Look at what most people do and do the opposite. Most people, what they do is they love consuming as opposed to creating. We live in a civilization of consumers: buy this, eat this, do this, consume this, but the top five percent, those who play in the rare air of world- class, are not consumers, they’re creators.
Secondly, most people, the 95%, and this is no judgment, just reporting, but they’re pleasure seekers. If you look at the true warriors of humanity, you look at the true empire builders, you look at the true Titans who are constructing a better world, there are less about pleasure seeking because they under understand that growth comes through discomfort.
Willpower is built through voluntary acts of “suffering.” I mean, to do hard work is to grow. To
push yourself on a project, to places that frighten you is to expand your creative capabilities. I hope I’m making sense for you here, but pleasure seekers don’t create monuments. If you look at the Taj Mahal, if you look at Piazza Navona in Rome, if you look at the Great Wall of China, if you look at the Mona Lisa created by DaVinci, if you look at the Sistine Chapel created by Michelangelo, if you look at any great company, okay, an Apple under Steve Jobs, for example, or it might’ve been Elon Musk’s companies, I don’t know what companies most speak to you, but if you look at any world-class company, Under Armour comes to mind, these companies took grit. They took suffering, they took relentlessness. Any creative person has to face the arrows and slings of their critics, so you get to world-class through the doorway of discomfort.