People Will Sacrifice Anything to Succeed Other Than Their Suffering

This post was inspired by Hamish McArthur’s appearance on the Testpiece Climbing Podcast. The link should bring you to the section in which they discuss this phenomenon. Though, I would strongly recommend the whole episode as it’s very insightful despite it technically being about climbing.

Everyone seems to believe success and excellence comes from suffering: locking yourself to your desk in an academic sense or sets and reps in an athletic sense. I believe this is a misconception, an enticing one at that, though. So much so that, I believe I fell into this trap this previous semester. Ironically, doing so proved to be quite detrimental to my productivity and overall success in some sense.

Evading the suffering

I have long felt that I understand how I worked and studied quite accurately. In middle school, I learned how to study effectively on my own as I wanted to improve at math, and learning how to study was the most effective way of improving. In high school, I became even more efficient; I was not interested in doing work for many of my classes, and so I learned how to get the work done quicker so I could spend my time on things I did care about. Over time, I learned how to get a month of work done in a weekend. While a bit of this could be attributed to some level of intelligence, I believe a majority of it came from understanding what environment I was most productive in and fully committing to it (even when it differed from how most people chose to work)¹.

In high school, I still had one major flaw in my system: procrastination. Even though I could do a month of work in a weekend, I would always do it in a weekend at the end of the month, rather than getting ahead in all my classes. This procrastination applied to everything, leading to some ultimately stressful times (like when I did all of my college apps, from start to finish, in less than a week). Fortunately, as I entered my freshman year of college, I became more organized and was able to largely kick my habit of procrastination.

Kicking this habit, in addition to my conviction to my study habits, proved to be incredibly freeing. During my first semester of college, I only worked 5 days a week, never past 5 PM and usually starting work around 9 AM. Meanwhile, many of my classmates were mentioning how late they were staying up studying or how much of their week is taken up by homework. Despite spending significantly less time, I was excelling in my classes and had ample free time to pursue other passions I have: I was consistently climbing 4 times a week, watching a movie about every other day, and finishing a new book about every week. This productivity and time for my habits largely continued through the spring semester.

Succumbing to the suffering

Unfortunately, as I entered this most recent semester, I began having quite a few personal stressors that affected my mentality and ability to prioritize the things I wanted to prioritize. This led to a gradual slide in my habits: I was less strict with my routine and began using my free time less productively, oftentimes doomscrolling. This slide led to more suffering in some sense; in each moment I was more likely to prioritize my immediate comfort than before which ultimately led to more stress and suffering as I began to see myself fall behind in some sense. This became cyclic, the more stress I had, the more I wanted to hide from it, which in the end led to more suffering. At some point in this period, I made the most grave mistake: I started to believe this suffering was necessary.

“I’m in a difficult major at a prestigious school. Of course, I’m going to be stressed. It would be foolish to think I wouldn’t be.”

I believe I was extremely mistaken in this thought process. I mean just look at the previous year, I was doing the same major at the same school, and sure it wasn’t the same courses but I wasn’t nearly this stressed. But, I had already begun to see this stress as necessary. As a result, whenever I did things that led to more stress (such as taking a YouTube break rather than doing the homework I really should have been working), it didn’t seem like as big of an issue anymore. The suffering was inevitable so why not seek a little bit of comfort even if it will lead to more stress in the future. I honestly didn’t even catch this mistake until I was listening to the podcast with Hamish McArthur, and I didn’t really fully accept it until recently after much reflection.

Though, now that I am aware of it, I’m putting lots of time and energy ensuring that I can get back to my old ways.

Sacrifice your suffering

Suffering is not necessary for you to succeed. Hard work is, but suffering is not. Understanding can almost always replace the suffering. I believe people that aren’t successful hold this masochistic view of success for 1 of 2 reasons: (1) they can rationalize why they aren’t successful because this “necessary” suffering is too much for them to handle OR (2) they prefer the superficial suffering over the difficulty of self-reflection and being honest about one’s self and life. Ironically, these reasons are contradictory to each other. Displaying some of the illogicality of this masochistic view.

This is a somewhat funny phenomenon, though, as this implies that you can succeed with less suffering and yet most people deny it. Self-reflection is not an easy thing but in the long run, it is easier than suffering. So I suggest you begin questioning both your suffering and yourself. In the long run, you may find yourself free from this suffering you were allowing yourself to endure.

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