Everyone desires what feels good. Everyone wants to live a carefree, happy and easy life, fall in love and have wonderful sex and relationships, look perfect and make money and be famous and well-respected and admired and a complete baller to the extent that when you step into the room, people part like the Red Sea.
It's quick to like that, everyone would like that.
If I were to ask you, "What do you want from life?" And you say something like, "I want to be happy and have a wonderful family and a job I enjoy," and it's so omnipresent that it doesn't mean anything at all.
A more important question, a question you might never have asked before, is what kind of pain do you want in life? What would you be willing to fight for? And how our lives turn out seems to be a greater determinant of that.
Everyone wants to have an awesome career and financial freedom, but not everyone wants to suffer from 60-hour work weeks, lengthy commutes, disgusting paperwork, arbitrary corporate hierarchies and an endless cubicle hell's blasé confines. Without the risk, without the sacrifice, without the delayed gratification needed to accumulate wealth, people want to be wealthy.
Everyone wants great sex and an incredible relationship, but not everyone is prepared to go through the uncomfortable talks, the awkward silences, the bruised feelings and the emotional psychodrama to get there. And they settle in that way. They're settling down and thinking "What if?" "for years and years before the question is converted from" What if? "To" Was it that? And they think, "What was that for?" when the lawyers go home and the food inspection is in the mail. if not for their reduced aspirations and standardsTwenty years ago, then, for what?
Since happiness demands war. The positive is the side effect of the negative being handled. For so long before they come roaring back to life, you can only escape traumatic encounters.
Our needs are more or less identical at the center of all human behavior. Positive information is simple to manage. It's a traumatic feeling that we all deal with, by definition. What we get out of life, therefore, is not decided by the good feelings we want, but by the bad feelings we want.We're ready and able to sustain emotions to get us to the healthy emotions.
People want an impressive physique. But you don't end up with one because you legally understand the pain and physical discomfort that comes with hour after hour living inside a gym, because you love to measure and calibrate the food you consume, preparing your life in small plate-sized portions.
People want to start a company of their own or become financially stable. But unless you find a way to appreciate the challenge, the confusion, the repetitive failures, and working insane hours on something you have no idea whether or not it will be good, you do not end up a successful entrepreneur.
People want a girlfriend, a partner. But without appreciating the emotional turbulence that comes with, you do not end up attracting anyone incredible.This includes weathering refusals, creating sexual tension that never gets released, and staring blankly at a phone that never rings. It's part of the love game. When you don't play, you can't win.
"What defines your accomplishment is not" What would you like to enjoy? The question is, "What pain are you trying to sustain?" The quality of your life is measured not by the quality of your positive experiences, but by the quality of your adverse experiences. And to be excellent at coping with unpleasant stuff,
And if you want the rewards of anything in life, you need the costs, too. If you want the body of the beach, you've got to want the sweat, the pain, the early mornings, the hunger. You must also want the late nights, the risky business decisions, and the chance of pissing off a person or ten thousand if you want the yacht.
If you find yourself wanting something month after month, year after year, but nothing happens and you never get any closer to it, then maybe what you really want is a dream, an idealization, a false promise and an image. Perhaps what you want is not what you want, but what you enjoy wanting. Perhaps you really don't want it at all.
I ask people occasionally, "How do you choose suffering?" These people are tilting their heads, staring at me like I've got 12 noses. Still I 'm asking, because it shows me a lot more about you than about your wishes and visions. And it's something you have to pick. You can't have a life which is pain-free. All can't be roses and unicorns. And that, actually, is the tough issue that matters. Pleasure is a question that is simple. And quite a lot of us all have similar responses. The pain is the more important issue. What,Is that the agony you want to endure?
Actually, the answer will get you someplace. It's a topic that can make your life change. That's what makes you, me and you. It's what distinguishes us and divides us and brings us together eventually.
I fantasized about becoming a musician, a rock star, in particular, for much of my adolescence and young adulthood. I would still close my eyes and imagine myself on stage playing it to the cheers of the audience, people completely losing their minds to my sweet finger-noodling, whatever badass guitar song I heard. For hours on end, this fantasy could keep me busy. Even after I left music, the fantasizing continued through college.School and stopped seriously playing. But even then, it was never a matter of whether I would ever perform in front of screaming fans, but when. Before I could spend the necessary amount of time and effort to get out there and make it work, I was biding my time. I wanted to finish school first. I wanted to make money then. I wanted to find the time, then. Then ... and nothing, then.
The truth never came, despite fantasizing about this for over half of my life. And it took a long time and a lot of bad interactions for me to actually find out why: I just didn't want it.
I was in love with the outcome, the picture of me on stage , people cheering, rocking me out, pouring my heart into what I was playing, but I wasn't in love with the process. And I failed at it because of that. Repeatedly speaking. Hell, I wasn't even trying hard enough to make it fail. I was not trying at all.
The daily practice drudgery, the logistics of finding a party and rehearsing, the pain of finding gigs and really convincing individuals to turn up and give a fuck. The bent strings, the blown tube amp, hauling 40 pounds of equipment without a vehicle to and from rehearsals. It is a dream-like mountain and a mile-high climb to the top. And what it took a long time for me to realize is that I didn't even like climbing. I just enjoyed imagining the top of it.
Our culture tells me that I've disappointed myself somehow, that I'm a loser or a quitter. Either I wasn't brave enough, ambitious enough, or I didn't believe in myself enough, Self-help would say. I will be told by the business / start-up crowd that I chickened out on my dream and gave in to my usual social conditioning. I'd be told to make affirmations or enter or manifest or something in a mastermind party.
But the truth is much less fascinating than that: I thought there was something I needed, but it turns out I didn't. End of story.
I wanted a reward, not a fight. I wanted the outcome and not the tool. I was not in love with war, but only with victory. And in that sense, life doesn't work.
Who you are is characterized by the ideals for which you are willing to fight. Individuals who enjoy the challenges of a gym are the ones who get in good shape. People who love long workweeks and the corporate ladder's politics are the ones who step up it. Ultimately, individuals who embrace the pressures and turmoil of the starving artist lifestyle are the ones who live it and make it.
This is not a call for willpower or "grit." This is not another "no pain, no benefit" admonition.
The most basic and essential part of life is this: our challenges decide our accomplishments. So choose your struggles, my dear, wisely.
