Pain is part of the process. Emotional pain, physical pain, mental pain. Pretty much anything worthwhile involves pain. Getting in shape, getting out of debt, learning a skill, or finding a significant other. The latter was the inspiration for this post. Recently, I dated a woman for about 2 months. We weren’t exclusive, but I fell pretty hard for her. She ended things in the sweetest way possible, but it still hurt quite a bit. Sometimes things don’t work out. That’s the risk you take when you put yourself out there. I don’t regret dating her in the slightest, I still think she’s one of the kindest people I’ve ever met. She gave me so much joy, but that’s why it hurts to no longer date her. The pain comes from no longer having that joy with her. But that joy was worth the pain. 

That’s really what it comes down to. Is the pain worth it? If you want bigger muscles, you literally have to tear them up. They must be broken down before they’re built back up. The mantra ‘no pain, no gain’ exists for a reason in fitness circles. This really goes along with the idea of sacrifice. But sometimes the pain has nothing to do with the sacrifice and is just a potential risk of what you’re trying to achieve.

Life is pain. Life is suffering, as the Buddhists say. Pain is a universal fact of life. There is no life without pain. Alleviate as much unnecessary suffering as you can while working through the necessary suffering.

You have to learn how to deal with pain if you want to achieve anything. You can’t stop when things become painful or even just uncomfortable. That being said, you do have to learn which pain is necessary and which isn’t. Going back to the muscle building analogy, if you do a lift incorrectly, you could hurt yourself significantly and set back your progress. But, again, that pain can teach you to be more careful in the future, to make sure you’re doing something correctly before putting significant weight on it. So even when you screw up and experience pain you could have avoided, it can still teach you a valuable lesson.

Some pain is avoidable, some is required. I suggest you avoid what you can and learn to cope with what you can’t. Self-improvement is not an easy path, which is why many people don’t get very far with it. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my life it’s that the best things don’t come easy, the best things in life require effort to attain. If I get too comfortable in my life, I start to become dissatisfied. I need a challenge, I need something to fight, something to chase. Luckily for me, there’s always something I can improve upon, there’s always something to work towards. There are two ways of looking at that, though. I could despair about the fact that I’ll never become my ideal self, I’ll never quite get everything I want. Or I can rejoice in the fact that I’ll always be able to work on becoming my ideal self, that I’ll always be able to work towards something. I know I’ll never get there, but I’m going to try anyway. That’s what it means to pursue excellence. Never stop trying to attain it, even though you know you’ll never quite get there completely. But part of the fun is seeing how close you can get. How excellent can you become?

Pain is the price of excellence. The only question is, are you willing to pay it?