Be a Co-Creator in Your Pain

“Pentagon bound. 72 Hours. 4 States. 1,000 handshakes. 0 sleep. Insane schedule, wouldn’t trade it, grateful for the grind with my hard working team. (And yes got my workouts in every day which equates to me getting my ass kicked).”
–Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, via this Instagram post

Why would The Rock, who is already so jacked, still do his daily workouts even with a crazy travel schedule, no sleep, and a top tier excuse to miss a day? 

In 2021, I committed to publishing a blog every single day for the year. 2021 was a busy year for me filled with great highs and lows. I got married to my wonderful wife Marian, and we took a two week honeymoon. Sadly, six months after this, my father passed away after a five-year battle with cancer. I took three more weeks off of work to care for him and my family. 

Why would I, who had already proved it by publishing hundreds of days in a row, still publish blogs, even on my wedding day and the day of my father’s death? 

Because for me (and maybe The Rock), there’s a comfort in co-creating your pain. 

Life is painful. It’s hard. And no doubt, writing and workouts make it harder. But that is a portion of the pain that we own. We’re co-creators in the pain. We’re still choosing this. No matter how bad a day was, no matter how much it took from me, I still published.

The alternative is to strip back everything extraneous—to pump the brakes on extra work to make things more manageable. But when life still kicks you while you’re down, and there’s nowhere else to hide, what then? The small amount of extra pain that disciplines bring pays off exponentially in feelings of agency and control in hard times.