Saturday 16th June 2018
Morning Vibes With Dr. Jerry - the First
Hello and welcome to
#MorningVibesWithDrJerryTheFirst-Episode 275
Title: 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 that 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.
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 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.
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 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.
It’s negative experience
that we all, by definition, struggle with.
Therefore, what we get out
of life is not determined by the good feelings we desire but by what bad
feelings we’re willing and able to sustain to
get us to those good feelings.
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, 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 don’t 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 don’t 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. It’s part of the
game of love.
You can’t win if you don’t play.
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.
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 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 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 and 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.
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 can’t 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. What is the pain that you want to sustain?
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 us and
separates us and ultimately brings us together.
For most of my adolescence
and young adulthood, I fantasized about being a musician — a rock star, in
particular.
Any badass guitar song I heard, I would always close my
eyes and envision myself up on stage playing it to the screams of the crowd,
people absolutely losing their minds to my sweet finger-noodling.
This fantasy could keep me
occupied for hours on end.
The fantasizing continued
up through college, even after I dropped out of music school and stopped
playing seriously.
But even then it was never
a question of if I’d ever be up playing in front of screaming crowds, but when.
I was biding my time before I could invest the proper amount of time and effort
into getting out there and making it work.
First, I needed to finish
school.
Then, I needed to make
money.
Then, I needed to find the
time.
Then… and then nothing.
Despite fantasizing about
this for over half of my life, the reality never came.
And it took me a long time
and a lot of negative experiences to finally figure out why: I didn’t actually
want it.
I was in love with the
result — the image of me on stage, people cheering, me rocking out, pouring my
heart into what I’m playing — but I wasn’t in love with the process.
And because of that, I
failed at it. Repeatedly. Hell, I didn’t even try hard enough to fail at it. I
hardly tried at all.
The daily drudgery of
practicing, the logistics of finding a group and rehearsing, the pain of
finding gigs and actually getting people to show up and give a shit.
The broken strings, the
blown tube amp, hauling 40 pounds of gear to and from rehearsals with no car.
It’s a mountain of a dream
and a mile-high climb to the top. And what it took me a long time to discover
is that I didn’t like to climb much. I just liked to imagine the top.
Our culture would tell me
that I’ve somehow failed myself, that I’m a quitter or a loser.
Self help would say that I either wasn’t
courageous enough, determined enough or I didn’t believe in myself enough.
The
entrepreneurial/start-up crowd would tell me that I chickened out on my dream
and gave in to my conventional social conditioning. I’d be told to do
affirmations or join a mastermind group or manifest or something.
But the truth is far less
interesting than that: I thought I wanted something, but it turns out I didn’t.
End of story.
I wanted the reward and not the struggle.
I wanted the result and not the process.
I was in love not with the fight but only the victory.
And life doesn't work that way.
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 most simple and basic component of life:
our struggles determine our successes.
So choose your struggles
wisely, my friend.
This article is an excerpt from
my book, The Subtle Art of Not
Giving a Fuck: A Counterintuitive Guide to Living A Good Life
Until I come your way
again, this is #MorningVibesWithDrJerryTheFirst
Keep it coming!!!
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Written by: Mark Manson
Source: The Life Quest Blog
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