Page 16 - Sealink July 2020

PAIN is a four-letter word. It can
paralyze you or it can redeem you.
It can entangle you in tits web of
complexity or at the same time it
can set you free through its
expanse of simplicity. Many
believe that to achieve something
great we have to struggle. And
with it we also need to endure
PAIN Along my entrepreneurial
journey I became immersed in this
paradigm. Everyone was talking
about how hard it is to build a
business (or achieve any big
dream). I was always hearing
stories of immense struggle, grind
and the phrase 'no pain no gain'.
Many motivational speeches are
based on this premise.
I started to believe that my
struggles were a non-negotiable
part of the path I had chosen. I was
feeling overwhelmed, confused,
exhausted, anxious, insecure and
frankly, unhappy. But apparently
everyone feels these things on the
path to success. It's normal and
you just have to keep going, right?
Wrong. All I heard for such a long
time was wrong. Most of us develop
this dangerous misconception
about success, that the journey to
success needs to be painful or else
it would not be termed as success.
In fact, there are people who have
realised their dreams and quite
unknowingly they surrender to it
t h i n k i n g t h a t t h e y w e r e
unsuccessful because of the fact
that the journey was not painful
enough for them.
In the normalisation and even
glamorisation of 'struggle', people
often aren't aware of, or at least
aren't articulating the difference
between 'struggle' and 'challenge'.
T h e s e w o r d s a r e u s e d
interchangeably but, the difference
between them is the difference
between a person breaking
through or breaking down.
Imagine someone having tied a
knot on your ankle and chained
you to a post. You spend days,
weeks, even months trying to pry
yourself free from the bondage,
it does not only eat you up
physically, it does eat you
emotionally too. Do you enjoy the
struggle and the pain? Does it
make you inspired and energised,
excited and powerful? Or, do you
feel desperate, exhausted and
powerless?
The latter is how most people may
feel on their journey while being in a
state of chronic stress caused by the
belief that they had to struggle in
order to achieve.
Stress evokes the ight, ght or
freeze mode in our brains. It also
shuts down the brain's executive
centre which helps us do things like
think of ideas, make plans and solve
problems. In such a state we are
rendered very ineffective and long
term, it is bad for our health and
wellbeing. So, how can struggle and
specially the pain associated with
it. lead to success when the stress it
causes actually shuts of the parts of
our brain that are needed to
succeed?
It is not struggle that we want, but
challenge.
I don't blame anyone who has
b e c o m e f r u s t r a t e d a n d
disillusioned with the working
world. It is a huge disappointment
to grow up and realize that most
of what we've been taught about
how to be successful is bad advice.
We were taught "Just work hard
at whatever job you get, and
things will work out." That's
false. Working hard at your job
does not get you much. When you
work hard at a job where the boss
doesn't value your efforts, all your
hard work gets you is taken for
granted. Just working hard by
itself will exhaust you and
shorten your lifespan without any
benets to you. There has to be
more to success than merely
working hard, or millions of
people around the world would be
a lot more successful than they
are!
We can see that there's more to
career success than just hard
work -- so what's the magic
ingredient? The magic ingredient
to success is not the good fortune