People want an amazing physique. But you don’t end up with one unless you legitimately
appreciate the pain and physical stress that comes with living inside a gym for hour upon
hour, unless you love calculating and calibrating the food you eat, planning your life out in
tiny plate-sized portions.4
People want to start their own business or become financially independent. But you don’t
end up a successful entrepreneur unless you find a way to appreciate the risk, the
uncertainty, the repeated failures, and work insane hours on something you have no idea
whether or not it will be successful.
People want a partner, a spouse. But you don’t end up attracting
someone amazing without appreciating the emotional turbulence that comes with
weathering rejections, building the sexual tension that never gets released, and staring
blankly at a phone that never rings. It’s part of the game of love. You can’t win if you don’t
play.
What determines your success isn’t “What do you want to enjoy?” The question is, “What
pain do you want to sustain?” The quality of your life is not determined by the quality of
your positive experiences, but the quality of your negative experiences. And to get good at
dealing with negative experiences is to get good at dealing with life.
To get good at dealing with negative experiences is to get good at dealing with life.
There’s a lot of crappy advice out there that says, “You’ve just got to want it enough!”
Everybody wants something. And everybody wants something enough. They just aren’t
aware of what it is they want, or rather, what they want “enough.”
Because if you want the benefits of something in life, you have to also want the costs. If you
want the beach body, you have to want the sweat, the soreness, the early mornings, and
the hunger pangs. If you want the yacht, you have to also want the late nights, the risky
business moves, and the possibility of pissing off one person or ten thousand.
If you find yourself wanting something month after month, year after year,
yet nothing happens and you never come any closer to it, then maybe what you
actually want is a fantasy, an idealization, an image, a false promise. Maybe what you want
isn’t what you want—you just enjoy wanting. Maybe you don’t actually want it at all.
Sometimes I ask people, “How do you choose to suffer?” These people tilt their heads and
look at me like I have twelve noses.
But I ask because that tells me far more about you than your desires and fantasies.
Because you have to choose something. You can’t have a pain-free life. It can’t all be roses
and unicorns.
And ultimately that’s the hard question that matters. Pleasure is an easy question. And
pretty much all of us have similar answers. The more interesting question is the pain.
What is the pain that you want to sustain?
