What am about to share is not something intelligent to say, like the stuff you see on inspirational posts on X and Instagram. It's something to think about when you're standing at the corner of life where you have to make the life altering decisions.
Just think of someone like Cristiano Ronaldo, I'm not a football fan but I know him very well. The man is 40 years old and judging from his date of birth will be 41 tomorrow. He trains harder than the guys that are 20 years old and that's a very major feat. He avoids eating the same food as everyone else at a party or in a regular day. He goes to bed when everyone else is staying up late, he does extra now in the gym. The discipline is not even normal.
But look at his actual life outside training and on the football pitch, his actual life is much less difficult than the person that chose to be comfortable every time an option was presented. The pile of easy options is a different pile than the pile of the day you chose the difficult option.
When you skip the gym over and over again, your body gets worse every time you make the decision to skip the gym. In life when you shy away from completing a difficult project because it just feels too difficult, you do not stay the same, you get left behind and everyone else who didn't do what you did gets ahead.
I think what happens is the difficulty of the situation gets moved around. You either deal with it in the early stages where you can still change the outcome or you have to deal with it in the late stages when your options of dealing with the difficulty have significantly decreased. I am even being too simplistic in my explanation because the later hard life is much harder than the difficulties in succeeding.
What I do know is that you eventually pay in your health, your regret and not getting to be the person that you could have been if you had made a switch and not paid the price for being comfortable. Difficult things do not guarantee success though, but, choosing the easy way out nearly guarantees that you will be stuck.