Embrace The Suck

We’re a bunch of quitters, aren’t we?

We all are guilty of it. Whenever our efforts don’t seem to be producing results or significant forward momentum, we quit.

Another way to look at it is to think about what happens when we go on a diet, or create a New Year’s resolution. We’re all in at first. Join a gym, eat healthy, take the stairs instead of the elevator, that sort of thing. It makes sense because we’ve all been told that if we eat right and exercise we’ll lose weight.

We’re just not told how long it will take.

After a week or two, we notice very little weight loss. In some cases, despite doing everything right we might even gain weight.

So why the heck are we going to torture ourselves on a treadmill when we can go back to our old lifestyle?

We start to cheat. That bowl of ice cream won’t hurt. Oh, I can eat chips today, it’s my cheat day.

We find it’s easier (and more enjoyable) to not do the hard stuff. Eventually, we quit on the whole New Year’s resolution altogether.

In fact, a study by U.S. News found that 80% of New Year’s resolutions fail by February. That study goes on to say that the reason why those resolutions fail is because we don’t change our mindset first.

…it’s important to recognize that outside-in solutions such as dieting, joining gyms and so on are doomed to fail if, other than your well-intentioned resolve to change, you’ve done nothing to enhance your capacity to either sustain motivation or handle the inevitable stress and discomfort involved in change

There is a Navy Seal, who came up with what he calls the 40% rule. What that rule says is that whenever we think we’ve done all we can do, we’re really only at 40% of our capacity.

Obviously, this isn’t a hard and fast rule. Your 40% might really be 25%, or 50%. The point is that we all have so much more potential inside of us than we ever let out.

When you feel like quitting because you’re not seeing results in whatever you do, keep on going. I used dieting as an example because it’s relatable to a lot of people. This mindset applies to anything you do though.

Fitness, business, relationships, parenting, finances, faith. The list can go on and on.

But the saying isn’t “when the going gets tough, the tough give up”. It’s “when the going gets tough, the tough get going”. Meaning the tough willed amongst us will endure through difficult or tough situations.

Need more proof? Read the story about any one of the Medal of Honor recipients.

– – I want to talk a little bit about a saying that we had when I was in the military and as a matter of fact, they probably still say it and they’ve probably said it for years before I was in the military but the saying is “embrace the suck”. Embrace the suck is basically an attitude that you have when something’s really hard, really difficult. In the military, we’d say this all the time when we were on road marches. We’d have our rucksacks on. We’d have our full load of everything. It was heavy, it was hot. We were just miserable. We were walking for miles and miles and miles but we were just saying embrace the suck because we’re going to have to do this thing anyways to complete our objective, to get to where we’re going or whatever. Embrace the suck. It’s going to suck but enjoy it while you’re there, right? A lot of us tend to avoid doing unpleasant or difficult things and it’s kind of a natural instinct that we have to kind of avoid some of these things. It might be hardwired from our ancestors or wherever it comes from. I don’t know but it seems like something that we tend to do on a regular basis. We tend to avoid these things because they’re just not producing the results that we’re expecting from the amount of effort that we’re putting in but sometimes we quit on ourselves too soon and we don’t end up living up to our full potential. Think about the last time you went on a diet or if you know someone who went on a diet or maybe created a New Year’s resolution. This is the year I’m going to lose weight or this is the year I’m going to quit smoking or quit drinking or whatever the resolution might have been. You try, you make that initial, New Year’s day and the first week after New Year’s, you’re all in, you’re all in or about it and it does suck that first week or so but then you’re not seeing quite the same results that you were expecting. Maybe you join a gym and you’re not losing quite as much weight as you thought you would after that first week or you start lifting weights and you’re not seeing the muscle definition and things like that, right, and so you’re like, well, what am I even doing this for, why am I going to wake up at five o’clock in the morning and go to the gym when I’m not really seeing any results, what difference does it make if I do it or don’t and so you quit. You also quit because it just got too hard. You could keep doing it but it’s inconvenient and for the results that you’re getting, it just doesn’t seem like it makes sense to do. Now, this next part might seem like I’m going off on a tangent but bear with me here. Alright, so there’s some species of bamboo, bamboo trees that take about five years to fully grow. Now, the farmers who grow this bamboo really embody this embrace the suck mindset that I’m talking about, right, so this tree, they plant the seed on day one and they cover it with dirt and they start watering the seed and everything like that and over the course of the five years, they’re making sure that no weeds are growing in that same patch where the trees are being planted and they make sure that they’re nice and watered and everything is being taken care of. They’re doing all the things that they need to do but during that five years, you think that at any point in time that farmer has a little spark of doubt that says I wonder if the roots are even formed, I wonder if this tree’s actually going to even grow, I see no results yet, nothing has proven to me that this is going to work, that this is going to ever exist or come up into anything substantial? Probably his friends and his family are saying the same thing like what are you doing, you’re out there watering your dirt, there’s no tree there to be watered like what are you actually doing but that farmer sticks with it and that person, he goes out there every day and he’s watering, he’s pulling weeds and he’s doing all the things that he’s supposed to be doing to make sure that this tree can grow to its full potential and after the five years, that tree starts to break ground and within a month to two months after, that tree shoots up to about 80 to 90 feet in the air, right, so someone from the outside looking in might just see all of a sudden there’s this tree that just magically appeared over the course of the last few weeks but that’s not the full story. The full story is what happened during the five years before that tree broke ground. The full story is the countless days and nights of that farmer going out there watering his plants and pulling the weeds and everything else out of there to make sure that those trees have the best chance possible to grow. So it might seem like that farmer was an overnight success and many businesses are kind of the same way if you think about it. You might have just heard about this new business with a new product, new service, whatever and it might sound like wow, they made it, this is like an overnight success. They just started and everything just fell into place for them. Those guys are real lucky, right? But what you don’t hear about is all the struggle that they had, all the failed ideas that they had before that, all the reiterations of redoing their brand and maybe introducing new products or new services to finally come up with something that the customer’s really going to want, right? You didn’t see all those struggles, all those late nights, all the working out of their garage or their basement or whatever to finally get to that next flashy office that they talk about or whatever. So it might seem like they’re an overnight success but there’s probably a lot of failures involved with that success. Now, think about your business or whatever it is that you’re doing that you might be struggling with. There might be times when yeah, you need to throw in the towel because maybe it’s just not a good idea or maybe it’s something that’s just not possible for them to do, right? I’m not talking about those things. I’m talking about the things that are just too hard for you right now, the things that you think should be going a lot faster, a lot smoother or whatever but some of these things just take time, right? So don’t quit on your idea. If you really believe that it’s a good idea and that people are actually going to be interested in what it is that you’re providing, don’t quit too soon because if you do, your business, your idea, whatever it is, that seed that you’ve planted is never going to break ground and you’re never going to have that overnight success that the other companies have had. So give it time. Water that idea. Let that idea grow. Take out all the weeds, all the bad stuff that’s holding it back from truly forming the strong root system and breaking ground. Once it breaks ground, you’ll appear as if you were that overnight success to everybody else but you’ll know all the hard work just like that bamboo farmer knew all the hard work that went into growing that tree. You’ll know all the hard work that went into making yourself look like that overnight success.