Cold Hard Feelings
Like the snowflake, no one person's story is the same as another. In mine, you'll find a winding road with twists and turns that led me here; sitting down, talking about it.
Cold Hard Feelings
The Hidden Power of Suffering
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Have you ever wondered why pain and suffering seem to be such integral parts of our personal growth? In this episode, we dissect the profound impact these challenging experiences have on our development. Join us as we unpack the notion that pain serves as the initial catalyst for change, while suffering acts as the aftermath that teaches us invaluable lessons. From the physical agony of a broken arm to the emotional turmoil of a breakup, we share relatable stories that illustrate how enduring these hardships can prevent future mistakes and spur significant growth. We also dive into how embracing new challenges, such as embarking on a podcasting journey, demands practice and resilience despite initial setbacks.
Failure isn't just a bump in the road; it's an essential part of the learning process, and sometimes, it can even be fun! We explore this idea through personal anecdotes about recording mishaps and public speaking blunders. By drawing parallels with mastering new skills like martial arts or video games, we highlight the necessity of experiencing defeat to fully appreciate victory. Whether it's the endless hours spent perfecting a combo in a fighting game or the persistent effort to improve in any area of life, we emphasize that consistent effort and perseverance are key. This episode is a rallying cry to embrace your failures, use them as stepping stones, and persist with unwavering determination on the path to perfection.
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All right, everybody. So we're going to get right into it. One of the things that I need to talk about is something that I've been dealing with pretty much throughout my whole life, and that is pain and suffering. Pain and suffering is something that is essential, I think, for every human being. I think we need that in order to grow. I think it's very, very important that people encounter pain and suffering, and I don't mean like all right, you have to have your arm broken. Now you can finally learn how it is to be a human. No, I mean like everybody needs to understand what types of pain there are and what the suffering that comes with it is, because suffering is an effect, and I guess the way you would look at it would be that pain is the cause, suffering is the effect. The way you would look at it would be that pain is the cause, suffering is the effect, and you only learn so much from the initial pain, but I think you take way more away from the suffering that comes after it, and that's you know.
Speaker 1:Go back to the broken arm incident. You go through breaking your arm, your arm breaks right, whatever the case may be, whether it's skateboarding, you're playing basketball and you fall wrong. You're playing football and you get tackled wrong. You just trip over a stagnant cord and you fall. Whatever the case may be, your arm breaks. Alright, that's the pain. Now you're in pain For the next. I've never broken a bone, so for the next, however many weeks it takes to heal after your arm is broken, that's the suffering Now. That's the things that you can't do now that your arm is broken. You can learn to do things with the other hand. Hopefully it wasn't the dominant hand, and if it was, you know, like writing, typing, all of that stuff, cooking, eating, even playing video games all that stuff is very difficult if one of your arms is broken. So that's the suffering, and I think that it's the suffering part that teaches you not to encounter that pain again.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the pain hurts, but look at us as human beings now. I mean, people get into relationship after relationship after relationship, but a lot of times those relationships end and they're painful. If you were suffering through that relationship, then that is where the pain became necessary. It was time to break up. What have you? But it's the suffering that teaches you all. Right, I don't want to go through that again. So what do you do after you're fully healed. If it was skateboarding, you learn what to do so that you don't break your arm again. You might train a little bit harder so you run faster. If you're playing football, you start looking around for cords on the floor if you know that was what caused it. So I think it's important, um, to experience pain and it's important to experience suffering.
Speaker 1:But when it comes to life, you know, pain and suffering is really something that should be used as a motivator. It's really hard to have a bad experience and say you know what, that experience is going to be a marker in my life where I make sure that that bad experience doesn't happen. That can be failing, that could be. Whatever the case may be. I won't go into anything like traumatizing or anything, but when you deal with that type of thing, you avoid going back and having to deal with that again. So for me, my case has always been all right.
Speaker 1:You know what? I'm just going to go to work. I go to work and if I fail at something, then I will take that failure. I'll take the pain of that failure and I'll say you know what? This is what I did wrong. This is what I did wrong. This is what I did wrong and this is how it went.
Speaker 1:But that's not where it stops, for me at least. When I fail at something, I spend the next two, three, four days mulling it over, reflecting, trying to figure out why I failed. How did the failure get to be that way? And that's the suffering for me. I have the initial suffering period where I'm like I can't believe I did that. Why would I allow something like that to happen? And I try to then turn that off and say, all right, I'm going to make sure that doesn't happen again. And then, when it doesn't happen again, you know I feel really good about it Suffering.
Speaker 1:Having that after effect of the pain is important, because if you just felt pain and didn't learn anything from it, you didn't have any lasting effect then you're just going to end up doing it again. You'll go right back to where you were and you'll be in pain again. Imagine you know riding a bike and you fall off your bike and then you get up and say, yeah, I think I was riding that perfectly. And then you do it again and you fall again. You're like, yeah, you know what it hurts, but I might as well keep going. If you don't take anything out of every failure and every time you feel pain, then you can't grow. It's impossible. You just, you just won't grow.
Speaker 1:Nobody does something and fails at it and says, yeah, you know what? I think that this is the right way and then gets better at it. That's just not how it works. I mean even me with right now I'm talking to everybody listening. You know podcasting, talking into a microphone. This is not something that I was doing I don't know three weeks ago. This was something that I thought. You know what? Maybe I'm going to try it and I'm just going to see how it goes.
Speaker 1:It turns out I actually really enjoy doing this, and finding the time right now for me to record and do this stuff is, you know, a little iffy, but I'm doing the best that I can and figuring out where I have time to record. I'm, you know, 10 minutes, 15 minutes, 20 minutes here. If I have time to do an hour recording, trust me, you can bet I'm going to do an hour recording. Um, but that's just the thing, even the pain of realizing, hey, you know what, podcasting's not for everybody. People tell me all the time that I have a really quiet voice. People don't want to sit and listen to things that I might have to say. But that pain is what I take and I say you know what, Maybe they're right. And then I suffer about it. And then I'll suffer about it. But thankfully, with the life that I've lived, I've learned that you feel pain, you learn from it, you try to mitigate that pain, you make it so it's less next time or just non-existent. So if you use both of those correctly, sometimes failure becomes something you look forward to, and that's kind of my life as it stands.
Speaker 1:I enjoy failing. I know it sounds weird, but I like failing. Failing is fun for me because I don't like to go throughout any of my days without learning something. You can't learn something if you don't fail at something. You can learn something new because you didn't know about it. But then when you try to put it into practice, probably not going to be that great, unless you're like a prodigy or something.
Speaker 1:So for me it comes to I don't know, talking for a long period of time. I was terrible at it. My first recording took like an hour to get 12, 15 minutes out of it and I was like, yeah, all right, this is probably not for me. And then I'm like you know what? No, no, no, let's try it again and see if I can just talk the entire time. And that's difficult too. But hey, you know what, if I can't do it, or if it doesn't last for as long as I'd like for it to, or I listen back on and it's not great, then I guess you guys will never hear it. But here's the thing I won't know if it's great or if it's good or if it's bad or if it's terrible, if I don't release it or if I don't try to talk to anybody listening and I need to feel the pain of nobody listening to understand, or nobody, or barely anybody listening to understand where I went wrong to.
Speaker 1:You know, go into my suffering phase and say you know what, nobody listened. I guess that's. It is what it is. But you know, sun comes up and it goes down. So it'll never be the end of the world for me Feeling any type of pain, hopefully. Yeah, I mean, pain is just, it's a motivator and it should always be a motivator. Suffering should always be a motivator. You know, don't go outside looking for a fight and saying, all right, I'm looking for somebody've never felt the pain before, if you've never been in a fight, then why not suffer through learning a martial arts class or taking a martial arts class or learning something, so that you don't ever have to feel that pain?
Speaker 1:Pain and suffering go hand in hand, but they are not. You know they're. They're not necessary for each other, because you can feel pain and not suffer. And when I say suffer, I mean learn, and you know, go back and do it again. So pain without suffering Okay, great, do it again. Now it's just pain.
Speaker 1:Suffering without pain is you can suffer without having to feel anything and then, when you're done suffering, you feel nothing and you don't have to worry about feeling that pain. So it is true that you can spend I don't know 10 years learning martial arts and still trip and fall and break your arm, but you can bet that if you spend 10 years learning martial arts, if you were to get into a fight, it would not be you getting your arm broken. So I think that's just one of the most important key lessons that I could think of at this point in time, and I can only hope that after this, people will start to try to fail more and when they fail, go back and say why did I fail? How can I not fail next time? Or how can I not fail so badly next time? Because perfection is impossible. But you can get as close to perfect as you possibly can. The harder and harder that you practice, the more that you suffer.
Speaker 1:There are no people out there. Let's not generalize it. Let's not, you know, use an absolute. There are not very many people at all out there that are really good at something that did not suffer in one way or another. You have to get up, you gotta to learn. You got to fail, you got to suffer, you got to get hurt. You know, and you got to know what that's like, because no winner is a true winner without the experience of defeat. And that's me, that's all me, right there. You're not a true winner until you know what it's like to lose, because that humility, what it's like to lose, is the best guidance on how to truly win at something.
Speaker 1:You ever see one of those games or or something like a game show or something, where you know it comes down to two people and they could win, but they hand it off to another person. They've been winning all of these times. They won 20 times in a row, but then the new person is a runner-up and they came to second place. And now they're going head to head and the guy in first place is just like I've been doing this for 20 years. 20 times I've been doing this and this person is on their first and they're here with me Not to say, oh, that I don't deserve a 21st win, but this person deserves their first, and sometimes you'll hand it to them. Sometimes they need the lesson of getting that far, for working that hard and then coming in second place and just not clinching that victory. It can go hand in hand and that's what I mean. It's always going to be time appropriate, it's always going to be a decision that's made right then and there, and I think that's the beauty of it.
Speaker 1:I'm not here to say you know what pain is awesome and you know sound really sadistic or anything like that, but I am here to say that one of the best ways to learn is to fail. When we were babies, how many times did we fall over when we were tired of crawling and said, all right, it's time to walk? How many times you fall when you tried to plant your feet on the ground and you fell over Riding a bike without the steering wheels. You say, all right, I'm tired of having these inhibitors, so you want to go and ride one bike. How many times you fall after that? If you learned how to skateboard, how many times you fall times you fall.
Speaker 1:You know, pro skaters, pro anybody, any professional, any person who's even somewhat good at something. You know, I'm halfway decent at my job, but it also took me seven years to get there, you know, and I've spent a lot of time and a lot of effort into it and I am not stopping anytime soon, Just like with this. This is my next thing. I want to do this and I'm going to keep doing this and I have to fail and get negative comments and get bad comments and have people tell me I suck. I need that because it's the only way I can get better and I would hope to be able to profess that to everyone else Anyone else listening.
Speaker 1:If you are failing at something and you feel you are just so bad at it and you are never going to get it, trust me when I say that you will. The second that you say, man, I'm failing at this, what am I doing wrong. And then you start reflecting. You look back, you hit the rewind button and say, okay, well, this is what I did and this is what I did. And if you don't have any of that information, go in and fail again. But when you go in and fail again, now you have the education to say, hey, I'm gonna fail, and if I do fail, I'm gonna know why, so that you can change something.
Speaker 1:If it's playing pool and you aim a little bit too far to the right, then you know, don't aim so far to the right next time. You know, if you're playing chess and there was a move that made or break, made it made or broke the game, then you know that if it broke the game, you can make the same or the opposite move and then, boom, you're good. You never know who might be expecting it. But that's the that's the beauty of it. You know it's not a video game where you only have one try at something. You can try at something as many times as you want, but what you can't do is just give up and say, yeah, you know what, I tried as hard as I possibly could, it's not for me, and you put it down. You know what? I always say that if I can bleed while doing something and not figure out how to stop bleeding, then that's going to be. When I say, you know what, maybe it's not for me, but I have to try at something until I start bleeding in order to make that decision. And if I'm bleeding and I can't stop the bleeding, then it's probably not for me. You know, and that's just my reminder, video games.
Speaker 1:People call me crazy when it comes to playing video games. I'm not a perfectionist, but I do love being good at video games, and you can't be good at video games if you don't practice the same thing in a video game for 5, 6, 10, 12 hours. You know, uh, the fighting games. I love fighting games and I have spent numerous hours at a time just practicing the same exact combo over and over and over and over again, until my hands cramped up and I, you know, and I would have to put them in ice or put them in hot water or both, and just be like all right, I can feel my hands again. And then you know what I would do get a snack lay down for a little bit, and then I say say you know what Time to get back to it.
Speaker 1:And then I do it all again, maybe not for the same amount of hours in succession each time, but if I was going to spend five hours on a Monday, before or after work or school or in whatever it was during, wherever I was at that point in my life then Tuesday I would say all right, you know what, let's do another five hours.
Speaker 1:If I had time later or after in that same day, I'd say you know what, another 30, 40 minutes couldn't hurt. You have to invest your time into failing, because once you are failing and you're no longer suffering or should I say, once you're suffering and you're no longer failing that's when you know you're getting better. So my encouragement to everybody and anybody listening if you've made it this far would just be fail, go out and fail. Failing is fun, as long as you take something away from it and figure out how not to fail as you did the first time. Because every time you fail in a better way, you're one step forward towards getting closer to that goal of perfection, and I think that's just extremely important.