"pain is weakness leaving the body."
I probably saw it on locker room walls, on NO FEAR t-shirts, and on athletic shoe commercials.
And, while the slogan feels a little intense, there is something valid about what's being said: When we hurt, we heal, and we are stronger.
There's been quite a bit written about grit and resilience over the past decade, but there have also been thoughtful critiques penned regarding the limitations of grit as a measurement for success. Personally, I think resilience is important, but it doesn't always make for a perfect result...what it does, though, is make you stronger.
When we hurt--when we allow ourselves to suffer through something we care about--the result is almost always worth it.
There are those age-old coaching adages, "you left it all out there" or "you did all you could." And when people say those things, it's not actually about the result or the outcome. Instead, it's about the effort, about the hard work. It's about trying hard.
This week I had to answer a number of questions, posed by my students about my policies for essay submission.
I have my students submit a rough draft. I grade this assignment for completion (does it, for example, have 600 words? If so, they earn a 100%). But I then remind them that I don't want to read anything "rough." I want to read and grade their best work. So, two days later I have them hand in a final draft. Over those 48 hours, though, my hope is that my students are reworking their rough draft. That they are struggling to make it better. That they are going to great lengths to pore over their ideas and better articulate them. Mark Twain once quipped that "the difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug." I think he's right, and I want my students to struggle to make their essays the best they can be. I want them to be frustrated. I want them to get writer's block...because writer's block comes when someone says, "Arrrrgghhhh, I know what I'm capable of and it kills me that I just can't get it onto the paper right now!!!" (Note: Steven King once suggested that bad writers never struggle to write because they just write, whereas great writers are constantly torturing themselves with trying to hone their craft)
I want my students to submit something that they have struggled to write. I want them to hand in a product they are proud of not because they are talented writers, but because there was a painful process to get the right words onto the page.
An educator I follow on Twitter, @Aaron_Hogan, posted this the other day to his PLN (personal learning network):
I asked my students this question and everyone looked nervously around. They fidgeted around because they knew what they were supposed to say, how they were supposed to feel, but it wasn't their reality right now.
Sports and art often follow this same reality. Any musician or athlete would tell you that they'd much rather train with people who are a little (or significantly) more talented than them in an effort to improve. Being a big fish in a small pond only gets us so far...the ceiling is often too low and we never see what we're capable of. The pain, though, of setting goals that are really, really complicated and hard can show us what we're capable of. As Henry Ford once admitted, "If I'd asked people what they wanted, they would have said 'faster horses.'"
We need to learn and to push boundaries, and to challenge one another to suffer better, not for the sake of suffering (which is awful), but for the sake of realizing what we're capable of and for what we were made.
Again, Mark Twain had some brilliant insight:
"The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why."
Answering that second question often comes after you've chiseled away many of the simple and commonplace elements of your life, leaving the hard parts that take WORK.
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