When you ask people what they would like to achieve in life, I’m sure that 100% of them would say something along these lines:
“I want a happy, worry-free life and to look good. I want my loved ones and me to be in good health, free of illness. Love, good sex, feeling loved and respected, no money problems and being financially free.”
Clearly, achieving all of that would be a good definition of happiness, but unfortunately hardly anyone ever has the whole “package” at the same time. You’ve probably noticed already that when everything is going well, some kind of worry always turns up, and that just when we’re at our best, we tend to get a phone call that can ruin the day.
In the end, we have to learn to live with the good moments (which tend to be many) and the bad ones (which tend to be very few, but rough). That’s why life is like a piano: the white keys are the good moments and the black keys are the bad ones. It’s up to us how we combine those keys so that we like the music.
That’s how life works in general. There will always be good and bad moments, and we have no choice but to learn to focus on the good ones while we dodge the bad ones.
In the professional world and in business it is similar, but somewhat different.
In professional life, in career success, things get more complicated. To go after the good moments, we are forced to invite the bad ones. In other words, the question is not “What do I want to achieve?” but “How much pain am I willing to endure to achieve it?”
Everyone wants an amazing job, and if they are entrepreneurial, they want a successful, profitable business, but very few are willing to put up with 60- or 70-hour working weeks, or to temporarily sacrifice part of their personal life.
People want to be rich, but without effort or sacrifice. They want to achieve financial freedom, but without learning about finance.
Happiness and success require a constant struggle. In business, everything positive is a manipulation of our perspective on the negative. And we can’t avoid those negative experiences; we can only postpone them, but sooner or later they come. That’s a good sign, because it means you are on the right path to success.
In other words, the road to happiness runs through pain.
I often use the example of people who want to work on their body to have an attractive physique. If that’s your goal, before you get the pleasure of seeing yourself looking good, you’ll have to go through the pain and sacrifice of hours and hours at the gym, and forget about some foods you loved while adding others you probably don’t like.
So the question would be: “How much pain and sacrifice am I willing to go through to get a gym body?”
Without a doubt, the hardest part of success is the pain.
When entrepreneurs want to start their own business or become financially free, they won’t become successful business owners unless they ask life to let them value risk, uncertainty, possible failure and hard work over very long days. And they have to do all of that without knowing whether the business will succeed or not.
Put another way, business is a kind of strategy game. Everyone has their own strategy, but to win you have to play. And the chips in this game are pain and sacrifice. The reward is success or happiness. Whoever puts the most chips on the table has the best chance of winning.
A very wise person once said that life is not determined by the quality of your positive experiences but by how you deal with the negative ones, taking for granted that you will never be short of them, and that pain and sacrifice are necessary to achieve your goals, whatever they are.
You just have to want it badly enough?
“You just have to want it badly enough and you’ll get what you want.” Nonsense. That’s why we criticised the book The Secret: everyone wants something, and plenty of people want it badly enough, but desire without action is just that: a desire. Try wishing for it when a comet goes by, and you’ll get roughly the same result.
If you want rewards in life, you have to pay for them. If you want a perfect body, you have to sweat. If you want a successful business, nothing will spare you the early mornings, the unhealthy hours and probably “bothering” a lot of people. That’s why we say that not everyone is cut out to run their own business. Not everyone is cut out to be an entrepreneur. Even so, when there’s no other option, you have to do it.
So, to sum up: when you want something, you must choose to suffer. If you want pleasure, you have to choose suffering first. And if you want something badly enough, ask yourself the magic question: “How much pain and sacrifice am I willing to endure for this desire, objective or goal?” Then, as soon as you know the cost of that reward, you’ll probably realise that you don’t want it enough to carry so much sacrifice.
When you pursue a result, you have to marry the process of achieving it. For some, that marriage is a hard one to live with, while others feel comfortable in it.
Ultimately, it is our struggles that determine our successes, and as the saying goes: “We can’t win every battle, so choose very carefully the ones you are willing to fight.”
Further reading
- 16 things you should know about life, success and happiness
- 9 truths about life and business
- 8 beliefs of successful people
- 7 things all successful people have in common
Featured image: Elliott Billings, CC BY 2.0, via Flickr.
