Someone recently asked me, “What do you want out of life?”
After a long thought I said, “I want to be happy and have a great family and a
job I like”. But, that answer didn't satisfy me. My thoughts were so ubiquitous
that they didn't even mean anything.
Then came an interesting question, a question that perhaps I
had never considered before, "what pain do I want in your life?"
"What am I willing to struggle for?" Because that seems to be a
greater determinant of how our lives turn out.
Everybody wants to have an amazing job and financial
independence—but not everyone wants to suffer through 60-hour work weeks, long
commutes, obnoxious paperwork, and navigate arbitrary corporate hierarchies.
People want to be rich without the risk, sacrifice, and delayed gratification
necessary to accumulate wealth.
Everybody wants to have great relationship—but not everyone is willing to go through the tough conversations,
the awkward silences, the hurt feelings and the emotional psychodrama to get
there. And so they settle. They settle and wonder “What if?” for years and
years and until the question morphs from “What if?” into “Was that it?”
Happiness requires struggle. The positive is the side effect
of handling the negative. You can only avoid negative experiences for so long
before they come roaring back to life.
At the core of all human behavior, our needs are more or
less similar. Positive experience is easy to handle. It’s negative experience
that we all, by definition, struggle with. Therefore, what we get out of life
is not determined by the good feelings we desire but by what bad feelings we’re
willing and able to sustain to get us to those good feelings.
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.
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 working insane hours on something you have no idea whether will be
successful or not.
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.
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 a 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 and 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.
So now I ask myself, “How do I choose to suffer?” I ask because that tells me far more about me
than m desires and fantasies. Because I 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 us and separates us and ultimately brings us
together.
For most of my teenage, I fantasized about being a musician
— a tabla player, in particular. Any concert I heard, I would always close my
eyes and envision myself up on stage and people absolutely losing their minds
to my mesmerizing performance. This fantasy could keep me occupied for hours on
end. The fantasizing continued up through college, even after I graduated and
started working and stopped playing seriously. 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 my college. Then, I needed to make
money. Then, I needed to find the time. Then … and then nothing.
Despite fantasizing about this for over 12 years of my life,
the reality never came and I was nowhere even close to it. 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 on stage,
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.
It was a mountain of a dream and a mile-high climb to the
top. And what it took me a long time to discover is that I didn’t like to climb
much. I just liked to imagine the top.
Our culture would tell me that I’ve somehow failed myself,
that I’m a quitter or a loser. Someone would say that I either wasn’t
courageous enough, determined enough or I didn’t believe in myself enough. The
entrepreneurial/start-up crowd would tell me that I chickened out on my dream
and gave in to my conventional social conditioning. I’d be told to do
affirmations or join a mastermind group or manifest or something.
But the truth is far less interesting than that: I thought I
wanted something, but it turns out I didn’t. End of story.
I wanted the reward and not the struggle. I wanted the
result and not the process. I was in love not with the fight but only the
victory. And life doesn’t work that way. Who you are is defined by the values
you are willing to struggle for. People who enjoy the struggles of a gym are
the ones who get in good shape. People who enjoy long workweeks and the
politics of the corporate ladder are the ones who move up it. People who enjoy
the stresses and uncertainty of the starving artist lifestyle are ultimately
the ones who live it and make it.
This is not a call for willpower or “grit.” This is not
another warning of “no pain, no gain.”
This is the most simple and basic component of life: our
struggles determine our successes. So let us choose our struggles wisely, my
friend or the struggles will keep on choosing us.
I hope you find some inspiration from this post as this post is also taken and inspired by something, something very deep.
Note: The thoughts in this blog are not completely mine but 90 percent relate to a post read and published somewhere else.
