When You Stop Giving A Damn About Suffering, You Become Unstoppable
I recently read a powerful life story by the author Mark Manson who wrote a book called “The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck”. My main take away from this book was captured by this quote by Mark “the key to living a good life is not giving a fuck about more things, but rather, giving a fuck only about the things that align with your personal values”.
As I read Mark’s book, I came to think of one of the topics I often cover with the entrepreneurs I coach, which is ….pain is very much embedded in our lives, and we need to learn to put up with it. In order to put up with it, we need to accept that life is always going to suck a little bit. And we need to stop reacting to suffering, and instead embrace pain, define it and manage it. If we seek to avoid pain, we may end up experiencing higher levels of suffering.
While happiness is part of life, pain also plays an important role in our everyday existence. And I believe that “managed pain” can propel our growth and mastery. There is no such thing as an app or an algorithm for happiness, and we should accept that adversity is part of life. The less reactive we become about adversities, and the more we accept the limits of happiness, the more we can deal with the negative feelings of life. Happiness emerges when we fix what is broken and problem solve. However…
