Eat a Peach

by David Chang

Change is guaranteed, but growth isn’t. In my experience, if you want to grow, you’ve got to want it. In fact, you’ve got to want it so bad that you’ll toss out everything that got you where you are.

Lobsters grow by molting. They shed their old shell to reveal a new, soft shell that will eventually grow and harden around them. By the time they’re done, there’s no sign of the lobster they were. It’s an exhausting, dangerous process. It takes a tremendous amount of energy and leaves them exposed and vulnerable while they’re in the middle of it. Want to know the only sign that a lobster is dying? It stops molting.

That cycle of building and destroying and rebuilding is not something to overcome. The human equivalent of not wanting to molt is trying to make life easy, refusing to grow or be self-reflective.

David Foster Wallace’s “This Is Water,” the late author’s commencement speech about identifying and challenging one’s inherent biases.

In other words, we may not be able to reject our fortune or fate, but we can reject how we approach it. Every day, we have the chance to kill the way the world sees us and push the boulder up the hill with a big, fat smile on our faces. To live life without amends.

For everything you make easier, make something else more difficult. Buy yourself some time so you can spend that time pushing yourself in new directions.