The Two Lies Everyone Believes (& the Truth That Sets You Free)
Why the path to fulfillment runs through the discomfort you're avoiding
There’s an old teaching story about a caravan master who stopped for the night with twenty camels but only nineteen tent pegs. His assistant panicked. How would they secure all the animals?
The master smiled. “These camels are stupid animals,” he said. “Just go through the motions of tying the last camel. It’ll stay put all night.”
The master was right.
The next morning, the assistant untied the nineteen camels and got them ready to go. But the twentieth refused to budge. The assistant pulled and prodded. Nothing.
“You forgot to untie him,” the master said.
Anthony de Mello tells this story in his book Awareness to illustrate the human condition. We are often afraid of things that don’t exist. We’ve tied ourselves to pegs that aren’t real. We stand there, paralyzed, convinced we can’t move - tied to nothing.
This is what the lies do. They tie us to nothing. And we spend our lives tethered to invisible ropes.
The Two Lies
Our friend Brian Johnson calls them out with brutal clarity. Two lies, working in tandem, that create every distraction keeping you from the life you’re capable of living.
Lie #1: Chase fame, wealth, and power. That’s the path to fulfillment.
Lie #2: It should be easy. If you’re uncomfortable, you’re doing it wrong.
These lies create a double trap. You work harder and harder, climbing a ladder that’s leaning against the wrong wall. And the entire time, you’re convinced that if it feels this hard, you must be on the wrong path.
As Brian puts it, you end up “not succeeding at something that was never worth pursuing.”
Lie #1: The Four Idols
The writer Arthur Brooks gives the first lie concrete form, pointing us toward what the 13th-century philosopher Thomas Aquinas called the four idols: money, power, pleasure, and fame.
“Our impulses, amplified by the consumer economy, entertainment, and social media,” Brooks writes, “push us to spend our time focused not on what matters but rather on trivialities and distractions: money and stuff, power or social status, pleasure and comfort, and fame or the attention of others.”
Why do we chase them if they don’t deliver?
“The same reason we always do self-destructive things when we are unhappy but unable to change our circumstances: distraction,” he writes, adding, “Unhappy people make great consumers.”
In his book Wanting, Luke Burgis calls these thin desires - those borrowed from culture and promising fulfillment but delivering disappointment. They’re diamonds formed at the surface, not deep beneath the earth. They crack under pressure.
“The feelings are often more intense the thinner a desire is,” Burgis observes. The intensity tricks us. We think: “I want this so badly; it must be what I need.” But intensity doesn’t equal truth. It usually equals borrowed wanting.
On the other hand, thick desires - the ones formed deep, over time, protected from the volatility of trends and comparison - those feel different. Quieter. More certain. Less frantic.
The question is: Can you tell the difference?
Lie #2: It Should Be Easy
The second lie is more insidious because it masquerades as self-compassion.
Listen to your body. If it doesn’t feel right, stop. You shouldn’t have to force it. The right path will feel effortless. Follow your bliss.
This advice might sound wise, but it’s really just comfort-seeking dressed up as intuition.
In The Comfort Crisis, Michael Easter traces the origins: “Humans evolved to seek comfort. We instinctually default to safety, shelter, warmth, extra food, and minimal effort. And that drive through nearly all of human history was beneficial because it pushed us to survive.”
But here’s the problem: “In an uncomfortable world, consistently seeking a sliver of comfort helped us stay alive. Our common problem today is that our environment has changed, but our wiring hasn’t.”
We’re still wired to avoid discomfort. But now, discomfort isn’t a saber-toothed tiger. It’s uncertainty. Vulnerability. The gap between who we are and who we say we want to be.
Avoiding that kind of discomfort doesn’t keep you safe. It keeps you small.
Brian makes it explicit: “Rule number one of a heroic life is that it’s supposed to be hard. That’s not a bug in the system. That’s the entire point.”
Why Meaningful Effort Must Be Uncomfortable
When we talked with him, learning expert Trevor Ragan gave us the equation that clarifies things: Caring + Uncertainty = Discomfort.
If you care deeply about something, and there’s uncertainty about the outcome, you will feel discomfort. That’s not evidence you’re on the wrong path. It’s evidence you’re doing something worth doing.
The discomfort isn’t the problem. The discomfort is the signal.
Seth Godin draws a similar distinction between stress versus tension in his book The Songs of Significance.
Stress is the desire for two incompatible things at the same time. Stay or go. Speak up or shrink back. Chase the idol or build something real. Stress is internal conflict, paralysis.
Tension is forward motion. “Tension is the feeling that leads to forward motion,” Godin writes. “Tension is a symptom of [Steven] Pressfield’s Resistance. Tension is a countdown, a deadline, or a budget. Tension is the process of finding an answer to a riddle or the question that opens up a possibility.”
The two lies create stress. You want external validation (Lie #1) but also want to avoid discomfort (Lie #2). You can’t have both. So you oscillate. You spin.
Meaningful effort creates tension. It’s productive. Useful. As Godin says, “The tension is good. It’s a sign we’re onto something.”
The Five Regrets of the Dying
Bronnie Ware spent years with people in their final weeks of life. She documented their regrets. Five patterns emerged:
I wish I’d lived a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.
I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.
I wish I’d stayed in touch with my friends.
I wish I’d let myself be happier.
Read those again. Each is the result of believing the lies.
Chasing the idols (Lie #1): working too hard for money, power, status. Living for others’ expectations. Letting what Brooks calls “deal friends” push out “real friends.”
Avoiding discomfort (Lie #2): not expressing feelings because conflict is uncomfortable. Not pursuing happiness because change is uncertain. Not living true to yourself because that requires facing the gap between who you are and who you say you are.
These aren’t abstract philosophical errors. They’re the specific, measurable costs of a life spent tied to pegs that exist only in your mind.
The Cost of Believing the Lies
Now you know the lies. You can see that they’re pegs that don’t exist. You understand that the discomfort you feel isn’t evidence that you’re on the wrong path; it’s often evidence that you’re on the right one.
So why does this matter?
Because knowing the lies exist doesn’t make them stop working on you. And the cost of believing them - even a little, even sometimes - isn’t just what you fail to achieve. It’s who you fail to become.
The Three Payments
When we spoke with our friend Jamison Price recently, he introduced us to what he calls the soul gap - that space between who you say you are and who you actually are.
“The gap shows up as anger, resentment, anxiety, disappointment,” Jamison told us. “It’s the dragon in the cave. It’s the secret life. The lies you tell yourself. The treasure - your identity, your soul - that you refuse to claim because you won’t face what guards it.”
The two lies create this gap, keep it open, and widen it. They do this by extracting payment in three currencies: health, happiness, and the chance to live with your heart on fire.
Health
Michael Easter calls it comfort creep. “We are terrible at noticing that comfort creep is consuming us, and what it’s doing to us,” he writes.
Here’s what it’s doing: we’re weaker, sicker, and more fragile than at any point in human history. Not because we lack information. Because we lack discomfort.
According to the research, Easter points out, only 3 percent of people who lose weight in a given year keep it off. Their secret? “It’s not some special food or exercise no one else has,” he writes. “It’s their ability to get comfortable with discomfort.”
Most people quit. Easter found that most people abandon their health goals after exactly five weeks, two days, and 43 minutes. “Why? This is when the discomfort sets in. People usually fail after a handful of weeks because their bodies fight to bring them back to their starting point.”
We’ve been sold the lie that it should be easy. So when it gets hard, we assume we’re doing it wrong.
But as former Special Forces soldier Jason McCarthy told Easter: “Through time, you’ve always had a warrior class that is at the physical tip of the spear. The Greeks, Roman legions, etc., they all trained similarly. And the distance physically between the warrior class and the average citizen used to be small. But now that gap is wider than ever in human history.”
We’ve allowed comfort to calcify our strength. And we’re paying for it with declining function, rising disease rates, and a slow erosion of our capacity to do hard things when hard things are required.
Happiness
Arthur Brooks identifies the trap: “Focusing on ourselves is the most normal thing in the world. Yet this doesn’t help us get happier. Focusing more on the world outside is linked to greater happiness, while focusing on yourself and how others see you can lead to unstable moods.”
He calls it professional self-objectification - losing your true self to a representation of yourself. Your job title. Your social media following. Your income bracket.
“When it comes to work,” Brooks writes, “people reward you for addictive behavior. No one says, ‘Wow, an entire bottle of gin in one night? You are an outstanding drinker.’ But work sixteen hours a day and you’ll probably get a promotion.”
The four idols promise happiness but deliver what economists call hedonic adaptation. You get the raise, feel briefly satisfied, then immediately recalibrate. The goalpost moves. You’re back where you started, but now you’re working harder to maintain what you have.
Meanwhile, Brooks observes, “societal incentives push many of us toward deal friends and away from real friends.” We collect connections based on utility - what they can do for us - instead of building friendships of virtue. Relationships that are ends in themselves, not instruments to something else.
Social media accelerates this. Brooks notes that researchers coined the term “Facebook envy” to capture “the uniquely fertile circumstances that social media creates for this destructive emotion.” These apps expose us to a constant stream of people curating their lives to look as successful and happy as possible. And we compare. And we try to climb those same ladders. And we fall further behind who we’re meant to become.
Hearts on Fire
Author and computer science professor Cal Newport, when we talked with him, described what he calls cognitive obesity - the mental equivalent of junk food. “We’re consuming shallow status content instead of doing deep work,” he said. “And it’s leading to cognitive decline.”
The lies direct our attention toward status games rather than what Newport calls the deep life - building the four buckets that create lasting meaning: craft, community, constitution, and contemplation.
“The problem,” Newport explained, “is that chasing external markers keeps you from asking the deeper questions. What skills am I building? Who am I serving? What am I becoming?”
In Wanting, Luke Burgis describes people who spent decades looking forward to retirement, only to find that achieving it left them hollow. “That’s because the desire to retire is a thin desire, filled with mimetically derived ideas about the things one might do. The desire to invest more time with family, on the other hand, is a thick desire - and the proof is that a person can start to fulfill it today.”
Thick desires are hidden beneath the fleeting, impulsive desires that dominate our days. We’re so busy chasing what we think we should want that we lose contact with what we actually want. With who we actually are.
As Burgis quotes author and educator Parker Palmer: “Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I must listen to my life telling me who I am.”
But we can’t hear our lives over the noise of the lies.
The Self-Reinforcing Cycle
Here’s how the lies keep you stuck:
You feel uncomfortable. (This is normal - remember, Caring + Uncertainty = Discomfort.)
But you’ve been taught that discomfort means something’s wrong. So you believe something’s wrong.
You chase a quick fix. A new program. A new strategy. A new distraction. Something - anything - to make the discomfort stop.
You get temporary relief. The discomfort subsides. You feel better.
But the underlying problem hasn’t changed. So you face it again. And the discomfort returns. Often worse than before.
And the cycle repeats.
Meanwhile, the work that matters most goes undone. The secret struggles -those dragons in the cave Jamison talked about - stay hidden and unresolved. The real threats to what you care about circle closer, unaddressed. And your inner wolves - those competing parts of you that need integration, not elimination - they grow feral or domesticated, but never tamed.
Jamison’s framework is clear: without doing the inner work, you can’t show up for others in the way they need you to.
Trevor Ragan, when we talked with him about the learner versus knower mindset, made a similar point: “Believing ‘it should be easy’ prevents us from even attempting growth. If you think talent is fixed, if you think meaningful work should feel effortless, you’ll quit the moment you hit resistance. And resistance is exactly where growth begins.”
The lies create a fixed mindset disguised as self-compassion. They tell you to honor your feelings, to respect your boundaries, to follow your bliss. But what they’re really doing is keeping you small. Keeping you safe. Keeping you from the discomfort that signals you’re doing something that matters.
The Real Cost
Let’s revisit Bronnie Ware’s five regrets:
I wish I’d lived a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.
I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.
I wish I’d stayed in touch with my friends.
I wish I’d let myself be happier.
These aren’t abstract warnings. They’re the specific, measurable costs of a lifetime spent believing the lies.
You work too hard for money, power, and status. You avoid the discomfort of being yourself. You choose deal friends over real friends because real friendship requires vulnerability. You postpone happiness because you’re waiting for some external condition to change.
And then, at the end, you look back and realize: you were never actually tied.
You pay for the mistake with all the relationships you don’t foster, the conversations you never have, and the worthy challenges you do not face. In short, you pay for it with the identity gap that never closes.
The Way Through
You know the lies now. You understand the cost. You can see the identity gap and what’s standing in the way of closing it.
So what do you do about it?
Two Kinds of Discomfort
What you can’t do is avoid discomfort. That option doesn’t exist. The only choice you have is which discomfort you’ll face.
Option A: The sharp, purposeful discomfort of growth. The hard conversation. The physical training. The creative work that scares you. The vulnerability of showing up as yourself.
Option B: The dull, chronic discomfort of regret. The identity gap that widens. The health that declines. The relationships that drift. The passion that fades. The person you never became.
Both hurt. Only one builds.
Arthur Brooks frames it clearly: “Being self-compassionate means doing the hard thing that you actually need to do, notwithstanding your feelings. A lot of the time, when people are in pain, they resist an effective cure because it would temporarily be even more painful.”
The way out is the way through.
The Three-Stage Path
When we spoke with him, Jamison articulated a philosophical framework that clarifies the path. Three stages. Each builds on the last. Each requires you to walk through discomfort rather than around it.1
Slay Dragons
The dragon is your secret life. The lies you tell yourself. The gap between who you say you are and who you actually are. The treasure the dragon guards? Your identity. Your soul. The person you’re meant to become.
You can’t skip this step. You can’t chase lions or tame wolves until you’ve faced your dragon. Because if you haven’t closed the identity gap, Jamison says, “you become a liability to your community instead of an asset. You can’t serve from an empty vessel. You can’t give what you don’t have.”
Slaying your dragon means getting honest. Ruthlessly honest.
Where are you living someone else’s life? Where are you chasing thin desires instead of thick ones? Where are you avoiding discomfort that would actually set you free?
Luke Burgis offers a tool for this in Wanting. He calls them fulfillment stories. “Tell me about a time in your life when you did something well and it brought you a sense of fulfillment,” he writes. Not someone else’s definition of success. Yours.
A fulfillment story has three elements:
It’s an action you took.
You believe you did well - by your own estimation.
It brought you deep satisfaction that lasted beyond the moment.
When you look at your fulfillment stories, patterns emerge. You start to see what actually matters to you. What you’re built for. What lights you up. These are your thick desires. They’ve been there all along, buried beneath the noise of the lies.
Remember the Parker Palmer quote: “Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I must listen to my life telling me who I am.”
Slaying your dragon means listening. Then acting on what you hear.
Chase Lions
Once you’ve faced your inner truth, the second stage is about using that self-awareness to protect what matters.
The lion represents external threats. Things that could harm what you care about if you don’t address them proactively. The key word is proactively. You don’t wait for the lion to attack the village. You go after it while you still have the advantage.
Cal Newport’s work on the deep life offers a framework here. He identifies four buckets that create lasting meaning: craft, community, constitution, and contemplation. These are what matter. These are what the lions threaten.
Chasing lions means asking: What threatens my craft? What threatens my community? What threatens my constitution - my physical and mental health? What threatens my contemplation - my ability to think, reflect, and grow?
Then you address those threats before they become crises.
The status games Newport describes - chasing external markers for validation - are lions. They promise fulfillment but often deliver only cognitive obesity. You chase them proactively by opting out. By building a deep life instead.
The comfort creep Michael Easter warns about? That’s a lion. It threatens your constitution. You chase it by deliberately choosing discomfort. By training hard. By going outside. By doing things that build capacity instead of eroding it.
The “deal friends” that Arthur Brooks identifies? Those are lions, too. They threaten community. You chase them by investing in friendships of virtue instead. Relationships that are ends in themselves, not instruments to something else.
Chasing lions is about prevention, not reaction. It’s about seeing threats clearly and moving toward them rather than away from them.
Tame Wolves
The third stage is about integration. Your inner wolves are the competing parts of you - wildness and wisdom, strength and restraint, the part that wants to break free and the part that wants to serve.
Most people try to eliminate one side or the other. They either become feral - all wildness, no restraint - or domesticated - all compliance, no fire. Neither works.
Taming your wolves means integrating the paradox. As Jamison says, you become dangerous to darkness and dependable in the light. You bring both wildness and wisdom to the pack. You show up as an asset, not a burden.
This personal evolution doesn’t happen through one heroic act or dramatic external change. (If you’re tempted to think you need to quit your job, move across the country, or completely reinvent yourself - that’s just Lie #2 showing up again.)
The taming happens in the fleeting moments that pass by too often without your awareness. Those little moments that go unnoticed are what dictate the quality of your life - and they’re where you learn to integrate both parts of yourself.
The Daily Reps
So what does the path through actually look like in practice? What are the daily opportunities to slay dragons, chase lions, and tame wolves?
They’re not big. They’re not flashy. Nobody’s watching. But they’re everywhere.
The biggest challenges you face are the tiny ones that pass by too often without your awareness. Those little moments that go unnoticed are what dictate the quality of your life.
You’re sitting at the breakfast table with your family. Are you scrolling through your phone, or are you present? That’s a dragon moment - closing the gap between who you say you are and who you actually are.
You’re in a bad mood. Your kid triggers you. Can you still pause before reacting? That’s a lion moment - protecting what matters most through a small choice when it would be easier to let the threat slip past.
The alarm goes off. Do you get up or hit snooze? That’s a wolf moment - integrating discipline and energy, proving to yourself that you’re the kind of person who does what they said they would do.
The gym is where you practice all of this in concentrated doses. As former Special Forces soldier Jason McCarthy put it: “Doing physically hard things is an enormous life hack. Do hard things and the rest of life gets easier and you appreciate it all the more.”
When you show up to train - especially when you don’t feel like it - you’re not just building physical capacity. You’re building evidence that you’re capable. You’re learning to name resistance and act despite it. You’re closing the gap between who you say you are and who you are.
These moments take more discipline than the big challenges. Because the big ones come with ego attached. The big ones give you something to post about. But worthy challenges don’t have to be big. They just have to be honest.
The sum of these small choices is greater than any dramatic gesture. Nearly every day, you have the opportunity to do another rep.
You don’t start with an epic challenge. You start with a random Tuesday morning. With the alarm going off. With the conversation at breakfast. With showing up to the gym no matter your mood or what’s written on the whiteboard. With the small decision that either closes the identity gap or widens it.
The Endgame
Here’s what all of this is building toward: the ability to forget yourself in service to others.
Jamison’s framework culminates in what he calls shared actualization. “The point of self-awareness,” he says, “is to forget yourself in service to others. The point of discovering your potential is to give it away.”
You slay your dragons so you can stop being a liability and start being an asset. You chase your lions so you can protect what matters. You tame your wolves so you can bring both wildness and wisdom to the pack.
The inner work enables the outer impact.
Arthur Brooks makes a similar point: “This is the mystical truth behind almost all faiths and traditions. Serve the tenets of the divine, seek the ultimate truth, and thus work to make others happier rather than yourself. Only then will you be more successful in your own quest.”
The lies tell you to focus on yourself. To chase your own fame, wealth, power, comfort. To make your happiness the goal.
The truth is the opposite. You focus on becoming someone capable of serving. You chase the discomfort that builds that capacity. You create surplus value. You make your growth the path to making others’ lives better.
That’s the way through.
One Last Thing
Jamison ends his framework with this: “The process is not about becoming perfect, it is about honesty and showing up to the cave, the pit, and the pack again and again.”
You’re not trying to eliminate discomfort. You’re not trying to finally arrive at a place where everything is easy. You’re not trying to slay every dragon once and for all.
You’re building the capacity to face what needs to be faced. To show up when it’s hard. To keep showing up.
The lies promise you can avoid this. The truth sets you free to do it.
Go through the motions of untying yourself from the imaginary peg. Even if it feels real. Even if it feels scary.
The freedom and fulfillment you’re looking for are there for the taking.
