Everybody wants what feels good. Everyone wants to live a carefree, happy and easy life, to fall in love and have amazing sex and relationships, to look perfect and make money and be popular and well-respected and admired and a total baller to the point that people part like the Red Sea when you walk into the room.
Everyone would like that — it’s easy
to like that.
If I ask you, “What do you want out
of life?” and you say something like, “I want to be happy and have a great family and a job I
like,” it’s so ubiquitous that it doesn’t even mean anything.
A more interesting question, a
question that perhaps you’ve never considered before, is what pain do you want
in your life? What are you 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, to navigate arbitrary corporate hierarchies and the blasé confines
of an infinite cubicle hell. People want to be rich without the
risk, without the sacrifice, without the delayed gratification necessary to accumulate wealth.
Everybody wants to have great sex
and an awesome 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 until the question morphs from
“What if?” into “Was that it?” And when the lawyers go home and the alimony
check is in the mail they say, “What was that for?” if not for their lowered
standards and expectations 20 years prior, then what for?
Because 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.
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?
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 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 on stage 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 up 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… and 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 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.
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 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. Self-help 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 admonishment of “no pain, no gain.”
This is the most simple and basic
component of life: our struggles determine our successes. So choose your
struggles wisely, my friend.
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