Why Pain Helps - a Story

The speaker discusses the importance of embracing hard and painful experiences in order to grow and become stronger. He shares a personal story of his military training and how it was easier for his father who had experienced abuse in his childhood. The speaker emphasizes the need to live life in a mode of survival and striving for goals, as going through hardships helps us become hardened and better equipped to handle future challenges. Hardships may be unpleasant, but they ultimately make us stronger. Good morning Mastery Alliance. Hey yesterday I talked about massive goals often equal massive pain. I want to dive in a little bit more into that and why we honestly need to embrace the things that come at us that are hard and painful and I'm going to do it by telling you a story. So just bear with me as I go through this. So I was a 21 year old man. I decided I'm going to join the Army. I get shipped off to basic training in Fort Dix, New Jersey. Basic training is by far not the most difficult military training out there but it's hard. It is not an easy thing to go through. It is eight weeks of grueling marching, you know, exercise, marching, exercise, you know, learning how to fire a weapon, exercise, marching. You get the idea. You get the drift. It was a lot of walking, a lot of marching, a lot of exercise, a lot of drilling and it's monotonous and it's frankly it's hard. You know, if you can imagine having a 50-pound rucksack on your back and having to walk in the sand in blistering heat with, you know, you've got your full uniform on, your black boots, you know, it's unbelievably difficult and it's over and over again and they have you do it after you've done your physical training for the day. So you've already gone out, ran a couple of miles, you know, you've done your sit-ups, your push-ups, your calisthenics, all of that stuff. Oh, and you march to that and then you march back. You get ready to go march again. Yeah, they give you a breakfast in there but you get the idea. It's constant and I remember walking in the sand thinking, when is this going to end? Why are we doing this? This is dumb. There's no point in this. There's, you know, you can just imagine all the things you can think about as you're like just walking and there's a guy in front of you and by the way everybody stinks because it's just, it's bad, it's hot, it's gross, it's disgusting. Then, later on, some of the things that they do is, you know, they'll gas you and you know, they'll tell you to take a, you know, stand there, we're gonna, you're in a room, we're gonna gas you and they gas you and it is horrible. You get this burning sensation all over your body, your eyes, your mouth, you're just unbelievable. They finally let you out which seems like an hour, it's like two minutes or something like that and then you do some more running to try to get that gas off of your skin, out of your clothes, out of your hair, out of your eyes and you're flapping your arms and like, like you're trying to fly. It's crazy but then what you learn is later on, you think to yourself, you know, if they're gonna gas me once, they're probably gonna gas me again and so you start to learn pretty quickly, I'm gonna get, I'm gonna be prepared, I'm gonna be prepared to get gassed and so the reason why they do this is because it hardens them, it hardens those guys in the military so when, if they have to go out into war, that they've got a simulation, they've got something that they can go back on and say, I've done hard things, I've experienced hard things, I've accomplished hard things and it culminates at the end, right before you graduate, with you low crawling through the mud, through all this crazy stuff with live fire rounds going above you so you're definitely low crawling through the whole thing. So I'm telling you this, I go home, my dad who's a career military man, so what did you think? How did you like it? I said, honestly dad, it sucked, the whole experience sucked. I don't know that I enjoy the military. He goes, yeah, I could have told you that. I'm like, well, you know, that's, that's actually one of the things that, that'd be great for a dad to tell you. He goes, no, I guess that's something you need to learn on your own and he goes, I said, well, how did you do it? He goes, and this is the key message to the story. He said, you know, I grew up with a dad that physically abused me. He chained me up in the backyard for everybody to see, like a dog, for weeks. He put me in the root cellar for weeks for being disobedient. I fell off the fender of the car one time and he drove over my leg and said, you need to learn to get out of the way faster. So when I went into the military, when I went through that experience, it was actually easier for me to do it than a guy like you that lived a comfortable life. This is why I'm so adamant about those three modes. The, you know, the sustain mode, the survival mode, the start gold mode. We have to learn to live our life like it, we're in survival, but on our terms and start gold. So we go through hard things so we can become hardened. So when the next thing comes along, it's easier for us to do. It gets easier and easier and easier the more we experience hardships. Hardships suck. They just do, but they make us better, stronger people. So I'm not saying, you know, like get all excited about hardships. I'm just saying, accept them for the outcome that they give you in your life. These are the things that are going to help us, help you, help me outlast everything. Have a fantastic day.