Your World Within Podcast by Eddie Pinero - Pain of Discipline or Pain of Regret?

Episode Date: August 12, 2020

In this episode I answer a listener's question about happiness in pursuit of a dream....and dive into Jim Rohn's quote about "choosing between the pain of discipline or the pain of regret."

Welcome to Your World Within Daily. I'm Eddie Panero. And in this episode, I'm going to answer a question from Tom on Twitter at Tom Marinello, who asks about happiness in pursuit of your passion. So I'm going to dive into that, dissect it a little bit, talk about why it's important, but can also be misleading as we push to grow and expand our lives. All right. I hope everyone's having a good morning here. And thanks to Tom for that question. What I'm going to do is try and at least the vast majority, kind of interject your questions and your responses from that Instagram post and certainly get to most of them. A lot of great questions there. So I appreciate everyone participating and, you know, sharing their thoughts. Very, very grateful on this end. So today, the topic of being happy in pursuit of your dreams, I think it's an important topic. And I've made a video about this. The sort of idea that when you hit, at a certain point or, you know, somewhere along the way when you've achieved X, Y, or Z, you know, you sort of sustain this happiness all the time and, or even in pursuit of a dream,

you know, if it's the right dream, it's happiness all the time. And it's just not congruent with reality in the sense that life is ups and downs. And, you know, to, to have happiness all the time, which is not exactly what Tom's saying, but happiness all the time. It's sort of my disclaimer, because it's a big misconception. It's just, it's not sustainable. It's holistically being happy, waking up excited, looking at the aggregate of what you're doing and being proud, being able to smile at your body of work, but understanding, you know, life is inherently difficult, and there will be times where you question what you're doing. There'll be times where you're frustrated. There'll be times you're disappointed, confused. There are times where you don't know what

to do next because things seem convoluted. And that is part of the process. But you could make an argument that, you know, that's not pure bliss, right? That's not moments of happiness. And Ryan Holliday talks about this specifically when he talks about passion versus purpose. You know, passion in pursuit of a dream is great. Passion is, you know, sort of moments of happiness, moments of excitement, of adrenaline, where you're just on top of the world. And he alludes to the fact that, yeah, but it's a misconception because those obstacles, they show themselves. And that's when he sort of moves to purpose, where he says, you know, purpose is the long haul.

Purpose is understanding that, hey, this is tough. I'm not enjoying this particular day or moment or experience, but I get the big picture. and I'm going to buckle up, buckle down, buckle whatever way you want to buckle and keep moving forward, right? That's like, that's the rationale behind it. And he's a writer. And so he talks a lot about days where he just has to sit down and force himself to write because writers don't feel like writing every day. And that's sort of the second piece. It's like progress, if progress is happiness is content.

and I believe it is. I think we are at our best when we're moving forward. You have to understand the push-pull because growth is inherently uncomfortable. It's chaos. It's intentionally putting yourself in difficult situations and, you know, adapting and adjusting and adjusting and acclimating. And then you're able to move on to sort of the next step or the next manufactured a moment of chaos.

And that's great. And that's why we grow. And that's why we look back and we smile at what we've done in our body of work. And, you know, that what we've done is meaningful. But again, in that moment, not exactly pure joy, not exactly pure happiness. You know, Jim Rohn says, you know, you have the pain of discipline or the pain of regret. Choose one. You know, so for Ryan Holiday's example, the pain of sitting down and typing when it's the last thing you want to be doing.

or the pain of looking back 20 years from now and saying, man, I wish I wrote a book. But either way, there has to be some type of pain of discomfort. And so I say that just as a way to sort of make sense of everything. Because, of course, I agree with Tom. I think you should be happy in pursuit of your passion. But I think it's a holistic big picture happiness. It's being proud and it's being content, you know, knowing that you're doing something that's meaningful to you. In the micro, if your expectation is, you know, happy or you think you're going to hit a point where every day is smiling and, you know, nonstop rainbows and butterflies, I think you're in for a rude awakening because life has something to say.

You know, it's who can best internalize that and make life work for them in pursuit of their dreams that will end up on top. So hey, thank you for watching. I hope you found this valuable. And if you enjoyed the podcast, please rate, subscribe, review. Helps me get it out to the world. I appreciate it. And I will catch you guys tomorrow.