Which Pain Do You Want to Endure?
This is a question that I’ve been asking myself a lot lately.
I have tendency to choose the easy path.
I’d much rather put something off.
I prefer to coast.
And what I’ve finally realized—and its only taken 41 years to figure out—is that choosing the easy path, putting something off, and coasting is so much more painful in the long run than the pain that needs to be endured in the moment.
The pain of not doing is far worse than the pain of doing.
The Pain of Not Doing
By choice, yesterday was a pretty big training day: 90 minute swim practice starting at 6:30am, and then at some point during the day I needed to fit in a 75 minute bike ride immediately followed by a 3.5 mile run.
With a 10-month-old son and a wife training for her second Ironman triathlon, this requires a lot of balancing. To add on to that, we also needed to get food prepared for a Thanksgiving party that my swim team was putting on.
After the swim practice, it would have been easy to convince myself that I’d done enough for the day.
After picking our son up to go grocery shopping with me and then getting breakfast made for the family, I could have easily justified a nap when I got our son down for his nap at 9:30am.
I could have also easily convinced myself that his nap time was a perfect time to prepare food for the Thanksgiving party so that we didn’t have to do it later.
But, I’ve put myself in that position too often.
And, I know the result: I end up not doing anything.
And the pain starts mounting.
And mounting.
And mounting.
And the pain causes me to start considering the should haves and the would haves and the could haves.
Which causes my self-esteem to corrode.
Which doubles then triples then quadruples the pain. Ad infinitum.
A pain that could have been just under 2 hours—had I just seen the bike ride and the run through—sits within me the entire day and keeps building.
It’s pervasive.
The Pain of Doing
And luckily, after 41 years, I’ve finally figured this out.
As I put our son in his crib, I asked myself, “which pain do you want to endure.”
I’m learning that the answer—the pain of doing—is a motivating force because I know it’s going to move me forward. While the pain of not doing seems tempting because I can justify the productivity of all the things that I come up with doing in lieu of what I planned to do—what I need to do—I know the detrimental effect that not doing has on my wellbeing.
So, I plugged my trainer in, put my bike on it, quickly changed, and 5 minutes later I was pedaling.
And two hours later, I was smiling ear-to-ear…
…bike ride done…
…run done…
…and I was just in time to walk into our son’s room with my wife to see him sitting up in his crib with a smile on his face after a much-needed long nap.
For me, the pain of doing creates the story that I want to be telling because it’s a story that I know that I can be telling.
Just Start
It’s that simple.
Stop with the storytelling.
Stop with the justifications.
Stop with the excuses.
Ask yourself, “Which pain do you want to endure?”
The pain is going to be there whether you do or don’t.
It’s just that one is momentary and one is pervasive.
The momentary builds you up because you make progress toward your goals. The pervasive tears you down because you know you’re putting off your goals. You owe it to yourself to keep the pain to a minimum. And, more importantly, you owe it to yourself to put your goals—the story that you’ve always wanted to tell and the story that you know that you can tell—first.
String a bunch of momentary pain together and you’ll be amazed at the story that starts to unfold.
Just start.