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 relationships, to look perfect and make money and be popular and 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 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 is “what pain do you want in your life?” What are you willing to struggle for?

Everybody wants to have financial independence — but not everyone wants to suffer through 60-hour work weeks, long commutes, obnoxious paperwork. People want to be rich without the risk without the sacrifice, without the delayed gratification necessary to accumulate wealth

Everybody wants to have awesome relationships — but not everyone is willing to go through the tough conversations, the awkward silences, the hurt feelings and the emotional drama 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?”

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.

Because happiness requires struggle ‘The positive’ is the side-effect of handling ‘the negative’. At the core of all human behaviour, our needs are more or less similar. Positive experience is easy to handle. It’s negative experience that we all, by definition, struggle with.

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.

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