Morning Philosophy
“Nothing in the world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain, difficulty... I have never in my life envied a human being who led an easy life.”
— Theodore Roosevelt, letter to his son Kermit, 1900
Roosevelt wrote this not as a general theorizing about war, but as a father speaking plainly to his son about the shape of a worthy life. The cadet's path—law, command, service—is deliberately harder than the alternatives available to him, and that difficulty is not a flaw in the plan but the plan itself. Today, when a task feels like friction, recognize it as the very material your character is being built from, not an obstacle to your purpose.