Building The Nucleus, A Series of Articles: (Ability To Withstand Pain) Chapter 7 of 25

What does it take to scale a business? I have been working as an entrepreneur for over 1300 days. I have learned a lot of things about business and people. I still have so much to learn. Number one, I have continued to learn what things are most important in life, and number two what is most important to a business needing to grow and scale and how these two things intertwine with each other.

Sales

People

Relationships

Having an abundance mindset

Persistence and Resilience

Leadership

Ability To Withstand Pain

Curious Mindset and Complacency

Follow through

Commitment (Desire vs Motivation)

Urgency (Time)

Physical Fitness

Focus

Crafting and Forming (Molding Your Own)

Non-Conformity

Total Self-Reliance

Networking

Education (Structure vs. Unstructured)

Personal Branding

Confidence vs Arrogance

Economics (Trends and Diversification)

Manpower strategy (Different Types of Strategies)

Processes and Infrastructure (How Much)

Branding + Marketing + Advertising (What Are They)

Fitting Business Roles

CHAPTER 7: ABILITY TO WITHSTAND PAIN

"To Live The Life You Really Want".

What does that statement mean to you? Unfortunately many people don't know what this means to them, until it is too late. To me it means between birth and death, everything is what you make it. I make the most of it because I live to fight. This is why I can go through anything, because I expect the challenge and hard times to come, and I WILL PREVAIL. So when I go through setbacks or challenges, I am not surprised. Birthdays, Christmas, Fridays and Mondays are not special to me; they are just any other day to fight for the life I want. See it is my mindset.

A personal quote of mine as follows:"To attain the life you really want, is not for the faint of heart".

Another favorite quote of mine from Morgan Freeman in the photo below:

So why is pain important to living the life you want and achieving your goals? Because pain is about loss and sacrifice. It starts with physical pain, because without the body, the mind cannot exist. Your brain and your mind are two different things by the way. The mind is the spirit, but the brain is the body. You have to exercise and harden your brain just like you do your body. Then your mind takes form. To never have pain is to never experience the true sweetness of pleasure, joy, loss and success. We all have the power to develop a mindset that can endure pain. Having this ability essentially provides you with more utility in life. In most situations life presents, people are not born with a high pain tolerance equipped to deal with the situations. This is why as children a bodily injury or mean words can do so much hurtful damage physically or emotionally to us, but to an adult the same injury does not have the same level of hurt. Pain tolerance is something that is built up over time. Same thing in martial arts where we use body hardening to withstand pain. Same thing with the mind and mental judo. That is called mental hardening.

During my life, I have been continually and have been consistently been forcing myself into experiences that most people view as painful in some way. By doing this forced hardening, I have built up a pain tolerance gradually.

This for me has turned into a beautiful and natural growth process of building new relationships with others and with myself that are filled with learning, failing, getting knocked down and getting back up.

In the Marine Corps we place a great deal of emphasis on physical endurance and physical pain. In the Navy Seals BUDS training, everything is painful. IT SUCKS!

Pain can act as a gauge for your state of mind. In the Marine Corps or in life, for ANY obstacle or challenge that you face, it will be your state of mind which determines your success.

Pain is not constant, it is intermittent (keeping this perspective that it is not permanent is key), and your tolerance is based on the frequency with which you experience pain. This is why it is important to view everyday as an opportunity to take on new challenges or new endeavors. This is why I joined the Marine Corps, for the challenge which was an internal purpose to myself, and it had nothing to do with serving my country, because that is external to who I am and to why I made the decision. I joined the Marine Corps because I wanted to be a better person physically and in my spirit mind. I knew it would suck. Eventually I got harder and began to love the tough situations the Corps put me in. I love the Marine Corps because it made me better, and I wanted to be BETTER. When you have an internal purpose developed, you can get through anything. And the Corps knows that physically fit Marine will make better decisions during times of stress.

I run a lot (I frequently run 7, 8 or 14 miles in one session), and I have been working out or in some form of athletics for most of my life. The thing about working out and running is that it lets me know where my state of mind is at during the moment in the day, week, or year. Am I ready to quit? Am I giving my best in the run or workout? If I feel that I conducted a lackluster run or workout, then I know that is where my state of mind is currently.

In the Marines we experience a lot of things that test us mentally. I once got disconnected from my unit in Iraq. My unit was no where in sight. During the 3 years I spent in Iraq, I had to make many split decisions of whether or not to shoot my weapon and potentially injure others or take their lives. I made the decisions. By adopting a masochistic mindset for physical deprivation and challenge, you become more in touch with nature and your physicality within the physical world around you. You can become more in tune and in touch with your physicality and your own state of mind, and MOST of all you can get through anything. This is called being situationally aware. By being situationally aware you can become animalistic and pick up on things which most people do not. This is a physical concept on the term, "machine learning". Your body is a machine, so learn it. We as Marines place a great deal of importance on physicality because if you have trained your mind to experience managing your body when it is tired, hungry, despondent and scared and get your mind used to those situations, then you will make the right decisions when you are physically impaired. In the Corps we have a mantra of don't think, just react and just do. That is why we train so hard. We are trained in every sense of the word to react instinctively. That is why we are good at what we do, because we get to a point where we don't even react, we just act. The right decision is to continue forward. To embrace the pain that comes from fear, uncertainty, sacrifice, and respond with complete subjective objectivity. Because physical pain is so surreal or in the moment it is also an emotional experience that develops the spirituality or the mind. This is why giving birth for women is such a physically memorable and nature-based experience that checks into emotions at all levels. This is why women pick up on things that most men do not. Because the physical pain develops a woman's spirit and emotion. Many men account women to have somewhat of a 6th sense, and this is why.

By keeping a good pulse on our physicality, we can then keep perspective on all sorts of pain that we experience in our lives, and ultimately we can maintain clarity on the fact that pain does not last forever.

Pain is also a source of achievement. It gives you a "superhero" type of feeling when you can overcome. YOU are more POWERFUL than you think.

It is a feeling of strength and self-fulfillment that gives us confidence to go out and achieve bigger, and better things in our lives. Allows us to approach people and situations with complete objectivity, no ego, a sense of empathy and a requirement to maintain integrity and dignity so that one's credibility is never sacrificed.

There are many types of pain, but it starts with your physical state of being. The mind cannot exist without the body functioning properly.

Most of us experience life by working in very safe, very confined and very limited settings where no physical effort or even mental effort is required. We depend on machines and technology to get us through physical and mental challenges, and we get caught up in routines that limit us from personal growth and new opportunities.

How do you deal with fear? How do you deal with being uncomfortable? Do you embrace it? Do you thrive in it? Do you face the elephant in the room, or do you act like it is not there.

Stagnant objects do not grow, just like muscles atrophy from non-use. A seed not planted, is a tree not brought to life. You have to move into new challenges, states of fear, and states of uncertainty.

That’s why a high pain tolerance leads to freedom. By facing difficult situations and having difficult conversations with yourself, you open yourself up to a world without limitation and new possibilities which then lead to new opportunities.

The very best things in life are experienced and had by continuously pushing ourselves beyond the threshold ceiling and limitations that pain has to offer.

I believe that most people do not have the life they want. Because when there is a challenge we try to avoid it by pointing the finger or causing harm to others. But in the end we only cause more harm for ourselves. That is why we constantly berate each other, point the finger, or try to be like celebrities that are so not relevant to us and our own realities. That is why the divorce rate is so high. We constantly satisfy ourselves in the comforts of pleasure and material things, not pain. And this is the problem!

To avoid pain you have to experience it. Just like anything else, you have to experience it. We avoid hot surfaces because we have experienced what getting burned is like. Make sense?

Outside of air and water, the VERY best things in life are not free, you need to pay the price to have these things. No Pain No Gain. People did not come up with these sayings for no reason.

You need to experience the pain involved with sacrifice to have the life you want. Freedom Is Not Free.

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