How Short Term Pain Can Bring Long Term Success

What's up, everyone? Welcome back to another episode of Founders Journal. This is your host, Alex Lieberman, co-founder and executive chairman of Morning Brew. For those of you that are coming back to Founders Journal, thank you for listening to the show. For those of you that are new, Founders Journal is an entrepreneur's personal diary made public for the world. Now, today we're going to switch things up a little bit, and I'm going to take on a more emotional or psychological topic that can be applied to your career building businesses. And so we're going to talk about why pain is your best chance at attaining long-term pleasure. Let's hop into the episode. So a few weeks ago, I was listening to a podcast called Hidden Brain, which is an awesome NPR show around psychology, neuroscience, emotions. And there was an episode around addiction. And what biologically happens to create addiction and also kind of what ties together all different types of addiction, from addiction to substances to social media addiction. And the guest on this episode is a doctor. Her name's Anna Lembke. She is a practicing psychotherapist or a psychiatrist at Stanford. She is the medical director of Stanford's Addiction Medicine Program. And she basically has more degrees than a thermometer, and she was Just incredible on the show in not only laying out kind of how addiction shows up for her patients, but also scientifically what's happening so that you can really understand kind of at the most first principle level, what is it that causes addiction? I listened to it again because the constant thorn in my side is how much time I spend on social media. And so she had mentioned on the podcast that she has a book and the book is called Dopamine Nation. So I decided to read the book and I have thoroughly enjoyed it. I'm almost, I would say, like 75% of the way done. And The gist of the book is basically you learn how to keep dopamine in check, given that we live in an era of overstimulation that leads to an overabundance of dopamine. My favorite part of this book is around halfway in, where the author talks about the relationship between pleasure and pain. Basically, how if there was if you're sitting on a teeter-totter, you can envision pain being on one side and pleasure being on the other side. And she goes through this kind of. Centuries or history's old relationship between pleasure and pain, the science behind why pleasure and pain kind of exist together at all times. And then I wanna talk about how you should be thinking about this relationship of pleasure and pain within your work and within building your companies and your careers. Here's how we're gonna go through things. I'm gonna share a bit about the history and examples of how pain leads to pleasure or pleasure leads to pain. I'm gonna talk about the science, which Dr. Lemke goes into a lot of detail around. And then I'm gonna talk about an exact kind of playbook for introducing pain or manageable pain into your life, which leaves you off better in a more pleasurable state long-term. The history. There are so many sayings around the value of pain being important in your life, and you, you may not be able to recount them right now, but you've probably heard everything I'm about to say. No pain, no gain. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Growth lies in discomfort. And there's a reason that all of these sayings exist, is because there's a clear relationship that exists between pain and pleasure, pain and contentment, pain and happiness. And the role that pain plays in your life has been observed forever. Literally 2,000 years ago, Socrates wrote a whole essay around the relationship of pleasure and pain. And so I'm just gonna read a short part of what he wrote here, and I'm gonna read it in my best Socrates voice. How strange would appear to be this thing that men call pleasure, and how curiously it is related to what is thought to be its opposite, pain. The two will never be found together in a man, and yet if you seek the one and obtain it, you are almost bound always to get the other as well, just as though they were both attached to one and the same head. Wherever the one is found, the other follows up behind. So in my case, since I had pain in my leg as a result of the fetters, pleasure seems to have come to follow it up. And so fast forward to modern day, and you can observe the importance of calculated pain leading to long-term benefit in so many different facets of life. I joke about it and kind of shit on it a lot, but there's a reason that cold plunges have become so popular, you know, originally in Silicon Valley and in the startup world, but now people everywhere are into cold water immersion. The idea of taking cold showers or the Wim Hof Method, Wim Hof being the guy who you know, swam through the Arctic or ran a marathon in his underwear in Antarctica. There's some science which people will have opinions on that basically shows that there is biological benefit to introducing cold or measured pain to your body in helping with things like inflammation and your immune system. Take acupuncture, you know, one of the oldest forms of medicine. Acupuncture is a measured version of pain. And then, you know, a great example, from one of my favorite athletes ever and one of my favorite movies ever, which was Free Solo, the documentary of Alex Honnold. Alex Honnold, you know, has become famous for climbing the face of Yosemite's El Capitan, which is one of the hardest mountains to climb in the world. And he climbed the entire thing without ropes. And what people were— what doctors found when they put Alex Honnold in an MRI machine is that He was found to have below-normal amygdala activation during brain imaging, basically meaning when most people are shown scary pictures or things that provoke anxiety, their amygdala is the part of the brain that lights up in the fMRI. For Alex Honnold, it didn't light up when things like mountains or talking about climbing without a rope was discussed. And, you know, a lot of researchers speculated that Alex Honnold had a biologically different brain. They speculated that he was just born with less innate fear than others, which in turn allowed him to accomplish an absolutely ridiculous climb of climbing El Capitan with no rope. But if you were to ask Alex Honnold this, he disagrees with this interpretation. His view is that he has done so much free soloing and he has worked at his climbing skills so incrementally over decades That this is why things that are outrageous to 99.9% of society is normal to him. And I would say Dr. Lemke, the author of Dopamine Nation, would agree. You know, what she basically shares is she thinks that he practiced to the point of mastery. He did hundreds of hours on this exact route attached to ropes, and he worked out a precise route with every handhold and every foothold in almost like a choreographed dance, such that if you were to ask him, After he climbed El Capitan, what is every handhold? What is every movement you did? He could recite it all from memory. And so this experience of enduring short-term pain to then enjoy longer-lasting pleasure is actually explained by science. And there's a branch of science called hormesis, and I just want to explain it, and then we can talk about the takeaway and how you apply this to your life. So hormesis— and I'm just scrolling through the book right now— a branch of science that allows biological systems, as in allows your body to have adaptive responses to moderate environmental or self-imposed challenges through which the system, as in your body, improves its functionality and/or tolerance to more severe challenges. And there's a few examples that I'm just going to read off so you understand what this looks like. Fruit flies that were spun in a centrifuge, the machine that like spins super fast, fruit flies that were spun in a centrifuge for 2 to 4 weeks not only outlived unspun flies, but they were also more agile in their older age, able to climb higher and longer than their non-exposed counterparts. Worms that were exposed to temperatures above their preferred 20 degrees Celsius lived 25% longer and were 25% more likely to survive subsequent high temperatures than non-exposed worms. For Japanese citizens who lived outside the epicenter of the 1945 nuclear attack, those with low-dose radiation exposure may have shown marginally longer lifespans and decreased rates of cancer compared to unirradiated individuals. You know, this field of hormesis, there are people who will dispute the findings by Dr. Calabrese. But overall, I would say my general takeaway from this research and also my own lived experience is whether conscious or subconscious, You make 2 choices in life. Every action you decide to take in life is one of 2 choices, whether you know it or not. You either are making the choice to embrace short-term pleasure in order to endure long-term pain, or you are enduring short-term pain to embrace long-term pleasure. And what I can say from my experience is the most successful people I know are really good at defaulting to the second choice, meaning enduring short-term pain to embrace long-term pleasure. So they are really good at taking care of their future self, even if it is at the detriment of their current self. We're gonna take a quick break, but more from Founders Journal when we get back. How does this show up in work and how can you apply it to your work today? Now, as I thought about this, it's actually very funny because I've never thought about, you know, how does pleasure versus pain and the symbiotic relationship they have, how does this work in my professional career? But once you start thinking about it, You see examples of this everywhere. I mean, the most obvious example that I was just actually talking with the team at StoryArc about is for people who are people pleasers. Like, that is one of my fatal flaws, or at least was in the early days of Morning Brew. People pleasing is the definition of choosing short-term pleasure over long-term pain versus short-term pain over long-term pleasure. Because when you people please, basically what you're saying you do is It feels very comfortable to say nice things to someone or do something that makes someone feel good, even if the long-term consequence is net negative because you've either missed expectations or you're going to have to disappoint them in the future. The examples go on. When you end up keeping a bad employee a few months too long at your company, you are embracing the pleasure of comfortability to delay the pain of a tough conversation. Or when you decide to hire someone who's quote unquote good enough because they're your only viable candidate left, all you're doing is embracing the short-term pleasure of checking off the hiring box, but you then open yourself up to the long-term pain of potentially having made a mishire, and then you're going to potentially have to fire them, and then you're going to deal with all of the lost money and time of re-recruiting for that very same role. When I think about this in my own career, I'm always fighting the short-term pleasure of quote unquote doing work on social media for the pain of not just failing to get important stuff done, but also the emotional hangover of feeling like I spent my time In a shitty way. In the early days of Morning Brew, when I reflect on the early parts of the journey, the pleasure-pain tradeoff for me was doing busywork that felt good because I could cross things off a checklist and say that I was productive. But I actually opened myself to the long-term pain of not growing as a leader or doing actually the most important hard work related to our long-term strategy as a business. And so now that you understand this, now that you understand that all of the time we're basically consciously or subconsciously making this tradeoff of embracing pleasure or embracing pain in the work that we're doing. The question becomes, how do you start embracing the suck? How do you default to option 2, where all you're going to be doing is taking on some short-term pain, but compounding decisions that lead to embracing short-term pain will lead to long-term pleasure for your business? First step is I have identified for myself the short-term pleasure traps that I most frequently fall into. That I believe lead to the most long-term pain in my life. And for me, there are 3 things. First, scrolling through social media. That is the classic thing that I embrace short-term pleasure, but a ton of long-term pain. Long-term pain because I'm not getting done the things I want to get done. So I'm not able to accomplish my long-term goals. And long-term pain because, again, emotionally, I feel horrible when I get to the end of the day and I say that was not a day well spent because I was putzing around on social media versus doing things I said I wanted to do. The second is missing early morning workouts. I have my best days when I work out at 6:30 in the morning. It, like, I, I notice a marked difference in my productivity. But again, it sucks when I haven't gotten 8 hours of sleep and it's 6:30 in the morning and it's so easy to hit snooze to not go work out. But the long-term pain of that is I feel worse in my days. I'm less productive. I may or may not get a workout done in the afternoon, which leads to just generally worse health over time. So that's the second one. And the third one is saying yes to too many things. Goes back to the people pleaser in me. It goes back to, you know, the part of me that misapproximates how much I'm truly able to get done in a day, a week, or a quarter. And so those are my 3 short-term pleasure traps that I fall into. The second step after I've identified these 3 things is how do I turn these short-term pleasures into short-term manageable pains that I can tie goals to? So I took each of these pleasure traps that I just said to you, and I turned them into measurable pains that become goals for me. The first, for social media, I set a pain slash a goal of 3 times a day I can go on social media. I can spend 10 minutes in each of those sittings. I'll have one sitting at 7:30 in the morning when I get up, one sitting in the middle of the day at 12:30, and one sitting at the end of the day at 5:30. And every day I will journal when I went on social media, how much time I spent on it, And I will constantly remind myself that by doing this, by setting this goal, I am embracing short-term pain, which will make me happier, my future self way happier down the road. The second one is related to morning workouts. I set a goal for myself of 4 times a week I will do 6:30 in the morning workouts. And again, it's manageable. I'm not saying 7 days a week. There will be days that I can sleep in, but it is something where I'm going to have to embrace pain. But in doing so, I'll be so much better off. Months and years from now. And the third is around focus or saying no to things. Every day in the same journal that I'm marking when I go on social media, and if I did my 6:30 in the morning workout, I am listing 2 things every day. There are just 2 things that I must do that are the need-to-haves that are my only 2 priorities. If I get those 2 things done, it was a successful day. If I don't get those 2 things done, it was not a successful day. And so those are the things that I have turned from short-term pleasures into short-term pains in order to have long-term pleasures. And the third step of this is Once these pains are no longer painful, so once it is no longer painful for me to only go on social media, as embarrassing as that sounds, 3 times a day, or once it's no longer painful for me to do 4 6:30 AM workouts a week, then I can start thinking about expanding my pains, right? And this is such a micro example of what I believe Alex Honnold did over several decades, which is, you know, when he first started climbing, maybe his first free solo was on a 12-foot wall. Then 15 feet, then 50 feet, then 1,500 feet. And so the third step is just consistently expanding your manageable pains. So you're constantly pushing on the pain lever a little bit, which will have the same impact on the pleasure lever over the long term. And so what's the takeaway here? Well, the takeaway is that I think it behooves all of us in our personal life and our professional life to invite some pain, to, uh, embrace some suck into our life. It has been proven over history that when we invite pain, pleasure is soon to follow, or when we invite pleasure, pain is soon to follow. And I think the question you have to ask yourself is, if you wanted to do the best possible thing for your future self, what would you do today? And the answer will always be embracing short-term manageable pain. This was a little bit different of an episode. I haven't done like a more psychological or emotionally focused episode in a while. I hope you liked it. Let me know what you thought about this style of episode. Shoot me an email to alex@morningbrew.com. And if you enjoyed this and if you think someone in your life, friend, family, coworker would benefit from this episode on the relationship between pleasure and pain in personal life and professional life, make sure to share it with them. It is the number one way that we grow this show. As always, thank you so much for listening and I'll catch you next episode.