The Most Important Question of Your Life

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 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.

The Cost of Dreams

Everybody wants to have an amazing job and financial independence—but not everyone wants to suffer through 60-hour work weeks, long commutes, and 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.^[1]

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.

"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.

The Fantasy Trap

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 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, 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.

Choosing Your Struggles

Sometimes I ask people, "How do you choose to suffer?" These people tilt their heads and look at me like I have twelve noses.^[2]

But I ask because that tells me far more about you than your desires and fantasies. Because you have to choose something. You cant 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.

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 and separates us, and ultimately brings us together.

The Bottom Line

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 work weeks 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 life are ultimately the ones who live it and make it.

This is not a call for willpower or grit. This is not another admonition of "no pain, no gain."

This is the most simple and basic component of life: our struggles determine our successes. So, my friend, choose your struggles wisely.