🌀Au Contraire: Pain is for the pro's

More pain = more gain. That is what they say, but that is bullshit. I think life is pain. It is painful being poor and broke. And it is painful becoming wealthy. You pick your pain. You can’t escape it.

There are two types of pain. There is dull aching pain and sharp pain. We tend to settle for the dull ache of pain. We settle for long prolonged periods of dull pain to avoid the sharp pain a decisive action might take. Here is what I mean.

There was a time I knew I had to raise prices, but I was scared to do it. Every month I would meet with our book keeper and review our numbers, and the profit sucked. For months, I would deal with the pain of not making a profit. I was settling for less. I was settling for the dull pain of not making enough money. I was scared to raise prices because I was scared of losing clients. Then one day I did it. I just raised prices unilaterally. I decided the sharp pain of raising prices was worth getting rid of the dull pain of settling for a shitty P&L every month.

It was scary raising prices. I had to deal with some anxiety for a few nights, wondering if the cancellations would mount up. But it turns out raising prices isn’t that big of a deal. We lost a few clients. Some were mad. Some fired us. But not that many. Not that many at all. Now all of the sudden, we were making real money. Now we had money to super charge our growth. We could re-invest. We could take money out of the business. Now we look forward to meeting with the book keeper each month now, because we are having fun making money.

It is sort of counter intuitive, but to stop the pain you have to accept pain. There is only one way out and that is through.

So when you need to make more money. You probably already have the answer. You are just avoiding the pain of doing what you need to do. And this isn’t a judgement. This is normal. It gets harder and harder as you progress, because just like weight lifting the weight gets bigger and bigger to lift. So the more successful you are, the decisions are heavier and riskier. But the reward is exponentially bigger too.

But it all starts with little decisive decisions. Your business is your gym. You go in every day and exercise your decisions. The more decisions you make, the more you will move forward. You are building your business acumen muscle. Sometimes you strain something with a bad decision. Your form isn’t correct. That’s ok. You will get your form right on the next one. Just reposition and try again.

And much like working out. There is a cycle. Break through one pain point. Then rest and enjoy the sunny day. But now there is another pain point. You gotta break through that one. The cycle restarts.  Break down the muscle, then rebuild stronger. Then repeat. It is like a circle. Breaking through each pain point creates another pain point.

In our business this spring, one of the experimental marketing tactics we tested last year took off this spring. Solving the problem of generating more work created three more problems. Now we can generate more work, but now we have to have one more person answering the phone, 2 more service techs, and 2 more trucks. And it has to be in place in 30 days. The cycle continues.

The real trick here which is hard as fuck to grasp is that accepting the pain is the key to happiness. The pain is unavoidable. There is no going around it. Yeah, a drink of whiskey will dull it for a night, but the pain is still there in the morning. The only way to escape pain temporarily is through it. But there is no escaping pain. You have to go through it. Again. And again.

The higher your pain tolerance, the more successful you will be.

The more failure you can tolerate, the more successful you will be. The people that fail the most are the ones that succeed the most.

There is no avoiding pain.

~Blue

P.S. What is your biggest pain point right now?