If you can't decide between 2 choices, take the path that's more difficult/painful in the short term. Doing this will counteract 'hyperbolic discounting,' the brain's tendency to overestimate short term pain and underestimate long term pain.

Run Uphill Simple heuristic: If you’re evenly split on a difficult decision, take the path more painful in the short term.

Run Uphill Simple heuristic: If you’re evenly split on a difficult decision, take the path more painful in the short term. If you have two choices to make, and they’re relatively equal choices, take the path more difficult and more painful in the short term.

This is a good plan for life in general. If you have two choices, choose the harder. If you're trying to decide whether to go out running or sit home and watch TV, go running. Probably the reason this trick works so well is that when you have two choices and one is harder, the only reason you're even considering the other is laziness. You know in the back of your mind what's the right thing to do, and this trick merely forces you to acknowledge it.

Life teaches us the right path is rarely the easy one.

Either way there would be suffering. I had to choose between physical suffering in the moment, and the mental anguish of wondering if that one missed pull-up, that last lap in the pool, the quarter mile I skipped on the road or trail, would end up costing me an opportunity of a lifetime. It was an easy choice.

One of the hardest decisions you'll ever face in life is choosing whether to walk away or try harder.

Basically, if you are making the hard choices right now in what to eat, you’re not eating all the junk food you want, and making the hard choice to work out. So, your life long-term will be easy. You won’t be sick. You won’t be unhealthy. The same is true of values. The same is true of saving up for a rainy day. The same is true of how you approach your relationships. If you make the easy choices right now, your overall life will be a lot harder. [4]

Sometimes the only choice is the lesser of two evils.

When faced with the choice between two things you need that are seemingly at odds, go slowly to figure out how you can have as much of both as possible. There is almost always a good path that you just haven't figured out yet, so look for it until you find it rather than settle for the choice that is then apparent to you.

Have you ever noticed that if there’s a hard way and an easy way, you choose the hard way every time? Why do you think that is?

Every time you confront something painful, you are at a potentially important juncture in your life — you have the opportunity to choose healthy and painful truth or unhealthy but comfortable delusion.

Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain.

Sometimes it is harder to deprive oneself of a pain than of a pleasure.