Sometimes I wish life could go easier on me. I am doing my best and working hard — why can’t life be easier? But these types of “why me” questions won’t help. The only way to solve these is to work hard and just conquer them, no questions asked.
Years ago someone I admired once told me this: everything is a muscle — the more you train it, the stronger it becomes. Say you are weak in public speaking, great! Let’s train this. The more you do public speaking, the better your public speaking will be and your “public speaking muscle” will become strong and huge. Now you will be able to handle all sorts of public speaking thrown at you. This is the level 1 meaning.
Now. I would go further and suggest that this “everything is a muscle” phrase goes beyond that. Pain, especially extreme pain and suffering, are great growth opportunities. The more suffering and miseries it causes to you, the better. Much like how you first have to sore your muscles to make them grow (man, going to the gym really teaches me a lot), extreme pain and suffering mentally will also be great growth opportunities. Those times you feel like quitting and like really really painful for you mentally, are the best.
I just came across some product issues today and It is really a mental suffering for me. I have worked so hard just to want to have everything perfect and everybody happy. Why issues could still arise out of nowhere? Now while it is a very isolated incident I still wish that it did not happen. It should not. I don’t know if I have talked about this example here before but let’s imagine you are going to a restaurant, and there is a thin little piece of hair in your food. Even if this happens once in every 1000 dishes the chef made, to that one person that has that one problematic dish, the restaurant is a bad restaurant, has bad hygiene levels and please insert all kinds of bad associations here. Now even if the other 999 dishes are perfect, because there’s one bad dish, to that one customer, the whole experience is ruined and he will never come back again.
So knowing this story, I know how one isolated issue could break the whole experience for one.
And this causes extreme pain and suffering to me because if I do not fix it from the root cause, I know it’s doomed to happen again, especially if we are growing. I need to find out the root cause, fix it once and for all, so that we can avoid the issue from happening again.
This is the right attitude to take. The harder road, the road less travelled, is often times the right road to take.