🤕 Suffering for success

Most people believe that success requires suffering - working long hours, putting up with horrible people, doing horrible things, sacrificing yourself or others.

If you believe the only way to make more money is to experience more pain, your nervous system is going to make sure that success doesn’t happen for you.

Your body and brain have gone through millions of years of evolution to prevent you from experiencing pain, you aren’t going to “tough it out” or “overcome” it. Your body won’t let you.

The belief that success requires suffering is wrong.

I’ve found that the less suffering I do the more successful I become. Good luck seems to flow against the tide of suffering.

My clients have found the same. One recently remarked that “Every time I take a vacation or pursue a what seems to be an unrelated interest outside of work, I seem to fall into a great new opportunity and my clients get better results”.

When he stops suffering, success starts. Why? Because he starts seeing the opportunities, because he leans into his strengths more, because he starts showing up full of energy rather than running on fumes, because he increases his surface area of luck (more on that later in this email).

When you’re living in fight-or-flight, you’re not doing your best work. The person who is merely surviving doesn’t have the mental bandwidth to work on things that create real leverage or growth. As one of the richest people in history, John D Rockefeller, said “he who works all day has no time to make money”.

The most valuable thing you can offer your clients isn’t more hours, it’s clarity. They’re drowning in people willing to work themselves to death. What they can’t find is someone with the mental bandwidth to see what others miss - and that requires you to give yourself space and rest.

When you’re constantly hustling, you’re actually LESS valuable to clients:

• You can’t think strategically.

• You miss crucial details.

• You bring anxiety into every interaction.

• You lack the confidence to speak truth.

  
  

Instead, you want to give yourself space via vacations, hobbies and outside interests, and by saying no more often. Proper boundaries make you more valuable to your clients.

Your clients aren’t paying for your suffering. They’re paying for your expertise. You can best access your expertise when you’re well rested. You don’t need to suffer.

You don’t win any prizes for self neglect, no medals for most overworked

I shared this in my Work Smart Wednesday newsletter. Want the full set of related insights? You can read them here: https://worksmartwednesday.substack.com/p/work-smart-wednesday-september-24

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