Count When it Starts Hurting.
The great boxer Muhammad Ali was known for his incredible physical conditioning, and especially for his speed and flexibility in the ring. One day a reporter asked him how many push-ups he could do, and strangely, Ali couldn’t give him an number.
But he did offer an answer that served to both explain his inability to quote an amount, and his incredible mental attitude that created such a legacy.
He said “I only start counting when it hurts”.
And once it began to hurt enough, he would start counting to see how many he could do this time. Rather than set himself an arbitrary goal that might limit his potential for growth, he walked right up to the line of pain, and then tried to push himself further and further through it.
His willingness to endure discomfort and pain that was voluntary was the definition of a life that went beyond the ordinary…
And became extraordinary.
Because there is always going to be pain that happens to you. Be it the physical pain of an injury, or the emotional pain of the breakup of a close relationship, there’s no way to avoid it. Somehow, someway, something will come along that just hurts. No matter how carefully you live, it will find you, and push you to your very limits. That’s just pain, that’s just life.
But the way you choose to experience suffering will define the future that you resent or enjoy.
Because although pain in inescapable, there are some kinds of pain and discomfort that will save us from a great deal more of the same later, and there are others that are the price of entry into the next level of fulfillment and happiness.
The question is not ‘if’ we will experience pain, rather how and when we choose to confront it.
Because the difference in your willingness to confront and to push through discomfort determines so much about your life that it can’t be understated.
For many years of my life, I was massively overweight. I was unwilling or unable to deal with the everyday discomfort of denying myself the foods that I wanted even though I knew they were no good for me.
In consequence, I suffered both the physical and emotional pain of being overweight, until the even greater pain of being unable to quality for life insurance drove me to face the pains I had been avoiding for so long.
A willingness to experience a small amount of discomfort each day would have prevented a massive amount of it later.
If you look around, you’ll know that what I’m saying is true. Very few people have arrived at peace and happiness by an easy road. Be it the countless hours studying and stressing of the professional with the degree, or the countless failures and risk of the eventual successful entrepreneur, the road to happiness and peace usually goes through some pretty dark and hostile territory.
And if you’re not willing to push yourself through the tough times now, you’ll end up facing even tougher times in the future.
Because the things you won’t face today will come around to stab you in the back later. If you don’t begin now to harden your will, and sharpen your focus, then when the difficult times come, and you know they will, you’ll be unprepared.
When opportunity comes, cloaked in hard work and risk, you’ll avoid it like the plague, because it looks too much like pain and discomfort for you to embrace it.
It’s been said before, but it deserves being repeated again. “Nothing that is worthwhile comes easy”.
But if you’ve trained and disciplined yourself to accept the hardships, and faced them, then what is difficult can seem easier, and what is easier can be simplest of all.
You don’t get to choose all the hardships in your life, you just get to determine how you show up to face them.
So get up, and go to it.
Your future is waiting.
— Dr. Alan Barnes
@maddrbmusings