Find Your Difficult: How to Put the Shark in the Tank Yourself
“-What makes you keep trying?
-My strong belief that I don’t belong at the bottom”
Ahmed KHalid Taoufika
That is probably one of the most influential ideas I encountered while reading ADHD 2.0 by Dr. Edward Hallowell and Dr. John Ratey. The authors explain how encountering—or deliberately creating—the right kind of challenge can improve our lives, sharpen our minds, and eventually contribute to better mental health.
But from my own experience, I would take the idea one step further:
Find your right difficulty, or the wrong one will eventually find you.
Let me start with a story.
Some Japanese fishermen observed something unusual: fish caught directly from the sea tasted superior and had higher nutritional value. In contrast, fish raised in tanks lacked these qualities and seemed bland, soft, and unremarkable. Curiosity led the fishermen to investigate, and they discovered the reason was surprisingly simple: constant movement.
A fish in the open sea is on constant alert: swimming, evading, surviving and competing. A fish in a tank has none of that. Food arrives on schedule. Danger doesn’t exist. It’s the perfect comfort zone. And the fish pays for that comfort with its own quality.
So they came up with an effective, simple solution: put little sharks in the tanks. Yes, they’d lose a few fish along the way. But the ones that survived—the ones that had to stay alert, had to keep moving—came out of better quality.
The moral of the story: struggle is a maintenance mechanism. Difficulty isn’t the thing standing between you and a better life — it’s frequently the thing building it. Life’s difficulties are healthy mechanisms that help you become a sharper, better person.
The Divine Law
In Islam, there are two kinds of struggle in every person’s life: the ones that come from your past- sins and shortcomings- and the ones that come from your future: life’s difficulties. We’ll focus on the latter here.
Firstly: being a righteous person, even one with a genuinely clean record, doesn’t automatically guarantee a happy life. We’re not angels. God tells us that worship, in the fullest sense, isn’t just prayer and piety — it’s work, it’s contribution, it’s the ongoing project of making the world around you better. That’s the original human covenant.
Which means the ultimate goal of a human life was never happiness. It’s fulfillment.
And when you look away from that fulfillment — when you settle into the tank — the divine law, just like the law of gravity, has a way of sending you circumstances and motives that force you back to the surface. Not as punishment. As a push upward.
A sickness that finally forces you to train your body, and buys you years of health on the other side of it. A financial crisis that rebuilds your relationship with money from the ground up, and ends up easing the load for you and everyone who depends on you. A toxic work environment that pushes you to sharpen your skills until you’re finally free of it. None of these arrive to break you. They arrive to push you forward.
Secondly, in Islam, struggle is not always about calamities or hardship; it can also be comfort and blessing. Sometimes your real difficulty is to make the most of what God has blessed you with. Your test in life is how well you will treat God’s fortune and the responsibility placed on you, and how others around you will benefit from it.
Here’s where being a believer actually pays off — not in the next life alone, but in this one, practically, today. You already have the script. You know, in advance, exactly which “little sharks” life tends to release into your tank. The smart move is to use that blueprint and stay 10 moves ahead of the game: make your difficult, on your own terms.
Why start from scratch? And discover the hard way?
Why wait until sick to exercise? Why wait until going broke to fix my spending habits? Why wait until a productivity guru tells you that waking up at dawn is good for your productivity and a perfect way to start your day, or that fasting is beneficial for your health, or that keeping a smile on your face affects your mood and the moods of the others around you: you already have that script, and it’s divine.
None of that means it will be easy. All of it will demand real effort. But it’s the right kind of difficult — chosen, structured, deliberate, not imposed on you by circumstance.
Hard times, met with the right mindset and real effort, lead somewhere good. Hard times met with a sinful life and a corrupted mindset only compound—more chaos leading to harder times.
So the real work isn’t avoiding difficulty. It’s controlling which difficulty finds you, and when. Build your own hardship before life builds it for you. Make it a habit, even though it costs time and effort up front — because that upfront cost is nothing compared to the price of a forced, chaotic, expensive adaptation later, on a timeline and environment you didn’t choose.
Put the shark in the tank yourself. Don’t wait to be thrown in the sea with bigger sharks.
“The Messenger of Allah (peace and blessings of Allah be upon him) said: “How amazing is the affair of the believer! His entire affair is good for him, and this applies to no one but the believer: if good fortune befalls him, he gives thanks, and it is good for him; and if adversity befalls him, he shows patience, and it is good for him.”
Narrated by Muslim
