Pleasure And Pain
Brewed on April 21st, 2008 by Troy Meyer
There is an awful lot of failure in life and I am sure that there are many of us that work exceptionally hard to avoid it all costs. But it can’t be avoided forever.
I was talking with my friend the other night and she shared how hard she works on her school papers editing and rearranging until they are absolutely perfect. She explained how she cuts and pastes paragraphs until she gets them in the most ideal arrangement. She also told me that if it weren’t for deadlines she would probably never hand anything in.
I wanted to tell her she might be a little crazy but figured that I shouldn’t poke fun at her for the personal information she just shared with me. I do think she is a little crazy for it though. All the time she spends for fear of making a mistake or having that mistake pointed out to her could be better put towards some other, more enjoyable endeavour.
We all do this in varying degrees, trying to avoid pain and by doing so thinking we are experiencing pleasure. We couldn’t be more wrong.
Pleasure is not really the absence of pain, I don’t believe. Pleasure is in the experience we receive when we have worked and persevered through something. Pleasure is the feeling we get at the moment we realize that we have grown from the pain, not just when the pain disappears.
Without failure we can’t learn how to capitalize on success.
This is very hard for me. Although I am a very quick learner and can accomplish most things fairly well, I rarely invest the time to get things accomplished extremely well or superbly. My mind is pulled in far too many directions and I get distracted from working extremely hard to become extremely good in that one area.
I need to practice practicing.
Do you have a story of something you persevered through or focused on to become extremely good at, even though you may not have been extremely good at it to begin with?
![[del.icio.us]](http://images.del.icio.us/static/img/delicious.small.gif){kind=small}
Tags: Improvement
Added this comment on April 21st, 2008 at 12:24 pm
I’m truly a believer that you can do anything you want to do. You just need enough passion and determination and you can get it.
Want a Million Dollars? Get it.
Want to learn how to code? Do it.
Etc..
It’s super easy to just give up and do something else, but I believe that simply means you aren’t being pulled hard enough to accomplish that goal.
I had a small epiphany a few years back when I was trying to learn XSLT was getting really annoyed with it and it simply didn’t make any sense. I stepped back and realized that this was made by another ‘human’ and that I was too ‘human’ thus why shouldn’t I be able to figure this out? A few hours later I had figured it out. I’ve since used this question to help me get through many far more difficult things than parsing XML. :)
Added this comment on April 22nd, 2008 at 6:57 pm
That’s an awesome outlook. If someone else did it there is no reason you can’t and I can’t and he can’t.
It’s pretty amazing you had it figured out so quickly. I guess you never know when you’ll reach the top of the hill unless you get going and ‘Do it’. Could be sooner than you thought!
Added this comment on April 30th, 2008 at 4:55 am
[...] I think my best post so far is “Pleasure and Pain” [...]