The Pain Is The Point
All forms of growth come from pain. A child begins to walk through the pain of falling. The same child learns to ride a bicycle by experiencing that pain repeatedly. You learn the ways of the world by experiencing the consequences of your own gullibility.
A teenage boy never understands love as well as someone in his mid-thirties. The heartbreaks that brought him pain also brought him wisdom. The suffering triggered by heartbreak led him to discover the flaws in his own identity.
Our personalities — built through learning our likes, dislikes, and ethics — are all a product of pain. So the only way we can grow beyond our present is by enduring the discomfort of embracing something new.
You can never write a good novel without first writing a terrible one. The pain of feeling ridiculous, useless, talentless — that is the prerequisite before you make it sharp and readable like a bestseller. So anybody who exhibits pain-avoidance behaviour is essentially self-sabotaging.
At this point it makes no sense to factor pain into your choices at all. Because even excessive comfort eventually invites pain. There is no way to circumvent it. It is how we are wired. And it is the only mechanism through which we transform.
The next time you catch yourself thinking "oh, this might hurt" — your answer should be "what wouldn't?" You see someone derailing their entire life and wonder why they made those choices. The answer is pain tolerance.
The degree of your pain tolerance will determine how far you go in life and how well you live it. Not everybody can make decisions independently of the pain that change brings. The discomfort is precisely the point — but when we avoid it, we resign ourselves to misery, and that misery ends up reflecting in our personality.
Do a little experiment for the next thirty days. Make choices that you know will bring you maximum mental discomfort but are strategically sound. Have the conversations you have been avoiding because they would make you uncomfortable. There is a mental cost — but strategically, they will close a lot of open loops.
Drop hints to that girl you have always liked but never told. Tell your boss you are expecting something different. Ask a friend for honest feedback about your personality. Build in public. Commit to something transformative. Write for thirty days straight. Take on projects that will exhaust you.
There is so much you could do that would raise your discomfort that you would instinctively avoid it. But you must not. When you make those tough choices despite the pain they cause, you are rewiring your brain to tolerate — and eventually welcome — pain. What you endure expands your capacity to endure. I am not talking about philosophy. That is science.
Thirty days later, you will not hesitate as long before taking on a new project. You will not be paralysed by the unfamiliarity of anything. That is how you develop pain tolerance — by making hard choices, and by reminding yourself that nothing in this world is entirely painless.
Everything costs something. The decision is simply whether you want the pain now or later.