Key Takeaway: Nothing of worth comes easy, and there will be times when you feel like you want to give up. But just persist until you succeed: it will be worth it in the end.

There are those days when you simply want to give up and do anything else that would seem better. For me, today is one of those days.

This isn’t uncommon when it comes to blazing your own trail of purposeful living, especially when it comes to living a life firmly rooted in awareness and service, or your own unique calling. But I say to you (and to myself), “Just keep going.”

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By nature, the truly good life is not easy. If it were, everyone would be doing it already. There are many people who would like to live a truly good life but have many reasons they “can’t”: it’s unfeasible, it’s difficult, it takes up so much effort, they are simply uninterested, they don’t want to give up the so-called “good” life they already have, etc.

The challenge is to drop all the reasons and just do it using the cards dealt you.

In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus preaches that the road to destruction is easy and many take this way. The road to life is difficult, and only few take it. This is usually mistranslated into a modern-day proverb: “[He] never said that it would be easy. [He] only said it would be worth it.”

According to this Mormon blogger, the correct attribution is either to an unknown author who wrote it as the opening sentence of a larger work, or to American celebrity Mae West. Whatever the case, even though it’s not actually Scripture, it holds deep wisdom for us all.

Another example of this wisdom is found in a video game – my favorite video game series of all time, Pokémon. In the first-generation games Pokémon Red, Blue, and Yellow, as well as their remakes Pokémon FireRed and LeafGreen, there is a person who says that he has finally caught a Chansey (one of the hardest-to-find-and-catch Pokémon that are not legendary), and that “[it] makes it all worthwhile.” He understands the value of not giving up and achieving a difficult, yet good, goal.

Nothing of worth comes easy – it takes hard work and perseverance to reach that position of excellence. This is where many others fail: Their level of perseverance is not enough, or they let themselves get swayed by various circumstances or factors.

Also, if you really, really wanted something, you’d cross rivers and mountains to reach it. Of course, you need to trek responsibly without putting yourself, those rivers and mountains, or even the journey itself, so to speak, in danger. But there are many ways. Our job is to find them.

(Read more: Simple and frugal makes innovative and purposeful)

The trick to making perseverance easier is to imagine the goal ahead, to imagine yourself achieving it and living it. This would grant you an “energy boost”, so to speak, to inspire you to keep going: a ray of light at the end of the tunnel.

At the start of any truly worthwhile venture, the one piece of advice anyone should get is that it won’t be easy. There will be times that you want to give up. It’s a given. But you should just keep going. Persist until you succeed. We couldn’t stress this any more. This isn’t to scare anyone away, but to prepare and inspire them to keep flying forward towards their goal of living a truly good life.

With that, let’s all use the weekend to take a break and recharge ourselves to continue living a life of higher purpose.