“No Pain, No Gain” is Not Always The Right Advice To Follow
Whenever we tend to go through painful experiences in life, we often keep pushing on because of the age old advice we have been given, which is “No Pain, No Gain,” That advice is sometimes true, but many times, following it could be the worst thing you could do.
When you are in the gym, soreness is good. A burning sensation of blood filling up the muscle is goood when you are lifting.
But if you rip out a muscle or tear it and have excruciating pain, you are going to mess things up. If you have angina or chest pain, you need to stop or you might have a heart attack.
The same is true in business and career, just because you working very very hard and killing yourself does not mean that will give you the best results. On the contrary, you may end up having health problems that may take a lot of money away from you. Your family might start hating you because you are almost never around to be with them. You may get divorced. You may have to endure years of disrespect and humiliation, wrongly believing that kind of pain is helpful while it slowly erodes your mental well being.
Furthermore, the bad pain in business and career, unlike a terrible injury does not immediately tell you that what you are experience is the wrong kind of pain. It takes a long time and terrible toll on your well being before you finally figure out how toxic the situation has become. For a long time, you may just go on wrongly believing this pain is important for success.
So you need to understand which pain is good and which pain isn’t. But how do you figure it out?
You figure it out in two ways
- Experience or Reactive Learning
- Learning In Advance or Proactive Learning
Experience is ironically the worst way to learn the difference, because that would mean you would have to go through some major trauma to actually figure out the pain is bad.
The the most preferable method is to study and be aware of others mistakes and painful experiences that did them NO GOOD. This is much better than blindly enduring pain in your life, just because you have been told – “No Pain, No Gain”
So, how do you learn
- From Mentors or People Who Have Unfortunately Experienced It Themselves
- Books/Seminars/Training.
All of these methods involve proactive rather than reactive learning. Simply put, reactive learning happens in response to a bad experience. Proactive learning is learning you do in advance to avoid having that bad experience in the first place.
Proactive learning will tremendously shorten the curve for you to improve on key areas and it is highly recommended that you devote a good chunk of your time to it, no matter how busy you are. Proactive, rather than reactive learning will allow you to avoid going through the pain that reactive learners do.
Contrary to what most people think, the solution to many issues in life already exist and you don’t need to waste hundreds of thousands of hours trying to reinvent the wheel. Commit to a life of proactive learning and watch the number of painful mistakes you make drop drastically!
To invite the author Anubhav Srivastava for speaking at your organization or for consulting queries, please email anubhav101@gmail.com. Visit http://anubhavsrivastava.com/about-anubhav for complete credentials.
