I find it difficult to go out consistently because game is "exhausting". But is it really? It certainly feels that way. You go home, and you can't wait to just relax and turn off your brain. You've been torturing yourself, pushing yourself to get better, forcing yourself into uncomfortable situations, over and over again. You're fighting your instincts, your habits, and putting into place a lot of psychological changes. You're fighting yourself, and you will probably be one of the most formidable, stubborn, and resistant foes you've ever faced.

And on top of that, as a newbie, you will rarely see "results". You'll only be watching yourself fail, perhaps look a little stupid, perhaps seem like a loser. Girls will reject you, ignore you, laugh at you. Other guys will see what you're doing. You're thinking about what other people might be thinking, because you're only human. Acting weird can get you arrested. A sensible person shouldn't be acting weird. It goes against everything you've learned and you've grown all too familiar with being criticized by the entire world. You learned to not do anything you want when you were a child and disciplined. That is now a part of you. And most of it is good. There is only a bit of that which is not, and holds you back.

So now you're exhausted and failing, not seeing any results, going out purely on will power. And your brain, being remarkably efficient, will refuse to do the same energy-expending nonsense over and over, expecting a different result. Just like you'll get tired of rubbing your hands together to magically make money appear in your lap, it will begin to feel unreasonably difficult. Progress seems invisible. Fate, it seems, has put you where you are. Fighting against hopelessness feels a hundred, or a thousand times harder than fighting with hope. If you perceive your situation to be hopeless, or to be difficult, or for it to be a "really long road ahead" you may be putting yourself into the trap of every step being more difficult than it needs to be.

But you still go out, a few more times. But you find it harder and harder to hold a smile. You find it harder to simply have the energy to go out. And you stop. You've reached your limit. You're exhausted. Even if you do go out, it's an extremely half-assed experience with very little expenditure. You stop approaching. Your energy is associated to your level of hope. Your energy is associated to the level of belief you have that there is a chance of success. Your energy is associated to your mind's ability to resolve that cognitive dissonance of being completely unable to do something and the expectation that you will be able to do it eventually.

Confidence starts with hope. Hope leads to a plan. A plan leads to execution. Execution leads to progress. Progress leads to belief. And belief leads to success.

The question is, after all the exhaustion and failure, have you lost hope? Have you mentally given up? Have you reached the point where you've tried and failed so many times that you're convinced that the next time and the next 100 times and the next 1000 times and the next 1,000,000 will also be a failure? Is there reason to have hope anymore? Does everyone else have something that you simply don't have? You were never born with?

We all die when we lose hope. We deteriorate quicker. We let go of opportunities sooner. We walk away from deals that could have been closed. We accelerate losses. Bad things lead to worse things. We begin a cycle of pain.

There are hopeless causes in the world. Some things we can never expect, because we live in an imperfect world. Whatever utopian dream we can come up with, reality often has a much more complex way of manifesting itself.

But, perhaps, without hope, we are without life. Because hope leads us to everything we want to achieve. It leads us to survive. It leads us to grow. It leads us to find happiness. Hope is the creator, the catalyst, and the seed of everything great.

And perhaps, faith in hope is the one religion that we can agree upon. That sometimes there is no evidence at all for us to feel or think differently that our circumstances might lead us to feel - being tortured by the universe in countless ways. Why should we feel any hope? But here, perhaps, blind faith is the only thing that can help one to see the light. Losing hope means creating a blind spot, perhaps many blind spots. And all these blind spots create a darkness. And in the dark, we stumble and we fall. The only cure, would then be blind faith.

Who are we to be so arrogant as to know that we should not be happy? How can we possibly know that our circumstances warrant sadness? That perhaps, despite all the struggles and pains, that those very things define us and make us stronger? That every failure makes us a better more weathered person? That every mistake and every so-called embarrassment is a medal of honor? That we should be happy and proud? Who are you, to be so certain, without sufficient evidence, except for some loosely cobbled together circumstantial experiences that we do not deserve to be happy?

Must we let the trivial components of life dictate how we feel? Should losing in a video game, getting wronged while driving in traffic, or being laughed at by some people you don't know, really warrant a deep suffering inside of you? Do these things really matter? Why should they matter at all? Who became the king of everything and decided that these things matter? You? Your upbringing? And why should anyone, including yourself, abide by these reactionary rules?

There is much uncertainty in the world, and perhaps, "giving life a try" is the best move to make. We don't like uncertainty because it's scary. And sometimes, legitimately risky. But other times, it simply holds us back. You can ruminate over how to live, or you can live. And you'll make mistakes. And you should. And you can learn from them. Be smart about it, but know when your intelligence is holding you back from an experience. Learn to decide when it's the right time to let go, because experiences create the richest most vivid life possible. A life of contemplation and analysis of life itself is hardly a life at all.

So going back to exhaustion, maybe you're putting up too much resistance. You're setting the bar too high, or maybe there doesn't need to be a bar at all. Maybe you're putting too much pressure on yourself to get a result. Although pushing yourself in the gym will help you grow, there is a concept of overworking your muscles and having it hold you back from gains. Perhaps you need to slow down the pace. You need to rest in between sets. Let your mind grow, by absorbing what you did, and learning from it, and having a plan of attack or a plan of practice the next time you go after it.

Imagine you tried to learn chess, but you never stopped and analyzed your mistakes. But you just kept pushing on, making the moves. You would lose, game after game. You would see no progress, no small wins here and there. It would just be getting your ass kicked, over and over and over. How miserable a game of chess that would be! What a horrible experience, with the likelihood of you becoming great on simple stubborn and mindless practice being about zero to none. I think you'd agree, that's an exhausting way to play, and that would lead you to quit (I would hope, unless you're a psychopath!).

Instead, what if you meticulously concentrated on specific weaknesses? And slowly, and surely worked on those bits? You didn't over-think yourself, or get tied up on whether you'll "eventually learn this game of chess" or not. You didn't try to learn everything all at once. You didn't overwhelm yourself. And you also didn't set yourself up with some unbelievable expectations. You simply saw a small weakness, and worked on it a bit until it was good. And then moved onto another weakness. And you'd practice that, and saw in yourself noticeable progress. At first, it might be a tiny goal. Sometimes almost obviously achievable. Then you move that tiny goal just a baby step away from the next one. And so on. And you eventually see that weakness begin to melt away. You look back, and see that those series of tiny baby steps have now accumulated into quite a distance. Feels good? Let's do more baby steps.

And slowly but surely, you make progress. And the tiny wins start to look like hope. And hope starts to look like faith. And what was "exhausting" now seems more reasonable.

And maybe, that feeling of being exhausted and without hope slowly transforms into a feeling of being exhausted but in bliss of a great day of practice. A feeling of exhaustion followed by a spirit of doing it again tomorrow, because progress was made. A feeling of exhaustion, but only physically. A feeling of mental freshness - that if your mind was an excited and happy dog pulling your tired old body along. How much easier would it be to go out and practice? How much easier would it be to game?

Have faith my friends. It all begins with hope.