get comfortable again, and the beautiful thing is that not only do you acclimate to a place, but you start to love it, except this time you love it with your eyes wide open. You love the whole picture, sticking around long enough to love a place that you hated changes you, and in my opinion, it  changes you for the better.

So in the end, I stayed long enough to genuinely love the Philippines, but unfortunately I only stuck around just long enough in the Middle East to learn to hate it. If you can make it past the point, you begin to hate it. You can learn to really see it for what it is. And the places that we bail out on early are the ones we never really knew it all.

There’s this concept that, uh, a business influencer I follow talks a lot about, uh,  Alex Hormozi. He talks about how a lot of entrepreneurs will get excited by an opportunity and jump into it. And with almost any business, once you're into it, you're gonna figure out that it isn't all roses. In fact, it's really difficult and you're going to be making mistakes and you're going to figure out real fast how naive you were.

At this point, a lot of entrepreneurs like to jump ship and try different opportunities out. What happens though is they start the process over. The reason to stick with a business you've grown to hate is that you grow to hate it because you're not naive about it anymore, which also means you know what it actually takes to succeed.

That kind of knowledge is worth its weight in gold. Entrepreneurs that can make it past that slump are the ones that break outta that cycle and start seeing real successes. Pushing past discomfort is what makes a person capable of really loving anything. I used  to think that finding a hobby was a matter of discovering your thing.

I know some people are immediately drawn to certain interests and never look back, but that was definitely not my situation when I was younger. I would try new things all the time and would never be that drawn to them. I had my eyes opened a while back when I did some martial arts classes. I didn't actually like it, but I was doing it with someone else.

So I kept going and after forcing myself to stay in for several months, I started seeing actual improvement and lo and behold, I started to like it. It made me realize that I could genuinely love a thing that I did not like it first, when I hear a person gimme  a hard no on a certain activity or hobby.

I now wonder if they've trapped themselves in a kind of a bubble of their own making, or if I see a person constantly chasing new things and only glossing over the surface. I wonder if they're depriving themselves of something amazing. We have a tendency to be so wired for novelty that we assume everything, everyone in every place is better than it actually is.

But when that chemical rush washes away, we see what's truly there. Growing to love something someone someplace is a process of adapting to reality and then learning to admire what they actually are. I love the concept of true love,  but emphasis on the word true. It means to me that you really know who that person is and you still love them.

Love that is blind, isn't really love at all because you don't love that person. You love an idea that wears their face. Our world has changed to such an extent that we hardly even know how to learn to appreciate something unless it's brand new and overwhelming our senses. I wonder if part of the reason we need the lights to be so bright and the music so loud these days is because we have simply acclimated ourselves to such a degree of novelty that we've lost the ability to appreciate quiet beauty.

This is why some of us never discover a deep love for anything. We never make it past the part where it's uncomfortable. If you know going into a relationship, a hobby, a job, or a new place, that the shine is going to come off eventually. You don't have to be so disappointed when it does. When that happens, all you have to do is push through a little longer to see if you can learn to love it.

If you do, make it past that stage and do learn to love it. Then you'll know that you're not in love with a fantasy that you've created, but something real. If you're going to commit your life to a person, a place, or some other pursuit, you need to know you love the whole picture and not just a little piece of it.

Let's all do ourselves a favor and reserve the word love. For things that we truly know, this is Skipping Stones - “Learn to Hate Before You Love.” You can find this podcast anywhere you choose to listen to podcasts. For more information about me, feel free to visit www.skippingstonessr.com. And if you enjoyed the show, please like or subscribe.  If there is a topic you would like me to speak on, please feel free to email me. At info@skippingstonessr.com, new episodes will be released weekly every Monday.