"Hard choices, easy life" came from a Polish firefighter who joined Solidarity, watched martial law crush the movement, and fled the communist regime in 1986 with his wife and almost nothing else. Jerzy Gregorek landed in America as a political refugee at 31. No English, no money, no credentials that transferred. What followed was two decades of the hardest available choices. He became a 4x World Weightlifting Champion and set a world record. He went back to school in his 40s and earned an MFA in poetry. In 2000, he and his wife Aniela founded UCLA's weightlifting team. The line only reached your feed because Tim Ferriss had Jerzy on episode 228, with Naval in the room, and both of them have been spreading it ever since. People quote it about 5am alarms and cold showers. The man who coined it used it to decide whether to leave his country forever.