Unlimited: How to Build an Exceptional Life (16 page)

Much like failure, pain is something we spend a lot of time and energy avoiding. If we shelter ourselves enough, we think we’ll get through life with no pain. Unfortunately, this isn’t reality. Pain and suffering exist for a reason, and running away does us more harm than good. You will never realize your full potential through an avoidance of pain. You can fight it—we all try to do so. But when you’re exhausted, worn down, and realize that your efforts have been in vain, your best bet is to surrender, lean into it, and let it flow through you. It will leave you wiser and stronger in the end. The only true way out of pain is through it (as in the children’s song: you can’t go over it, you can’t go under it, you have to go through it)
.

“If you’re going through hell, keep going.”

–
WINSTON CHURCHILL

On
Biggest Loser
season six, we had an amazing contestant named Michelle. She came to the show full of piss and vinegar, determined to go all the way. By week three she was shattered: facing all the emotional pain that had gotten her to 242 pounds and estrangement from her mother seemed unbearable to her. By week five she had had enough and was ready to quit. Usually when someone I’m working with wants to walk out on their health, I let them. I can’t want health for them. All I’m there to do is to give them the tools and to tell them how to use them—they have to do the work, and if they don’t want to, then it’s not going to happen.

But with Michelle it was different. I couldn’t let her quit because it was working. Her pain was evidence that she was in the first stage of awareness. So I told her that she could quit the show and go home, but she would never move forward in her life until she processed whatever was coming to the surface. So Michelle and I made a pact: I would provide a safe environment for her breakdown, and she would lean into it. If you caught that season of the show, you’ll know she came through the storm and ultimately, on the other side of it, was a smarter, stronger woman. She became so empowered, in fact, that she went on to win the whole competition. She is now happily married and inspiring women all over the world to confront their demons and follow their passions. If she hadn’t allowed herself to feel that pain, she never would have succeeded
.

We spend so much time running from what’s difficult and shutting off our emotions, scrambling to stay in our comfortably numb place. A multibillion-dollar industry is devoted to manufacturing medications that will stop our emotions for us. Are you feeling sad, mad, or anxious? Whatever it is, chances are there’s a pill for it. Awesome. It’s yet another reason I hate many drug companies
.

Human beings have evolved over thousands of years to have emotions. They exist for a reason. Our emotions are like an internal GPS system, guiding us out of unhappy or unhealthy situations and toward what’s right. Remember the hot-cold game from Step One? Your emotions tell you when you’re on track and when you’re off it. You “listen to your gut” and “follow your heart.” When you shut that part of yourself down, when you put your personal TomTom in
the glove compartment, it becomes impossible to navigate back to your true path
.

Many people live beneath their true potential because the minute they have a feeling of discontent, they swallow it down with a little Prozac. Their need to move out of the unhappiness dissipates, and they successfully reenter the world of the comfortably numb
.

In most cases, antidepressants and elaborate defense mechanisms don’t bring happiness—they block it. They don’t protect you; they destroy you. Being numb to life is being asleep to its richness and fullness. The only way to know love is to know vulnerability. The only way to know happiness is to know sadness. Your ability to feel one emotion enhances your ability to feel the other. Remember that Kahlil Gibran quote from
Chapter 1
? “Your joy is your sorrow unmasked. And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears.”

So what’s the alchemy that turns pain into wisdom and joy? It’s pretty simple: awareness, honesty, and time. You must be aware of your feelings and honor them by not stifling them. You must bring meaning to your pain by finding the lesson it holds. And with time, both will allow you to “become stronger in the broken places.” It seems impossible to imagine when we are in the grip of suffering, but my mother used to say to me, as her mother used to say to her, and maybe as your mother has said to you … 
This too shall pass
.

And it really will. Do not shut down. Be present and stay open. Almost every major event in our lives, especially the struggles, has a hidden meaning, and this meaning will serve you more than any other, if you choose to let it. This is the way to turn tragedy into triumph
.

If you get fired, see it as a sign that you were meant for something else. Improve your skills, and pursue something better. If you go through a bad breakup or fall out with a friend, work on the issues that can enhance or deepen your connection in other relationships. Our darkest hours, like our failures, can be our greatest teachers
.

WHEN THE WORST HAS HAPPENED

What about the kind of pain and sadness that can’t be reasoned with or rationalized, like the death of a loved one? These things happen, and they are truly devastating. All I can offer you is a technique that helps me sleep at night—it’s called logotherapy. (Yes, it has its own name.) Logotherapy was the invention of Viktor Frankl, an Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist as well as a Holocaust survivor who created a philosophy to help him get through his time in a concentration camp. The basic principles are these:

• Life has meaning under all circumstances, even the most miserable ones.
  
• Our main motivation for living is our will to find meaning in life.
  
• We have freedom to find meaning in what we do and what we experience, or at least in the stand we take when faced with unchangeable suffering.
  

Some of you out there are probably good and pissed at me for suggesting that horrible events have some sort of value. Ultimately everyone deals with “unchangeable suffering” in their own way, and I’m not here to start a religion. But personally I believe that to make the best of my situation, I have to create meaning from it, both in the best of times and in the worst. And I figure that if someone could find meaning in something as incomprehensible and horrendous as a concentration camp, my struggles and losses are minor; they are nothing. Let me give you a few examples of how you can apply this technique. This first is from Frankl himself, and it concerns a man who had lost his soul mate.

Once, an elderly general practitioner consulted me because of his severe depression. He could not overcome the loss of his wife who had died two years before and whom he had loved above all else. Now how could I help him? What
should I tell him? I refrained from telling him anything, but instead confronted him with a question. “What would have happened, Doctor, if you had died first, and your wife would have had to survive you?” “Oh,” he said, “for her this would have been terrible; how she would have suffered!” Whereupon I replied, “You see, Doctor, such a suffering has been spared her, and it is you who have spared her this suffering; but now, you have to pay for it by surviving and mourning her.” He said no word but shook my hand and calmly left the office.
*

When I first read that story, I got chills and cried for about ten minutes straight. Sometimes we have no choice but to suffer and sacrifice, but we can give that suffering purpose by becoming a vessel for goodness in the world. I’m not suggesting you become a martyr. You
know
that’s not my thing. But if something horrible happens to you and you have no control over it, altruism and a belief in the greater good might carry you through. Frankl’s story about the doctor and his wife is sad, but it’s not rooted in darkness or tragedy. A loss of that kind, although soul-crushing, is part of nature’s plan and for that reason possibly easier to bear.

But what do we do with life’s unimaginable tragedies—dark events like genocide or murder, based in malevolence and born of evil? (Yes, I do believe that evil exists. It’s not inherent, but born from unmanaged tragedy.) How can such horrors be purposeful and result in goodness in any way? The reality is that if you were involved in these things, you would find meaning in them, and the likelihood is that your sanity would depend on your doing so.

Bear with me for one more example. This story of the human spirit at its most transformative has gotten me through many a dark hour. In 1981 a six-year-old named Adam Walsh was kidnapped from a Sears near his Florida home and was brutally
murdered. The details of the murder were atrocious, the realization of any parent’s worst nightmare; the death of a child, especially such a violent one, must be one of the hardest things anyone can go through. But instead of letting the pain of the loss crush him, John Walsh, Adam’s father, did just the opposite. He became an advocate for victims of violent crimes and eventually went on to create and host
America’s Most Wanted
, Fox’s longest-running TV show. As of July 15, 2010, some 1,123 criminals had been captured worldwide due to his work.

Walsh brought meaning and purpose to a tragedy that was unthinkable. He transmuted the darkness of his son’s murder into a vehicle to protect other innocent victims from devastation. The show will never fully heal the pain, obviously. But “God”/the universe doesn’t give us anything we can’t handle. In fact, I believe that people are subjected to these kinds of struggles and tragedies because they
are
strong enough to find the meaning in the tragedy and to turn the suffering into love.

I love philosophy, and a lot of times when I can’t sleep, I listen to podcasts by philosophers on everything from infinity to wine. In one lecture, about “the problem of evil,” the speaker raised the question of whether compassion could exist in the world without evil. (Similarly, how would we feel deep happiness if we didn’t know sadness?) None of us want evil to enter our lives, but we may have no choice in the matter—John Walsh and Viktor Frankl didn’t. But what they did afterward shows us the flip side: that light can penetrate the darkness.

How can the evils or tragedies that may have befallen you provide an entry point for goodness? This is a
huge
question, and I can’t answer it for you. You’ll have to take it with you and answer it as you go about the work of living.
You
must bring the meaning. All I can do is tell you it’s there if you look for it. The application of this philosophy isn’t easy. No true victory ever is. But we are programmed survivors, and you can get through
anything
if you lean into it, learn from it, and transform it.

INSTANT KARMA

This last bit on attitude is going to be short and sweet, because it’s
obvious
. When I say karma, I’m not talking about reincarnation. If you’re into that, cool; if you’re not, that’s cool, too. What I’m talking about here is your basic “do unto others” stuff. Your karma is the total effect of your actions and conduct over the course of your life, and it determines the shape of your life. It embodies a lot of what we’ve been talking about in a nice neat little package. If you want to see it as psychology, remember that all relationships are nothing more than a mirror of your relationship with yourself. If you want to get spiritual, remember that we are magnetic beings who attract the things we focus on. However you want to see it, we get back what we do and think, especially when it comes to our treatment of others.

Karma works in both directions, good and bad. If you’re shitty to people, then life will probably be shitty to you. If you’re good to people, most likely good things will ultimately come back to you. You really do reap what you sow. Or if you want to get a little more highbrow, we can go with Gandhi, who said, “Be the change you want to see in the world.” You make a choice about what you want to put out there.

I bet you’re thinking,
I have seen total assholes become wildly successful, so how can this be true?
Well, so have I. But consider: you don’t know the quality of their personal lives, health, or spiritual happiness. My father was a
very
successful man, and I’m sure to the outside world his life seemed perfect, but sadly, I don’t believe he was or has ever been happy. Remember that old saying “You can’t judge a book by its cover”? Know this: a happy, self-satisfied person does not feel the need to attack, belittle, or undervalue other human beings.

Often people aren’t kind to others because they feel the world hasn’t been kind to them. They are hurting and feel powerless, so they hurt others as a way to have power over those people, like a
bully in the schoolyard. And don’t we all know that the bullies are the most scared and insecure people?