As we close out this week, I would like to take a moment to talk directly with the audience: the potential entrepreneurs, or people looking for lasting and beneficial change in their lives.
The journey is not meant to be an easy one. Suffering is a staple of the human condition, and many successful entrepreneurs and thought leaders today all say the same thing: if you’re going to suffer anyway, why not suffer for something.
That’s not meant to say that we cannot find some level of peace and fulfillment in that suffering. It is the journey, after all, that we must live for – not the destination. And while that may sound confusing, what it really means is that it’s the lessons we learn in each moment that grow us as long as we’re prepared to listen.
Furthermore, when beginning to aim for this life-altering journey at a late stage in the game, we must be prepared to cope with a physical side to the journey. We’re slower, going through physical changes, and more often than not dealing with a level of pain we’ve never understood before.
That simply cannot be an excuse for not going any further. Life is growth, and growing must come at the expense of some physical pain. When we’re 10-20 years old we go through growing pains where our joints and muscles hurt. We also have emotional challenges during that time. To become fit you have to deal with the pain of micro-tears in your muscles in order to grow them. And as we face these later chapters in our lives, changes in our body chemistry and years of physical abuse surface and we have to face the pain of getting older.
We simply must come to terms with that suffering and continue forward anyway. We just have to honor some of our limitations with added rest and a graceful understanding of where we are in life and as long as we keep showing up and making some kind of effort each day, we can have faith that eventually we will begin to reap the rewards that come with these changes.