The Most Important Question of Your Life

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.9 People who enjoy long work weeks and the politics of the corporate ladder are the ones who move up it.10 People who enjoy the stresses and uncertainty of the starving artist life are ultimately the ones ... See more

Because if you want the benefits of something in life, you have to also want the costs.

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.

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.

we are all capable of—and I’d argue responsible for—ascribing meaning to our pain, and this can actually give our life purpose.

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.