I’ve been thinking a lot about strain recently. Strain shapes you. The moments that push you just enough, just a little too far, are the moments you discover the bounds of who you are–the edges of your identity. In the same way our muscles, minds, and careers grow when we stretch them, most trying aspects of life do as well.
There is a maximal living that only comes after finding the limit, of becoming the limit case.
People always say that you have so much potential, that you have your whole life ahead of you. But what they should tell me is that I have so many failures left to give. That I have so many trying times left to give. That I get to face the mountain of doubt and strain and still prevail. Struggle is not the point of life, but neither is coasting.
You don’t grow in comfort. 1
I heard an analogy the other day, that pain and obstacles are as much a part of an ambitious hero’s journey as hard breathing is to running. You wouldn’t say that you are doing something wrong if you are running and you start panting, right? But when it comes to matters of ambition, we sometimes forget this. We get deep in the pit, we get rejected and the world seems to turn against us. But what we fail to remember is that it’s the straight path, the path without trials and tribulations, that would be the unusual hero’s journey. If we are doing anything worthwhile, it’s these moments that define it. Otherwise, we’re probably working on the wrong thing. Discomfort is the price you pay for a big life. Pay it gladly.
These days, I’m trying to track my failure rate. I want to aim for failing about 20% of the time in anything I do. I want to know that, when it’s all said and done, I put it all out there. I think a responsible rate to fail is 20%. Any less and you aren’t doing what you can. This perverts our aversion of failure and turns it into a sort of compass. Encountering The Resistance just means I’m on the right path. Why am I doing this? I’m doing it because it’s hard. Exactly because of the possibility that I can fail. That’s where adventure lives!
Safety is safe.
Whatever is low risk, everyone else is able to do. Life rewards you in direct proportion to your willingness to take on risk. Life’s richest experiences expand and contract in proportion to your willingness to assume risk, to reach toward your outer edges and play at the boundary. The world is somewhat efficient in that regard. If it was easy and it seemed easy to everyone else, they would’ve done it.2 The people who make history aren’t the ones who stayed past the point of discomfort. They’re the ones who looked at impossible things and said “fuck it, we’ll try anyway.”
Every time I touch the edge and cross it, I draw the new boundary of who I am. Will this push me past what I thought possible for An? Good. That’s exactly where I should be. And this muscle gets stronger every time I strain it.
So I’m learning to fail. Learning to force myself to go where I can’t. I’m opting for pain because I don’t want stability. I want to look over the edge and see where An can stretch.
I want the great adventure.
“I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
Footnotes
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The truth is, most people don’t want to grow that badly. Most people are not that ambitious. Or, they’ve given up on the possibility that ambitious is someone they can be. Comfort is the right life choice for most people. But for ambitious people, comfort may be the most cancerous and depressing path in the long term. Ambitious people may not be the happiest compared to the average joe, especially when they work 80 hours a week. But ambitious people are happier putting it all on the court than they would be if they barely worked. And thats a key difference between ambitious people and everyone else. ↩
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The world is actually a lot less efficient than we think sometimes. It’s our job to find these inefficiencies and fix them. ↩