What Are You Willing to Struggle For

What Are You Willing to Struggle ForWhat Are You Willing to Struggle ForBecause if you want the benefits of something in life, you have to also want the costs.A happy Fourth of JulyAdvice from Theodore Roosevelt on July 4thIt is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause who, at the best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.That was Theodore Roosevelt speaking at the Sorbonne in 1910 and I run this prozentanteil every Independence Day because it inspires us.Speaking of national heroes, I dropped by the Met, and was inspired by the new setting for the famous Washington crossing the Delaware.Its majestic.Depicting the night of December 25, 1776, Leutzes painting captures a desperate General Washington pushing his luck after a miserable first year in the field against the British. The lunacy of the raid - chunks of ice the size of Volkswagens clogged a turbulent Delaware River - is somewhat forgotten in the haze of later victories.A general facing winter without victories, armies, or money, is a general facing the hangman, and Washington knew it. The codeword that night was Victory or Death.Washington had to decide what he wanted to do at a moment of the lowest lows for him and his team.I was searching for a way to explain it better and stumbled across these words from Mark MansonEverybody 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 - its 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, its so ubiquitous that it doesnt even mean anything.A more interesting question, a question that perhaps youve 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 blank confines of cubicle hell. People want to be rich without the risk, with out 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 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?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. Its negative experience that we all, by definition, struggle with. Therefore, what we get o ut of life is not determined by the good feelings we desire but by what bad feelings were willing and able to sustain to get us to those good feelings.People want an amazing physique. But you dont 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 dont 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 dont 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. Its part of the game of love. You cant win if you dont play.What determines your success isnt 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.Theres a lot of crappy advice out there that says, Youve just got to want it enoughEverybody wants something. And everybody wants something enough. They just arent 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 y ourself 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 isnt what you want, you just enjoy wanting. Maybe you dont 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 cant have a pain-free life. It cant all be roses and unicorns. And ultimately thats 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. Its the question that can change your life. Its what makes me me and you you. Its what defines us and sepa rates us and ultimately brings us together.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 fruchtwein simple and basic component of life our struggles determine our successes. So choose your struggles wisely, my friend.On this anniversary of our struggle for independence, may you find yourself struggling with all the right things.