What Contribution Taught Me about Connection (and Why I Refuse to Lose Faith in Humanity)

by CHELSEA DINSMORE

Have you ever had an experience that changed you? One that touched you so deeply or inspired you so fully, it caused to to act differently from that point on? Well, here’s a little story about one of those experiences for me…

I visited Africa for the first time 9 years ago. Shortly after that trip, I quit my soul-sucking Public Relations job and decided to pursue something that actually mattered to me. It wasn’t just being away from the office for a few weeks that did it. It was the lessons that lingered afterwards, the reminders that I couldn’t seem to shake.

I recently shared 8 reasons why I think exploration is the best education—but really, it’s pretty simple. It’s because:

Your experiences create your passions.

So, after that initial trip and quitting my job, I had plans to go spend some time in Africa through a fellowship program. But Scott and I then decided it was something we wanted to do together (and was what we had planned to do after summiting Kilimanjaro). I put that dream on hold for a bit to prioritize some other things in my life—a decision I am glad I made today. 

But to honor that lingering spark inside of me, recently I joined a trip to Kenya where the focus was adventure and contribution:

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13:32:00 - By Vincent 0

DIVERSIFY YOUR IDENTITY

By Mark Manson

I don’t watch much TV, but if there were a channel that played Tony Robbins seminars non-stop, I’d watch it like a teenage girl glued to an America’s Next Top Modelmarathon. Say what you want about Robbins (opinions range from him being a complete hack and fraud to him being the second coming of Jesus Christ; my opinion is somewhere in the middle), but his seminars are never dull. The guy knows how to market helping people.

For the uninitiated, Robbins’ seminars have some informal portions where people in the (massive) audience are able to stand up and address their personal issues with Tony one-on-one, in a kind of private counseling session… in front of 2,000 other people. Tony manhandles their emotional worlds, reshaping their realities in front of your eyes, all to thunderous applause. Whether it’s genuine or not, it’s never boring, and it’s usually educational.

(A good friend of mine who is a psychologist and therapist refers to Robbins as the Batman of Psychology — sometimes he has to break the rules and do some unethical things, but it’s always for the greater good.)

In one seminar, a middle-aged man in the audience stood up and confessed that he was suicidal. He then shared his story: he was a finance guy, a very good finance guy. He made a fortune and not only that, but his friends and family members gave him their savings to manage and he made them fortunes as well. His entire life he had been successful and made a lot of people a lot of money.

And then one day he lost it all.

When prodded by Robbins, his reasoning for wanting to kill himself was that his life insurance policy would pay enough to support his wife and children after he was gone, whereas if he stayed alive, his family would be saddled by debt and left broke. When Robbins threw out the obvious point that while his kids would grow up with financial stability, they wouldn’t have a father, the man calmly asserted, “Yes, exactly. That’s the idea.”

What immediately strikes you is this man’s dumbfounding belief that his kids need financial stability more than a living father. And it’d be easy to discount him as a loony for that and be on our merry way.

But if we take a moment and empathize with him and dig a bit deeper into his motivation, we discover something important about his self-perception: This man perceives the value of his own life to be nothing more than financial.

He has no sense of value in himself as a father, husband, friend, companion, not to mention any other skills or hobbies. It’s not just that he thinks his kids would be better off with money than with him, it’s that he believes his only value as a person is his ability to make money.

Superhero Robbins quickly pounced on the nub of the issue: this man had never emotionally invested himself or identified with his roles as a father, a husband, a friend, a colleague — he had invested all of his identity (and time and effort) in making money and becoming rich. Then once his wealth vanished, so did his entire sense of self.

A while back, I saw a short video of Tim Ferriss and in passing he mentioned a concept called “identity diversification.” He more or less said the following:

When you have money, it’s always smart to diversify your investments. That way if one of them goes south, you don’t lose everything. It’s also smart to diversify your identity, to invest your self-esteem and what you care about into a variety of different areas — business, social life, relationships, philanthropy, athletics — so that when one goes south, you’re not completely screwed over and emotionally wrecked.

I loved this idea. It’s one of those ideas that’s so obvious yet elusive. When you hear it, it makes you feel like you just woke up. Identity diversification.

WHAT IS IDENTITY?

Whether consciously or unconsciously, we all choose what’s important to us; we choose what we value. We choose the measuring sticks with which we measure success and our self-worth. Common measuring sticks people often choose include: being professionally successful, being highly educated, making a lot of money, being an excellent father/husband, being pious and faithful in a chosen religion, being socially and/or sexually popular and desired, being physically attractive or beautiful, and on and on.

Whatever we choose to judge our self-worth by, be it how big of a fan we are for our favorite sports team or making more money than any of our friends or getting more attention from the opposite sex, we are choosing in which way we want to receive validation to feel good about ourselves. Like a mural, whatever you choose to value and receive validation from conglomerates into your overall identity.

Most of us naturally gravitate toward certain aspects of our identity merely through growing up and having attention or praise lavished on us for particular reasons. Maybe you were the smart kid, or the good-looking quarterback, or the popular musician, or whatever. The validation we receive growing up largely determines how we choose to value ourselves in our adult life.

Some of us also experienced emotional traumas early on and therefore many of us get fixated on certain aspects of our identity more than others. Social pressures can also force us into over-identifying with a certain aspect of our identity, which then drowns out other areas of our lives.

For instance, the movie Blow is a true story about drug smuggler George Jung. Jung grew up in a poor family with a father who had trouble paying the bills. As a result, Jung grew up identifying disproportionately with earning money and being rich and doing it in whatever way he could. Once he began smuggling drugs, the social pressures of those around him, the drug cartels and the lifestyle he lived continued to reinforce his choice to receive validation from money and wealth. Even if you haven’t seen the movie, it’s fairly obvious that eventually his life unraveled along with all of the relationships which mattered to him.

In my own life, I over-identified with my sex life and the validation I received from women. This led to me becoming depressed and living on a couch with no job. Later on, when I was building my business and often working 14-16 hour days simply to make a rent payment, a simple refund request or 2-3 days with no new sales could send me spiraling into a depression. Both of these examples from my life were times when I was investing myself completely into one area — women and business — and forsaking other important areas of my life and my identity.

In the case of the man in Robbins’ seminar, he lived an entire life that reinforced his identity as a man who could make money. He worked 100 hour weeks for decades. He made millions. Everyone who knew him, knew him as the man who could make money and did. Many of them knew him and liked him because he could make money.

This constant reinforcement and lack of diversity in his life eventually warped his perception in himself away from being a father, a husband, a friend, a role model, and instead a walking bank account. That’s all that came to matter to him and his identity. He had nothing else going for him because he never invested in any other aspects of his relationships. And when the money went, so did his self-worth along with it.

WHAT DO YOU CARE ABOUT?

One could take this advice as merely being a well-balanced individual. The problem is, people can be well-balanced but still not have a diverse identity. They can participate in a lot of different activities, but still derive the majority of their validation and self-worth from one source.

For instance, let’s say you’re a well-balanced individual with a successful law career, a spouse, some cool hobbies, and you enjoy reading in your spare time. But in reality your career dominates your identity. You work so much that you have little with which to relate to your spouse other than work. Your hobbies all involve your coworkers. Your reading relates to your career. You have no diversity.

A lot of people I know in finance are like this. Their friends are their co-workers. The books they read and movies they watch relate to their job. Their social excursions are work and networking functions. The dates they go on with people they meet doing work-related things. There’s no diversification of where they’re receiving their validation. And therefore their emotional stability and self-esteem is at risk.

If you invest all of your identity in one basket, then you put your self-esteem and emotional well-being at risk.

American Football player Junior Seau recently committed suicide a few years after retiring. A lot of discussion has taken place about athletes and how they can regain their lost identity once they retire. One can’t imagine what they must feel, having gone their entire lives since childhood being recognized for being great at a single activity, and then once they hit their 40’s, it’s all taken away.

Seau is not the only casualty. There’s this heartbreaking article about Hall of Fame football player William “Refrigerator” Perry and his descent into depression and alcoholism after retirement. Or this excellent article on soccer legends Pele and Maradona and their inability to let go of their pasts. Or how about this one on Michael Jordan and his continued bitterness and insecurity after retirement?

Three years ago, the thought of my business going under terrified me. I stayed up entire nights worrying about if a new web page would make me money or not. When they didn’t I would lose sleep again trying to figure out why.

Ironically, now that I’m successful in business, my identity isn’t as invested in it, and if it failed tomorrow I don’t think I’d be as devastated now as I would have been three years ago. Why? Because I’ve diversified my identity. I’ve been around the world, speak multiple languages, have a wide array of friends of varying lifestyles, am a good musician, a successful writer — if my business crashed, it would surely suck and be stressful, but I imagine emotionally I would hold up much better.

What do you care about? I mean, what do you really care about? Invest yourself in a wide range of areas. If you like music, start attending concerts or learn an instrument. Don’t just travel as a vacation, but invest in learning about the cultures. Learn a new language. Make time for old friends. Pick up new hobbies. Get competitive in something. Expand yourself beyond your work and your relationships. Go out for no other reason than to be with your friends. Learn how to dance. Take some time off work. Attend a meditationretreat.

And don’t just do something else, but care about it, invest yourself in it.

Lest you become like our finance guru at a Tony Robbins seminar. Because chances are, the Batman of Psychology is not going to be around to save you.

12:43:00 - By Vincent 0

Creating a Life Plan Can Change Your Life

Why, when, and how to create a life plan

BY Harleena Singh 

Do you think that creating a life plan can really help change your life for the better?

Sounds unbelievable, right? I bet it’s easy to believe that money and power alone can make a difference to your life.

They sure do, but not without a plan!

Without a plan or a program, even your best resources will fail to produce the desired results. Life is no exception.

Creating a life plan is one way to control the outcomes of your life, attempt to manifest your desires or materialize your dreams, and decide your future as well as the state of life.

Let’s learn more about life plans.

“A man who does not think and plan long ahead will find trouble right at his door.” ~ Confucius

What is a Life Plan

I’m not talking about an insurance plan. Here I’m talking of a strategic plan that gives you some control over your life, to safeguard yourself from failures and taking unnecessary risks.

Life plan is what sets the course of your life, helps you accomplish your aims, and assists in bringing happiness into your life.

The dictionary defines a plan as a series of steps to be carried out or goals to be accomplished.

Life plan is a design that you create with all the will and intention to achieve favorable outcomes. It’s a plan for life, just like the plan you’ve for your business or career.

You can consider a life plan as a map of your life that helps you find the right path, keeps you on track, and makes you happy by making your life meaningful.

Life plan is a structure that gives shape to your hopes and dreams.

You can also consider it as a recipe that tells you about which ingredients you should mix in a specific proportion to bring you the taste of success.

My life plan might be different from yours.

In fact, we all could have different life plans; yet live together in harmony, because life, in general, has a bigger plan that involves all of us.

“You have had a dream for so many years. Let today be the day you make a plan for it. Just think about how much more likely you are to hit your target when you finally aim at it.” ~ Steve Maraboli

Why Create a Life Plan

Do you really know what you want to do or become in life? Do you have a plan for life or a purpose for living?

Obviously, there must be a reason that you’re here in this world and still living – there’s nothing that happens without a reason.

It’s not just about choosing a career, a job, or planning your holidays, investment, and wedding.

Isn’t it ironical that we create plans for everything we do in our life, but not about life itself?

What could be the reasons?

Moreover, if a life plan does help, then why don’t people create one?

If you don’t have a life plan, what’s your reason? Please take the poll to find out why people don’t create a life plan. You may abstain if you’ve created one for yourself.

What are your reasons for not creating a life plan?

Not being aware of a life planNot knowing how to make a life planNot wanting to make the effortsNot believing in life plans

VoteView ResultsPolldaddy.com

Are there any surprising results?

“Life is what happens to us while we are making other plans.” ~ Allen Saunders

True. Life happens, and sometimes you’ve to accept it, even if it is not in accordance to your plans. Agreed that we aren’t in control of our lives all the time.

But that doesn’t mean that you don’t set up a life plan. Yes, you should not let your plan control you because that makes life difficult.

“In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.” ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower

Even if plans don’t work your way, you need to do life planning.

A life plan is effective and it does not bind you. It also gives you the freedom to be yourself and achieve your potential.

You need a life plan because it gives you power, makes you strong, and helps to show you the direction of your life.

Most importantly, you need a life plan because it makes your life focused.

Focus and direction are two important elements among others requirements to be successful.

If you do not have a life plan, then it’s just like sitting on logs that drift away with no control, in the river of time.

You can even compare a life plan to a motorboat that can be steered at your will and doesn’t make you feel helpless, but very much in control.

If you feel you’re losing control of your life, things aren’t happening as you wish them to happen, and you feel that your efforts are not bearing the expected fruits, then you must think about creating a life plan.

If you’re not happy with your life, or wish to achieve more in life, then you must plan your life.

A life plan may not guarantee you success, but it can surely make your life easier. It’ll provide you with the specifics to make sense out of the chaos in your life so you don’t waste more time.

Your life plan would define all the milestones, everything you need, all you have to do, and make you realistic about your life.

Do you now believe in the importance of a life plan? I hope you do!

It’s great if you want to evolve in life. It’s not that you don’t evolve if you don’t plan long-term. Even day-to-day plans and living consciously helps you evolve.

However, a long-term plan will give you a new perspective, and an overview that will make your day-to-day living more meaningful.

Now that you know what a plan is and why you need it, when should you start?

“You were born to win, but to be a winner, you must plan to win, prepare to win, and expect to win.” ~ Zig Ziglar

When to Create a Life Plan

Any time is the right time for creating a life plan, but the earlier the better.

There may be many reasons trying to stop you from doing so, or there could be much doubt in your mind.

You just need one strong conviction to take the positive step and live to the fullest of your life’s potential.

“Create a definite plan for carrying out your desire and begin at once, whether you’re ready or not, to put this plan into action.” ~ Napoleon Hill

What could be a better time than the beginning of the year to reset the course of your life and steer it into the track of progress.

Generally, those who value life and don’t take it for granted are interested in having a life plan. They’ve a strong desire to succeed.

Passion is the fuel that drives all plans. If you’re inspired by now, and are filled with zeal and fervor for life, then it’s time to plan for it.

Some go for a life plan when all options in life seem to have failed them. That’s the time necessity becomes the mother of all reasons to plan their lives.

“To accomplish great things, we must not only act, but also dream; not only plan, but also believe.” ~ Anatole France

You’ll make a life plan when you strongly believe in it. I’d say, don’t wait for the extreme situations, or think that you’re too old and it’s too late.

It’s never too late. The time to create the plan of your life is NOW!

If you’ve made up your mind, then just pick up a pen and paper and start creating your life plan.

“You have to create your life. You have to carve it, like a sculpture.” ~ William Shatner

How to Create a Life Plan

The first thing you need is a reason to script your life plan, and a strong belief to follow it. I hope by now you’re convinced that you need to have a strategy in place to make your life as you want.

Like all other plans, your approach to creating a life plan should be very logical.

1. Know what you want or where you want to go

2. Find the best and easiest way to achieve your aim or reach your destination

3. Assess yourself and your status to know the resources you have with you

4. Choose the best strategy as per your condition and circumstances

5. Make an action plan and commit to it

Do you believe in a different approach? Please share in the comments; I’d love to know them.

You need to have your own life plan. Don’t try to copy that of others, because you’re unique and you’ve your own beliefs, dreams, purpose, priorities, and qualities.

“If you don’t design your own life plan, chances are you’ll fall into someone else’s plan. And guess what they have planned for you? Not much.” ~ Jim Rohn

I believe you can control your life to a great extent and transform it into how and what you want. Isn’t it?

But, how do you go about doing that? I mean achieving happiness not by chance but by your will. I’d say you can follow the following steps to designing your life.

“First comes thought; then organization of that thought, into ideas and plans; then transformation of those plans into reality. The beginning, as you will observe, is in your imagination.” ~ Napoleon Hill

Steps to Creating a Life Plan

Your life plan will take the real shape and better form only when you write it down. It will make you serious, accountable, and committed to your design for life.

Creating a life design will give you the focus and force to execute and achieve your dreams. With this dynamic map in hand, you’ll never lose your way.

You need to be very precise and positive while creating a life plan. Use positive sentences to express your precise goals, and make them measurable.

A good plan will always be clear and achievable. You can make it in form of an outline or in detail if you like, or perhaps without being time-specific or a time-bound plan.

Creating a life plan can be a three-step process. A smart tip is to create your plan from top to bottom and implement it from bottom to top.

KNOW and PURPOSE

First, you need to know what you want.

Do you’ve a dream or a vision? Will achieving that make your life complete? What will make you happy in life? What is the purpose or aim of your life? What is the one thing that you’ll settle for in life?

You’ll create your life plan especially for yourself. So, the first thing you need to do is know and understand yourself.

I know this appears to be the most difficult step for some, and it really is not easy. You may understand complex mathematical equations, but understanding yourself seems more difficult at times.

The strongest drives and solutions are all within you. Let yourself be guided by your inner-self and intuition.

If self-introspection seems difficult, what you can do is list all your likes and the things you love in life or about yourself, to make a personal assessment.

Though your likes and dislikes keep changing with time, but you’ll have a better idea and picture about who and what you’re, and what you should be doing.

What are the things you want in life? What is the state of life you want to achieve? What are your innermost desires and drives?

All plans have a purpose, aim, or a goal to start with.

All sportspersons use strategies, and all players have plans to win their games.  The military, doctors, teachers, and all professionals go by their plans.

You must’ve observed the nature and its manifold aspects around you. Do you know that each element of nature has a specific purpose?

Nothing exists without a purpose. Have you found your purpose of life?

Well, I won’t delve with this aspect in its depths, but if you‘d like to do that, you might like to read my post about it.

MUST READ: How to find purpose in life and be happy

As per the dictionary meaning, a purpose is an anticipated outcome that is intended or that guides your planned actions. In other words, it’s your aim or objective.

In general, the purpose of life for everyone is to be happy. You can define more specific, realistic, and measurable outcomes that you want to achieve for a limited period.

Having a purpose in life is like knowing your destination, where you’ve to go, in the journey of life. Do you have a dream – if you believe it’s realistic enough, make it your purpose in life!

You need to make short-term goals that serve as milestones to your long-term goal, the destination. Goal setting gives you a vision, a bigger picture, guide, and motivation.

Describe your purpose of life as clearly and precisely as possible.

Besides the purpose, you also need to set your priorities in life. This should be in line with your short-term and long-term goals.

If the main goal of your life is to be happy and achieve happiness for your family, then you need to set intermediate goals at different intervals of your life that can lead to happiness in life.

ASSESS and DEFINE

Second, you must assess and define all aspects, including yourself.

Have you taken a stock of yourself, gathered resources, and defined the critical success factors? Have you defined your success and set the achievable goals? What steps would lead you to your destination?

Observe yourself and find out what are your personal qualities, aptitude, abilities, skills and whatever you’re good at – your strengths and talents.

You can take the help of your family and friends, who might be able to give you some feedback that probably you never took into consideration earlier.

However, you yourself have to figure out what your needs are – emotional, financial, mental, physician, and spiritual needs. Your hopes and dreams have great value too.

Now that you’ve a realistic understanding of yourself, you can get ahead with creating a life plan that is entirely unique for you.

Find out the resources that you require that will help you in achieving your purpose of life. If you don’t have everything, you may’ve to make do with whatever you’ve.

You need to define what success means for you. We all may’ve different definitions and interpretations of success.

You need to find, define, and write the factors that can contribute to your success. Your life journey will become easier when you define your short-term or intermediate goals.

Next, you want to know how to get results.

PLAN and OUTCOMES

Third, plan how you’ll get the results that you want.

Have you created your mission to achieve your purpose? Have you defined your objectives, strategies, and action plans? Do you have specific commitment in place and ways to measure the output or result?

Outcome is the result of your efforts. How precisely can you define the outcomes you desire in your life?

What do you want to be in life? What is your goal and how realistic it is? Is that leading you to your next goal in the scheme of progress that you’ve defined for your life?

Defining the outcomes is like putting up milestones that measure the progress you’ve made or the distance you’ve to travel in your efforts to reach the final destination.

The more outcomes you’re able to think of, the more clearly you’re able to define your life, make it meaningful, know exactly what you want to do and how to proceed in your life.

Remember that the outcomes and purpose of your life should be realistically in line or in coordination with your personal abilities and capabilities.

For example, you’re a blogger and you want to be the richest person in the world. Now this is a bit exaggerated and unrealistic, isn’t?

What about if you want to have a bank balance of 5 million dollars after 5 years.

It’s a great plan, but is it realistic and feasible being a blogger?

Well, I personally feel it’s difficult, but not impossible either. It depends on your skills, attitude, approach, and the timing. Of course, hard work included.

May be you can’t be the world’s richest person, but you can make big achievements if you’ve a combination of high goals, aspirations, resources, a winning attitude, and a strong life plan.

Don’t disbelieve me; there are exceptions and people who’ve done it. Look at Pete Cashmore of Mashable, Michael Arrington of TechCrunch, Timothy Sykes, and many other bloggers.

You too can transform your life!

All you need are right strategies, well-configured action plans, and specific commitments to carry out the plan objectives.

Once you know all about yourself, define your purpose of life, assess and define everything, and describe your desired outcomes along with your action plan, you need to pen them on paper.

“Reduce your plan to writing. The moment you complete this, you will have definitely given concrete form to the intangible desire.” ~ Napoleon Hill

Sounds great and simple, doesn’t it? However, there’s more to designing your life. One thing you need is a correct format that suits you for creating your life plan.

I haven’t made one for you because good formats are already available created by personal development experts.

You can have a look at Michael Hyatt’s popular life plan here or a simple goal-planning template here.

You create a life plan according to what matters to you and what you want to be.

Make sure that your aims or goals are measurable. You need to define them clearly.

Remember, you need to keep re-visiting your plan, adjusting it according to relevant changes, and keep refining it. A life plan need not be rigid and static; it’s always flexible and dynamic.

“A goal without a plan is just a wish.” ~ Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Remember that not all good things in life happen by chance. You can create happiness by your efforts and change your life for the better by creating a life plan.

This is the time to start a new life and journey when lots of festivities are going on all around the world.

I wish to extend all my wishes to you for a brighter, healthier, prosperous, and more importantly, a happier year ahead.

“Plan for the future because that’s where you are going to spend the rest of your life.” ~ Mark Twain

Over to you –

What are your views about scripting your life plan? Have you ever created one? If yes, then please share your experiences and tips to make our lives meaningful in the comments below.

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13:42:00 - By Vincent 0

THE MOST IMPORTANT QUESTION OF YOUR LIFE

By Mark Manson

Everybody wants what feels good. Everyone wants to live a carefree, happy and easy life, to fall in love and have amazing sex and relationships, to look perfect and make money and be popular and well-respected and admired and a total baller to the point that people part like the Red Sea when you walk into the room.

Everyone would like that — it’s easy to like that.

If I ask you, “What do you want out of life?” and you say something like, “I want to be happy and have a great family and a job I like,” it’s so ubiquitous that it doesn’t even mean anything.

A more interesting question, a question that perhaps you’ve never considered before, is what pain do you want in your life? What are you willing to struggle for? Because that seems to be a greater determinant of how our lives turn out.

Everybody wants to have an amazing job and financial independence — but not everyone wants to suffer through 60-hour work weeks, long commutes, obnoxious paperwork, to navigate arbitrary corporate hierarchies and the blasé confines of an infinite cubicle hell. People want to be rich without the risk, without the sacrifice, without the delayed gratification necessary to accumulate wealth.

Everybody wants to have great sex and an awesome relationship — but not everyone is willing to go through the tough conversations, the awkward silences, the hurt feelings and the emotional psychodrama to get there. And so they settle. They settle and wonder “What if?” for years and years and until the question morphs from “What if?” into “Was that it?” And when the lawyers go home and the alimony check is in the mail they say, “What was that for?” if not for their lowered standards and expectations 20 years prior, then what for?

Because happiness requires struggle. The positive is the side effect of handling the negative. You can only avoid negative experiences for so long before they come roaring back to life.

At the core of all human behavior, our needs are more or less similar. Positive experience is easy to handle. It’s negative experience that we all, by definition, struggle with. Therefore, what we get out of life is not determined by the good feelings we desire but by what bad feelings we’re willing and able to sustain to get us to those good feelings.

People want an amazing physique. But you don’t end up with one unless you legitimately appreciate the pain and physical stress that comes with living inside a gym for hour upon hour, unless you love calculating and calibrating the food you eat, planning your life out in tiny plate-sized portions.

People want to start their own business or become financially independent. But you don’t end up a successful entrepreneur unless you find a way to appreciate the risk, the uncertainty, the repeated failures, and working insane hours on something you have no idea whether will be successful or not.

People want a partner, a spouse. But you don’t end up attracting someone amazingwithout appreciating the emotional turbulence that comes with weathering rejections, building the sexual tension that never gets released, and staring blankly at a phone that never rings. It’s part of the game of love. You can’t win if you don’t play.

What determines your success isn’t “What do you want to enjoy?” The question is, “What pain do you want to sustain?” The quality of your life is not determined by the quality of your positive experiences but the quality of your negative experiences. And to get good at dealing with negative experiences is to get good at dealing with life.

There’s a lot of crappy advice out there that says, “You’ve just got to want it enough!”

Everybody wants something. And everybody wants something enough. They just aren’t aware of what it is they want, or rather, what they want “enough.”

Because if you want the benefits of something in life, you have to also want the costs. If you want the beach body, you have to want the sweat, the soreness, the early mornings, and the hunger pangs. If you want the yacht, you have to also want the late nights, the risky business moves, and the possibility of pissing off a person or ten thousand.

If you find yourself wanting something month after month, year after year, yet nothing happens and you never come any closer to it, then maybe what you actually want is a fantasy, an idealization, an image and a false promise. Maybe what you want isn’t what you want, you just enjoy wanting. Maybe you don’t actually want it at all.

Sometimes I ask people, “How do you choose to suffer?” These people tilt their heads and look at me like I have twelve noses. But I ask because that tells me far more about you than your desires and fantasies. Because you have to choose something. You can’t have a pain-free life. It can’t all be roses and unicorns. And ultimately that’s the hard question that matters. Pleasure is an easy question. And pretty much all of us have similar answers. The more interesting question is the pain. What is the pain that you want to sustain?

That answer will actually get you somewhere. It’s the question that can change your life. It’s what makes me me and you you. It’s what defines us and separates us and ultimately brings us together.

For most of my adolescence and young adulthood, I fantasized about being a musician — a rock star, in particular. Any badass guitar song I heard, I would always close my eyes and envision myself up on stage playing it to the screams of the crowd, people absolutely losing their minds to my sweet finger-noodling. This fantasy could keep me occupied for hours on end. The fantasizing continued up through college, even after I dropped out of music school and stopped playing seriously. But even then it was never a question of if I’d ever be up playing in front of screaming crowds, but when. I was biding my time before I could invest the proper amount of time and effort into getting out there and making it work. First, I needed to finish school. Then, I needed to make money. Then, I needed to find the time. Then… and then nothing.

Despite fantasizing about this for over half of my life, the reality never came. And it took me a long time and a lot of negative experiences to finally figure out why: I didn’t actually want it.

I was in love with the result — the image of me on stage, people cheering, me rocking out, pouring my heart into what I’m playing — but I wasn’t in love with the process. And because of that, I failed at it. Repeatedly. Hell, I didn’t even try hard enough to fail at it. I hardly tried at all.

The daily drudgery of practicing, the logistics of finding a group and rehearsing, the pain of finding gigs and actually getting people to show up and give a shit. The broken strings, the blown tube amp, hauling 40 pounds of gear to and from rehearsals with no car. It’s a mountain of a dream and a mile-high climb to the top. And what it took me a long time to discover is that I didn’t like to climb much. I just liked to imagine the top.

Our culture would tell me that I’ve somehow failed myself, that I’m a quitter or a loser.Self-help would say that I either wasn’t courageous enough, determined enough or I didn’t believe in myself enough. The entrepreneurial/start-up crowd would tell me that I chickened out on my dream and gave in to my conventional social conditioning. I’d be told to do affirmations or join a mastermind group or manifest or something.

But the truth is far less interesting than that: I thought I wanted something, but it turns out I didn’t. End of story.

I wanted the reward and not the struggle. I wanted the result and not the process. I was in love not with the fight but only the victory. And life doesn’t work that way.

Who you are is defined by the values you are willing to struggle for. People who enjoy the struggles of a gym are the ones who get in good shape. People who enjoy long workweeks and the politics of the corporate ladder are the ones who move up it. People who enjoy the stresses and uncertainty of the starving artist lifestyle are ultimately the ones who live it and make it.

This is not a call for willpower or “grit.” This is not another admonishment of “no pain, no gain.”

This is the most simple and basic component of life: our struggles determine our successes. So choose your struggles wisely, my friend.

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12:30:00 - By Vincent 0