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?

One thing I’ve found to be extremely helpful with self development is finding an ideal you admire and striving to become it. It also helps to have specific people in mind that you admire and who you’d like to emulate. Generally when you admire someone, it means they possess a trait you have or that you’d like to have. Pay attention to who you admire, it will tell you a lot about yourself. Also, pay attention to which characters in fiction you admire or resonate with strongly.

I’ll give an example of someone I admire: Marcus Aurelius. He was a Roman emperor from 161 AD to 180 AD. What I admire about him is his complete lack of corruption. He didn’t abuse his power. He could’ve had any woman he wanted, at any time, for any reason, with zero effort, but he stayed faithful to his wife. He could have stayed in bed all day, but he got up and dealt with the problems of his empire. He could have had wine and food brought in and gorged himself, staying drunk for the duration of his reign and eating himself to morbid obesity. But he didn’t. He could execute anyone who made him angry or even slightly annoyed him, but he patiently dealt with them peacefully. He had absolute power and he didn’t abuse it. He kept his dark side in check, because no one else could.

I admire him because I want to be in control of myself to the level he was. I want to have such a strong character that I can resist disgracing myself. He’s someone worth emulating, in my opinion. I recommend his book “Meditations” if you’re interested in him or the philosophy he lived by. It’s the first entry on my book list.

Your hero doesn’t have to be someone that actually lived, they could be a fictional character. In fact, characters we resonate with tell us a lot about ourselves. I like Bilbo Baggins from The Hobbit, for example. He’s torn between two parts of himself. One part enjoys his comfortable hobbit hole with regular mealtimes and pleasant furnishings. The other part yearns for adventure and all the excitement that goes along with it.

I relate to him strongly. I enjoy my alone time, I’m an extreme introvert, but another part of me yearns for adventure. It’s that part of me that pushed me to take up dancing, which changed my life. It showed me I could do more than I thought I could. Now I perform dance routines for fun as well as being a solid social dancer. I’m still very introverted, that won’t change, but I can now do something most people associate with being extroverted and I have a blast doing so.

Make a list of people and/or characters you admire. Really dig deep into why you admire them; what specifically do you like about them? What do they have that you wish you had?

A central idea in Stoic philosophy is to focus on what you can influence and disregard what you can’t. This is your locus of control, to use a more modern term. If there’s something in your life you don’t like, determine if you can do something about it. If it’s out of your control, there’s no point worrying about it. If it is within your control, you have the power to change it. Essentially, it’s an argument against complaining about your life. If you can’t change something, what’s the point in complaining? If you can change it, stop complaining and change it. Once you determine what’s within your control, endless possibilities open up and you can make great strides in self improvement.

For example, if you don’t like your boss, you won’t be able to change them, but you can look for a different job. One thing isn’t within your control (your boss), while another is (finding another job). Another example would be the fact that you can’t make any one person attracted to you, you can’t make someone love you; but you can make yourself more generally attractive.

If you find yourself blaming the world for your problems, take a moment and think of any way you might be able to make it a little better. If you’re overweight, you could blame the food industry for pumping out cheap, hyper-palatable foods that are very easy to buy and eat. You could blame restaurants for making their portions too big. You could blame your parents for not teaching you proper nutrition when you were growing up, or allowing you to watch TV and play video-games instead of encouraging you to play outside. These things could all be blamed for your overweight problem and the thing is, they could truly be factors for you being overweight. None of those things are your fault.

It might not be your fault for where you initially end up, but it’s your fault for staying there.

You could play the victim and lament about fast food, junk food, soda, and how they’re engineering these things to be addictive. You can stay angry at your parents for not teaching you about food and getting you hooked on junk and a sedentary lifestyle. But that doesn’t solve your problem. None of those things were within your control; what’s within your control is choosing what to eat, how much exercise you get, and what food you keep around. It’s within your locus of control to change your lifestyle.

In a sense, everyone’s a victim of their initial circumstances. Generally, everyone has had something horrible they’ve had to go through in one form or another. Everyone has been a victim.

But there’s only one question you have to answer: are you going to stay a victim, or are you going to make your life better?

Sacrifice. For a long time, humans have incorporated the idea of sacrifice into their religions. Earlier on, it was offerings of flesh and blood, whether human or animal. It was believed that the gods or God would look upon the sacrifice, be pleased by it, and bless them for it. They expected something in return for their sacrifice. Religions today have the same idea, though it’s more about giving up food in the form of fasting, or giving up something you like doing for a time. Either way, they sacrifice something they like for something else they value higher.

A sacrifice, by its very nature, is something that is valued, otherwise it wouldn’t be a sacrifice. If I don’t care much for alcohol, it’s not a sacrifice to remain sober. But for an alcoholic, or just someone who enjoys drinking, giving up alcohol is a sacrifice. The idea is to give up something you enjoy to gain something deemed higher value. My point in saying all this is to drive home the fact that to achieve any goal, you must make sacrifices.

I like to use getting in shape to illustrate this, because it’s something most people have experience with. To lose weight, you have to go a little hungry, move around more than you’re used to, and eat different foods. The goal (a slimmer body) demands a sacrifice (eating less). Goals always demand sacrifices, the sooner you accept that, the better. Time, money, comfort, convenience, pleasure, etc. These are all common things that must be sacrificed to pursue a goal.

In your own mind, that which you want to achieve has to be more important to you than whatever is keeping you from it. Everything has a price and sacrifice is the price of achievement. Sometimes what you sacrifice isn’t enough and you’ll be required to sacrifice more, but that’s all a part of the process. We may not sacrifice animals to please the gods anymore, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t required to make sacrifices to something higher than ourselves. Your goal is something higher than you currently are; if you don’t see it that way, chances are you’ll just default back to your old habits. The goal has to be worth the sacrifice, otherwise there’s not much reason to pursue it.

Remember this the next time you’re doing something you don’t want to do, but it’s something that’s furthering your goals. You’re making a sacrifice. Embrace it.

You’re not perfect just the way you are. There, I said it. Is that a relief? Or are you thinking, how dare you?! I am so perfect! My mom said so!

I can’t tell you how much I hate the phrase “You’re perfect just the way you are.” Or some variant like “You’re just fine the way you are.” Because when someone is wanting to make a change and someone else responds with “You’re just fine”, that’s really not going to help them. If I’m perfect right now, then this is all I have to look forward to in my life? Things can’t get better? How depressing is that?

I understand why people tell others they are ‘just fine’, they generally are being nice and don’t want the person to feel bad about themselves. Or, on a darker note, they don’t want the person to improve, because then it will just remind them of their own failings. But for now, let’s go with they’re just being nice. Nice doesn’t help you improve, though. Cold reality is often anything but nice. But it’s in facing the harshness of the truth that you’re better able to improve.

Which is why it should be a relief to know you’re not perfect just the way you are. You can get better. There’s always room for improvement and you can make those improvements. Can’t wake up on time? You can learn to be an early bird. Overweight and out of breath all the time? You can lose fat and increase respiratory endurance. Do you spend all your money as soon as you get it? You can learn to be a saver. I know all this because I’ve been there. 

I used to not be able to get up before 10 on the weekends. Now I get up at 4:30 in the morning without effort. I used to be obese. I lost weight, built muscle, and work out 5 days a week. I used to spend every cent I earned on useless crap I no longer have. Then I got my finances in order and was able to buy a house at 22, selling it later for nearly double.

Changing your beliefs about yourself is vital to your improvement. If you think something won’t work and you never try it, it’s the same as failing. If you actually try, it might just work. You might be wrong about your own abilities. It’s useful to find out where you’re wrong, and I guarantee you’re wrong about something. The sooner you find out what it is, the better. So try something you don’t think will work.

And I don’t mean try the “Lose 30 pounds in 10 days!” sort of thing. That crap actually doesn’t work, or if it does, it’s only a short-term fix. Any change worth making takes time to bear fruit. Lasting weight loss happens 1-2 pounds per week. Waking up early takes months to acclimate to. Changing spending habits and learning to not touch your savings takes time. If you’re looking for a quick fix, you’ve come to the wrong place. Change takes place over time. It requires sacrifice. It’s not glamorous or sexy to count calories and lose a pound, but it’s the repeated effort that bears fruit. Once you change, you have to maintain new habits, if you go back to old habits, you’ll be back where you started.

No one is perfect just as they are, everyone should always strive to be better. You don’t have to hate yourself to want to improve, but even if that’s your starting place, improving yourself is one way to start loving yourself. Everyone has the power to make their life better, no matter their current circumstances. Sometimes it can feel daunting to tackle all the things you want to improve, which is why I recommend taking it in small chunks. Sometimes a drastic change is useful, but often that is unsustainable. Small changes made over time tend to stick better and it is my intention with this blog to help people do that.

I’m not perfect just the way I am and neither are you.

Stick around, let’s get better together.