From the Desk of Maverick Brenton.
Subject: Pain.
My earliest memory in life is pain.
I was three years old and crawling into bed next to my dying sister, then laying next to her while she took her last breath. Her body was cold. Years of fighting leukaemia. My mother and father cried loudly in the bedroom as she slipped away, hugging each other tightly. I just stared at my sister while she stared back at me before dying, and then I kissed her cheek because my mum told me to. After that I remember walking over to my mum and holding her leg while she cried.
Shortly after this my parents split up. Mum lost her mind and dad lost his. She went and stayed with a friend, as far away from our home as possible. Dad, well I don’t know what he did but I think that’s why he started drinking. It was a sad time. I can’t imagine how they felt, but that is genuine pain. Losing your little girl. My sister. It’s something I don’t really think about that much. I keep a little star she made with me wherever I go. It’s covered in glitter and made of golden plastic.
Throughout my life I have experienced a lot of pain. The pain of growing stronger in the gym, the pain of overcoming heartbreak. The pain of being humiliated. The pain of failure. The pain of success. Pain is an inevitable fact of life.
You can’t get around it.
That’s what I wanted to write about tonight. Because I’ve had a frustrating day and was reflecting on the importance of embracing pain. Lately I have been working and studying around 16 hours a day. I have another five months of this while completing some training I enrolled in - studying sales with the highest commission based earners in the history of earth. Impressive guys with genuine mastery of human psychology.
It’s been tough. I have been really tired. Often in the mornings I find myself crawling out of bed, pounding coffee, cigars, and forcing myself in front of the computer to drill the fundamentals. If I stopped smoking so much I might have more energy. Tobacco helps me think though. We all have our vices.
Very little is fun about any of what I’m doing. But I know it will pay off and make me a lot of money in the future, simply because of how much it fucking sucks. I have no life outside working and learning and lifting. It’s been this way for almost 9 months straight, with occasional breaks and diversions. But when it gets tough I think back to dive school, and a particular day where I’d really had enough.
We had to do an exercise known as dredging. It was raining, the wind was cold. Each of us had to sit 10 metres under the surface of a river where the water flowed down from the mountains and the night before it had snowed also. Which made it fucking cold. For three hours we had to sit down there in the mud, vaccuming the base of the river up and digging holes. To keep warm you needed to bury yourself in the mud. But there was no escape from the cold. My entire body shivered. I just narrowed my gaze and allowed my mind to drift off into the future. With dirt and silt all around me I could see nothing. For hours I shivered and shivered, until through the comms I heard the instructor call time. It was fucking brutal.
In the past I ran from difficulty. I quit things a lot. I took the easy way out. As a result I always struggled and I never got very far. I always ended up back at square one without much success, until I learned how important it is just to accept that pain and hard times are as much a part of success as all the good things that come with it. Life and pain are intertwined like roots beneath a tree. You cannot have one without the other.
Most people today think they have problems. They don’t have a fucking clue. Confused about what gender they are, how many followers they have on social media. Try losing loved ones, or failing 7 times and being laughed at by people you know, or getting the shit kicked out of you in a street fight, or spending hours in dark freezing water trying to fix fish nets in the ocean with sharks watching you.
Just as growing stronger in the gym is painful. So is getting better at life. It’s all painful, in fact if you are not experiencing pain - especially as a young man - then you need to ask yourself whether or not you are actually doing anything worthwhile.
Because why the fuck should life be easy?
Why?
Why should you wake up smiling all the time like life is a fairytale?
I think that’s a joke. Maybe because my life has been quite dark and I had to build myself into something, coming from the bottom of the barrel with a broken family and a mum who was on welfare to support us. But at the same time just look around at the world and at nature. Animals killing eachother. Wars. People doing horrible things. Life is brutal, why should it be any different when it comes to you?
Everything good in my life has come from suffering. The beautiful swiss watch on my wrist. The life I have. The man I am. There’s a reason I don’t put up with any shit from anyone and it’s because I respect myself a lot for what I have done. Most people would not go through what I have gone through, and sit where I am now - they would have worn down and given in. But not me. I kept going. That’s why I win.
The idea of feeling good about things is a lie. Nothing worthwhile feels good during the process of doing it. Lifting heavy weights. Getting better at life. Starting businesses. Learning difficult skills and increasing your relative value in the world. All of it is tough. That’s what makes it worth doing, that’s what makes it feel so fucking good once you make it.
I have a lot of calls with young men and one of the most common things I see that holds them back and keeps them broke, is their desire for comfort and for certainty. I am very much the same - just like every other human - but I have also accepted that success and building a good life requires embracing discomfort and uncertainty. If you want everything to stay exactly how it is, then great just do that.
But if you want something different, then you will need to do something different. Which won’t be easy. It will involve the pain of change and growing into something new. It will involve doing shit that is not easy. This seems simple but some guys just can’t get it through their thick fucking skulls and that’s why they eat shit for most of their life. Maybe they are just stupid. I don’t know, but in my opinion is does not take brains to win - it just takes guts and nuts and the ability to not QUIT when you want to quit.
Pain is a good sign when you are engaged in the pursuit of something worthwhile.
You shouldn’t shy away from it.
It’s a sign that you a growing. Like muscle fibres tearing. This is the best advice I could give to a young guy; find the hardest stuff you can do and soak up all the pain you can possibly get. That’s what has helped me the most, and it will probably help you too. On the flipside you also need to enjoy life and take time out to appreciate what you have done. This is something I am working on, because my demons seldom allow me to slow down and take a breath.
But unless you are in a genuinely good spot. Don’t slow down. Don’t stop to catch your breath.
You probably haven’t done enough, you haven’t genuinely suffered, and you will know if you really have been trying because you will want to stop more than anything else. You’ll want to give in. You’ll want to lay down and go to sleep. You will want it to be over.
That’s where the man is made.
Right there when the mind hurts, the body aches, and every morsel of your fucking being just wants to throw in the towel and call it quits. Just after that point though….just beyond the point where you thought you had nothing left….THAT is where the gold is seated. One step beyond the most difficult point.
So if you want to quit and you want to call it off. If nothing makes sense and continuing just seems like a fucking bad idea, I want you to keep going. Only a little more. When you want to quit the most, that is when you need to try your absolute best.
Most often. Just after that point. You’ll break through and everything will change. If it doesn’t then yeah, call it off. But don’t be a coward. Don’t take the easy way out. Or life will punish you for failing to see it through. Giving your best effort and not winning, despite trying your absolute best….that’s still a victory. You can hold your head high. You can hang up your boots with pride.
You can go to sleep and rest easy, knowing you did everything you could.
There’s victory in that brother.
Until next time.
Filed under · Motivation
