Doctor beautifully explains why life being hard doesn’t mean something’s wrong

Dr. Russell Ledet, MD, PhD, MBA, shares some of the lessons he’s learned over the past 20 years in a recent Instagram post. One of the biggest is that just because something is hard doesn’t necessarily mean something is wrong. Like most of us, Dr. Ledet has experienced his share of hard times. He and his wife married at 19 and raised two children while building their careers. He served in the military, worked full-time as a hospital security guard while double majoring in chemistry and biology, faced 30 to 40 medical school rejections, earned a PhD, and kept going until he eventually became a doctor. “You better get comfortable with things getting hard,” Dr. Ledet says. “Sometimes life is just hard.” Life can be hard Things can be important to us and still be difficult. “Trying to become a better version of yourself while still being responsible for the version of you that exists right now, it’s hard,” Dr. Ledet says. He offers plenty of examples from his own life in the video. He and his wife had their first child while they were, as he puts it, “still figuring out how to be adults.” While working full-time as a security guard at Baton Rouge General Hospital and attending college, he decided he wanted to become a doctor. He applied to 30 to 40 medical schools and was rejected by all of them. Undeterred, Dr. Ledet and his family packed up a U-Haul and moved from Louisiana to New York City, all so he could pursue a PhD at New York University. “We barely had any money. Didn’t know any people. Didn’t even have an apartment when we got there,” he says. He explains that raising two children while attending medical school was hard. “You want to raise kids while you’re in medical school? Good luck. They do not care,” exclaims Dr. Ledet. Entering a five-year residency that combined pediatrics, adult psychiatry, and child and adolescent psychiatry was hard, too, Dr. Ledet tells viewers. However, his perspective on those situations began to change. Dr. Ledet says, “I asked a different question. Is this hard because I need to stop, or is this hard because I need to grow?” This way of looking at life’s hard moments resonated with plenty of Instagram viewers. One person championed Dr. Ledet’s message, writing, “This is a master class that needs to be taken on tour to every city town parish and borough” Another was ready to pass the word, sharing, “Passing this along to my daughter and everyone else who needs it. GOD BLESS YOU & YOUR FAMILY. You touched my heart and soul todayyyyy” For this viewer, the timing couldn’t have been much better. They remarked, “This was the first post that came up on my phone when I opened IG.” One person wasn’t shy about just how much they liked Dr. Ledet’s words. “Could be the best post on Instagram ever.” Not every hard thing is worth sticking with Dr. Ledet makes it clear that walking away from a hard thing can sometimes be the right choice. “I ain’t telling you to stay somewhere where you know you’re getting destroyed,” he cautions. “I’m not telling you every struggle is worth enduring.” He acknowledges that sometimes the right response is to leave a situation and make a change. “But it is important to learn the difference between something that’s bad for you and something that’s simply being hard FOR you.” It’s a distinction his own life has given him many opportunities to make. “If you run every time life gets uncomfortable, you’ll eventually run away from some things that were worth fighting for.” A woman facing an uphill climb. Photo credit: Canva Getting comfortable with hard Dr. Ledet doesn’t expect life to stop being difficult. “The goal is not to build a life where nothing is hard,” he clarifies. “I don’t even know if that exists, by the way.” Instead, he says, “The goal is to build the capacity to handle hard things without the hard things destroying you.” Looking back at the life he and his wife have built together, Dr. Ledet now sees those experiences differently. “The easy moments gave us memories, but the hard moments gave us capacity,” he shared. His family doesn’t always know how things will work out, but after 20 years, Dr. Ledet says they’ve gotten comfortable facing that uncertainty. “This is going to be hard, and we going to do it anyway,” he adds. “That’s pretty much been the Ledet way.”