Reality doesn’t care about preferences. It rewards accurate perception and punishes wishful thinking, even when the wish is sincere.
The first discipline is to look at what is true, especially when it threatens your identity. Pain often marks the edge where learning is available. If you treat pain as a warning to stop, you stay stuck. If you treat it as information, you move forward.
I learned to ask: what is the real problem, not the story I’m telling? What evidence would change my mind? What am I missing? Those questions turn confusion into investigation.
Dealing with reality also means accepting constraints—time, talent, luck—and designing around them instead of arguing with them. Acceptance is not surrender; it is the start of effective action.