I am reading Mark Mason’s book The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck where I got struck by an interesting point.
Mark writes when asked “What do you want out of life?” most people respond by saying something like, “I want to be happy, have a great family and a good job.” This response is so common and expected that it doesn’t really mean anything.
We all want these things. We all want to lead a carefree, happy and easy life, fall in love, have amazing relationships, look perfect, be admired and respected by everyone.
Everybody wants that because it is easy to want that.
But there is a better question. A question we never ask ourselves but turns out to be a much greater determinant of how our lives turn out to be.
That question is, “What pain do we want in our lives? What are we willing to struggle for?”
Asking about pleasure is easy. Pretty much all of us have a similar answer.
The more interesting question is about the pain. What pain do we want to sustain? That is a hard question. But it is a question that matters. A question that will actually get us somewhere. A question that can change a perspective, a life.
We can’t have pain-free lives. Our lives can’t be all roses and unicorns. We have to choose something.
The bad thing is our lives are full of struggles. The good thing is we can choose our struggles.
By choosing what we are willing to struggle with, we can decide which direction we want to take our lives.