The purpose of pain

Before we get into it, let’s define some things.

  • Pain: a feeling of discomfort for the purposes of direction or instruction 
  • Suffering: an obsession with loss that comes from ignoring pain
  • Pleasure: dealing with pain appropriately (growth)

If I were writing this to myself, I could stop there. 

Most of my ups and downs all trace back to poor definitions of things. When you fix the definition, you usually fix the outcome. But let’s keep going. 

There is not a single person worth looking up to who has not experienced pain. Lots of it. If you’re going to climb the tallest mountain, you’re going to fight the elements to get to the top. But it’s deeper than that: once you’re there, if you haven’t trained how to breath at that altitude, you will just go back down where it’s safe. 

Thomas Edison failed a thousand times to develop his light bulb. 

Bill Boeing failed his first airplane design and flunked out of Navy trials because of it. 

Walt Disney almost went bankrupt from his early twenties until his park finally opened when he was in his fifties. 

These patterns are written through history. The question is, do we want to accept them? Or, can we rewrite the definitions? 

“The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones.”

John Maynard Keynes

Some mornings I wake up and I do not feel motivated. 

Oops… 

Cat’s out of the bag. No, I am not your perfect “guru” with everything neatly put together. My mind can be a cesspool just like anyone else’s. What does it mean when I wake up and do not feel great? 

The traditional model for dealing with this is to fight it. 

“Why am I crazy?”

“Why does so and so not feel this way?”

“What is wrong with me?” 

The correct way to deal with it is to be curious. 

Pain is always telling us something. Your intuition is your mentor — if you ignore it, it will escalate the message. Ignore your feelings for too long and you will get sick. Ignore that, and you will alienate people. 

Eventually you end up on an island. Sick, alone, unhappy, and confused. 

Or, we can accept that some days are hard. And some days are less hard. And inside of this there are lessons. If you’re reading this, it means you are most likely a human. And humans are complex. 

We exist inside of a complicated ecosystem of feedback loops. 

To feel betrayal is to feel pain. To hold someone hostage is to suffer. The pain teaches us something unless we refuse to let them go. Watch this to learn how I do it. 

Pain shows us the signs that we didn’t know to look for. 

If you’ve married the wrong person, partnered with the wrong business partner, said the wrong thing at the wrong time — these are lessons. The pain just tells us what to look for next time. Like a child touching a stove, it instructs us how to do it different next time. 

Unless we fight it. 

And we haven’t even gotten into the intuition of it all. Let me ask you a question: can you experience pain before you make a decision? Yes, yes you can. This is why we should not ignore the complicated web of feedback that we are picking up on. We should explore it. 

When I wake up and do not feel like I think I should, my first step is to explore. I do this with Holy Spirit. 

“Why am I feeling this way?”

“What is causing me to feel this way?” 

“What do I need to know about the way I feel?”

Notice the absence of judgement. 

Pain felt from the past is called regret. Pain felt from the future is called anxiety. We must explore it, not fight with it.

The best “system” that exists for dealing with pain is called learning. Learning creates growth. As we learn, we neutralize. 

We do not need to fear our mistakes or our lessons. 

Instead, fear the mirage of safety that protects us from all fear and all failure. That is when you know you are dead. When there is nothing and no one who can hurt you, you’re already halfway gone. 

“The dot-com crash came, we lost nearly half of our customers, and we never moved into The Maude Building. The lease we signed was for $10 per square foot per month. When we tried to rent it out, we found that post dot-com crash, the market price was $0.90 per square foot per month. But given the number of companies that had gone out of business, there were no takers even at that price. I ran away from my fear and lost $30M.

Thirty million dollars that I badly needed. Yet somehow, some way, we survived-and maybe we survived because I never ran away again. To this day, every time I feel fear, I run straight at it, and the scarier it is, the faster I run.

Which way you run is often the key differentiator between effective and ineffective CEOs. Almost all CEOs know where the problems are, but only the truly elite ones run towards the fear.”

Andreeson Horowitz 

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