Suffering is the art of undergoing pain, distress, or hardship. This suffering and turmoil make you stronger and can lead to success. Many people look down on struggle, which is wrong. Without struggling or experiencing hardships you will feel unaccomplished, and lessons will not be learned. Using hardship and undergoing pain can fuel traits like discipline, passion, confidence, and resilience.
Think about school and doing homework or a hard class, looking at the class before you are in it, it looks very scary and you fear failure. That’s why most kids do not take AP classes or challenging courses because of the fear of failing or going through more work than usual. Going into the class you realize that more work and attention will have to be given to the class to achieve a good grade, but the benefits of overcoming the hardship or struggle in the class are worth it. Teaching you to time, study, and do difficult things that another class will not give you because it is easy.
Some people may see struggling and uncomfortability as bad, and nothing good can come out of it. Even if you may not see it from your perspective, successful people fail multiple times until they finally reach success.
“What is the connection between success and failure,” says Tim Harford, an English economic journalist, “Failure isn’t something we should fear, but it should be treated as part of the process towards success. People who fail more than others tend to succeed most often, mainly because they try more than the rest of us. They work hard, take risks, and learn from their mistakes.”
Pushing oneself to do hard challenges knowing it is going to be hard and you are going to fail builds a lot of character. According to the largest and oldest survey of college freshmen, 66% feel lonely or homesick and want to come home. This is the same idea. The act of going into an uncomfortable environment seems scary and the fact of loneliness seems unbearable because for the first time in your life you are stepping out of your shell. This is a good thing though, because many life lessons will be learned by going through problems and dilemmas.
Failure or hardship does not bring you down, it is one of the key ideas to keep moving one foot in front of the other. If failure is seen as negative it will never be recognized on the path to success.
An analogy for this and how to look at success and failure is to take a glass of water and look at it either half full or half empty. Looking at the glass half empty looks at the same glass of water but sees the negative side. While individuals who look at the glass half full look toward the positive side.
Success and being stronger is not a linear path, failure and distress is inevitable. Identifying why failure and struggle are happening should be used to know what went wrong and learn from our mistakes. Sitting around and not helping yourself will not get anyone further, embracing the struggle is the key to success. Oprah Winfrey says, “Where there is no struggle, there is no strength.”
The fear of failure is one of the main things that hold people back from trying new things and experiencing a new experience. You never know the capability of what someone has in them because they never try.
Something in our brain called the anterior midcingulate cortex is what is responsible for building willpower and building a will to do difficult things to increase motivation and drive to constantly get better. According to the National Library of Medicine, “When faced with a difficult challenge, such as mastering complex equations or training for a marathon, many individuals will find the effort too costly, and withdraw. Others, however, will marshal their resources, and persist in their efforts against the same challenges, even in the absence of immediate reward. This individual difference has received a great deal of attention in recent years, as growing research indicates that individuals who persevere in the face of challenging situations show better life outcomes in the domains of health, academic achievement, and career success (Duckworth and Quinn, 2009; Duckworth and Gross, 2014).” This cortex in the brain is built by doing things you don’t particularly want to do, such as doing a very difficult task or even just waking up when your alarm goes off in the morning. This all stems from embracing struggle and never giving up because in the end a stronger version of yourself will be achieved.
Most successful people were called crazy and laughed at, but they did not care; they used it as fuel to jumpstart their successes. All of their success comes back to one thing, and that is failure. They embraced the struggle and knew that it was going to happen, but they used this failure to learn and get better in their sector of success. The persistence of doing a challenging task builds a lot of character for these individuals.
Failure and struggle are scary, but they serve as rockets to jumpstart personal growth and success. Embracing struggle brings traits like resilience, adaptability, and a better understanding of themselves to succeed. It’s challenging situations that we pick up better qualities to be more equipped for the future and why struggle leads to success.
