Everyone want what makes them feel good. Everyone wants to live a carefree, happy, and easy life, to fall in love and have fantastic sex and relationships, to look perfect and make money, and to be popular, well-respected, admired, and a huge baller to the point that when you come into a room, people split like the Red Sea.

That is something that everyone would enjoy—it is simple to enjoy.

"What do you want out of life?" I could inquire. "I want to be happy and have a wonderful family and a work that I enjoy," you say. It's so common that it's lost its meaning.

What pain do you want in your life is a more interesting question—one that you may have never pondered before. For what are you willing to put up a fight? Because it appears to be a bigger factor in how our lives turn out.

Everyone wants a great job and financial independence, but not everyone wants to put in 60-hour work weeks, long commutes, and tedious paperwork while navigating arbitrary corporate hierarchies and the sterile confines of an endless cubicle purgatory. People want to be wealthy without the danger, effort, or delayed reward that comes with accumulating wealth. 1

Everyone wants wonderful sex and a great relationship, but not everyone is prepared to put up with the difficult conversations, awkward silences, broken sentiments, and emotional psychodrama that comes with getting there.

As a result, they come to an agreement. They settle down and ponder "What if?" for years until the question shifts from "What if?" to "Was that it?" When the lawyers get home and get the alimony cheque, they ask, "What was that for?" What would they have done 20 years ago if not for their lowered standards and expectations?

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.

And learning to deal with terrible events is learning to deal with life.

It takes practice to get skilled at coping with negative situations, and it takes practice to grow 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.5

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?

That answer will actually get you somewhere. It’s the question that can change your life. It’s what makes me, me and you, you. It’s what defines and separates us, and ultimately brings us together.

For most of my adolescence and young adulthood, I fantasized about being a musician—a rock star, in particular. Any badass guitar song I heard, I would always close my eyes and envision myself up onstage playing it to the screams of the crowd, people absolutely losing their minds to my sweet finger-noodling.

This fantasy could keep me occupied for hours on end. The fantasizing continued through college, even after I dropped out of music school and stopped playing seriously.

But even then it was never a question of if I’d ever be up playing in front of screaming crowds, but when. I was biding my time before I could invest the proper amount of time and effort into getting out there and making it work. First, I needed to finish school. Then, I needed to make money. Then, I needed to find the time. Then… nothing.

Despite fantasizing about this for over half of my life, the reality never came. And it took me a long time and a lot of negative experiences to finally figure out why: I didn’t actually want it.

I was in love with the result—the image of me onstage, people cheering, me rocking out, pouring my heart into what I’m playing—but I wasn’t in love with the process. And because of that, I failed at it. Repeatedly. Hell, I didn’t even try hard enough to fail at it. I hardly tried at all.

The daily drudgery of practicing, the logistics of finding a group and rehearsing, the pain of finding gigs and actually getting people to show up and give a shit. The broken strings, the blown tube amp, hauling 40 pounds of gear to and from rehearsals with no car.

It’s a mountain of a dream and a mile-high climb to the top. And what took me a long time to discover was that I didn’t like to climb much. I just liked to imagine the top.

Our culture would have me believe that I had failed myself, that I was a quitter or a loser. According to self-help, I was either not brave enough, motivated enough, or didn't believe in myself enough. 6 The entrepreneurial/start-up crowd would argue that I abandoned my dream and succumbed to my social conditioning. 7 I'd be told to do affirmations8, join a mastermind group, manifest, or anything along those lines.

The truth, on the other hand, is significantly less interesting: I thought I wanted something, but it turns out I didn't. The story comes to a close.

I was only interested in the prize, not the effort. I was only interested in the end outcome, not the process. I was only interested in the victory, not the struggle.

And that isn't how life works.

The values for which you are willing to fight define who you are. People who appreciate the challenges of a gym are more likely to stay in shape.

Those who go up the corporate ladder like lengthy work weeks and the politics of the workplace. Those who thrive on the pressures and unpredictability of life as a hungry artist are the ones who live it and make it.

This isn't a plea for tenacity or "grit."

This isn't another case of "no gain without pain."

Our problems determine our accomplishments, which is the most basic and basic aspect of existence. So, friend, pick your battles carefully.