The Best Life Hack Is No Hack At All

I’m fairly certain he didn’t notice me.

He was too busy making things happen.

In a rare moment of sitting down and relaxing I spied a spider diligently working spinning his web. Back and forth he went from the light fixture by the back door and up to the gutter creating an ever growing and symmetrical network of whatever spiders make their webs out of. 

It was fascinating to watch the process of how he patiently and intentionally created his work of art. What I saw as art, he saw as something far more practical and essential to his survival. 

If there were any short cuts to building a web, I don’t believe this spider was aware of them. His task looked pretty straight forward, perhaps even repetitive and monotonous. He knew what he needed to do and he simply did it.

Us humans are often inundated by so-called influencers and self-annointed experts trying to sell us their short cuts and ways to hack the system. Some will tell us that all we need to do is radiate our intentions into the world and those intentions will somehow magically manifest themselves into our reality.

I’m a huge fan of setting clear intentions and embodying the energy of those intentions. But life has shown me repeatedly that there are no shortcuts, there are no magical hacks to circumvent the hard work associated with accomplishing anything of significance. Intentions without aligned action render those intentions useless.

The hard work is never glorious, is it? It is often repetitive and monotonous. Growth is a process and the process is not as glamorous as some would have you believe it to be no matter what it is you’re attempting to build. The process is the path, and the path is the way.

A spider looking for a life hack on how to build a web without doing the work will likely starve to death.

The best life hack is no hack at all.