Some adversity is a lesson. Some is just unfair. Knowing which one you’re in saves you a lot of guilt.

Treating everything hard as a lesson means treating everything hard as somehow earned, which quietly turns each difficulty into a question about what you did wrong. Plenty of it is not like that at all. Some situations contain something to learn and some are simply unfair, and putting a thing in the right category decides whether guilt gets attached to it. The sorting is worth doing carefully.

Take whatever is weighing on you and ask whether there is a real lesson in it or whether it just happened to you. If the honest answer is the second, you can stop hunting for what you should have done differently.