Are you asking yourself the right question?

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, make money and be popular.  To be well-respected and admired 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 asked you, “What do you want out of life?” what would you say?  I'd wager most people are going to say something like, “I want to be happy, have a great family, and a job I like”.  That is so ubiquitous that it doesn’t even mean anything.  It's not measurable, not defined.

A more interesting question to ask, a question that perhaps you’ve never considered before, is "What pain do you want in your life?"  To put it a little bit better, what are you willing to struggle for?  What are you going to fight for?  These questions seem to be a far greater determinant of how our lives turn out than "what do you want out of life?"

I mean really... you've probably asked that first question too.  “What do I want out of life?”  Everybody wants to have an amazing job, financial independence, to look good naked — but not everyone wants to suffer through 60-hour work weeks, long commutes, obnoxious paperwork.  Not everyone wants to put in those extra sets, do grueling WODs, plan their meals, or even bother going to a gym.  People want to be rich and fit without the risk, without the sacrifice, without the delayed gratification necessary to accumulate that wealth and good health.

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.  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?”  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?

Happiness requires struggle, fitness requires struggle, gaining financial independence requires struggle.  The positives are the side effect of handling the negatives.  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 the same.  Positive experiences are always easier to handle, you look forward to those positive experiences.  It’s the negative experiences that we all struggle with.  We tend to avoid confrontation, failure, and all the other negatives in life.  They’re not easy.  They ain’t fun.  In the end, 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.  You don’t end up with one unless you appreciate and value 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 into smaller plate-sized portions.  What was it Rocky said?  “You've got to be willing to take the hits!”  

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 love, having no idea whether you will be successful or not.  No risk, no reward. 

People want a partner, a spouse, someone to share their lives with. 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.

Perhaps you don’t want any of those things, but you do want something, but maybe you didn’t understand the level of commitment.  Or, maybe you understood the commitment but the fear of failure made it easier to quit or not even try, rather than face the level of struggle you might have to endure.  Sometimes it’s easier mentally to not try or start something you know will require hard work.  We’ve all had trials we’ve endured that had we known how awful or hard it was going to be, we may not have even started.  Hard to say.  I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s more satisfied with the end result when I’ve gone through a struggle.  

What determines your success isn’t “What do you want to enjoy?”  The question is really, “What pain are you willing to sustain?”  The quality of your life is not determined by the quality of your positive experiences but the quality of your negative experiences.  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.  Everybody wants something enough. Most just aren’t aware of what it is they want, or rather, what they want “enough.” 

If you want the benefits of something in life, you have to also want or at least be willing to pay the costs.  If you want that 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 or 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. 

“How do you choose to suffer?”  I ask because that tells me far more about you than your desires and fantasies.  It forces you to choose something.  You can’t have a pain-free life.  You already know that, you already know that it's not all sunshine and rainbows.  That is precisely why this question matters, why it's an important question to ask.  Pleasure, fun, those are easy questions to answer, and we've all got remarkably similar answers.  The more interesting question is the pain.  What is the pain that you want to sustain?  What are you willing to endure? 

Those answers will actually get you somewhere. Those are the questions that can change your life.  It’s what makes me me and you you.  It’s what defines us, separates us, and ultimately brings us together.

For years, not long after high school, I wanted to earn the title, to become a Marine.  I went to recruiters, I read books, internet articles, talked to Marines.  I'd imagine being a Marine, wearing those dress blues, serving my country, winning the fight, and getting the girl.  This dream kept me occupied for hours at a time.  It continued through 9/11, through meeting my eventual wife, through getting married, through gaining weight, hell, I still think about it today.  For a time, it was never a question of if I’d ever be one, but when.  I always found myself waiting for something.  I need the money for new shoes.  I need more time.  I need to get a juicer so I can eat better.  I need I need I need... and then nothing.  

Despite "wanting" this for the past decade, the reality never came.  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 in dress blues, playing real life Call of Duty, me being the hero, saving lives and defending freedom — but I wasn’t in love with the process.  And because of that, I failed at it.  Repeatedly.  I didn’t even try hard enough to fail at it.  I hardly tried at all.  

The daily drudgery of running, working out, the time it takes to prep proper meals.  The shin splints, crappy weather, the being alone while running in the early morning.  Earning the title of Marine is a mountain of a dream with a mile-high climb to the top. What took me a long time to discover is that I didn’t like to climb (or run) very much. I just liked to imagine life at the top, the after effects of the struggle, and the prestige of having the title Marine. 

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. 

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.  Life doesn’t work that way, at least not for most of us.

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 friends.





I want to give a lot (read: almost all) of the credit for this post to Mark Manson and his article The Most Important Question of Your Life. Go give it a read.