Chad Silverstein argues that choosing short-term pain now, like confronting a toxic teammate or doing rehab, prevents worse chronic suffering later. Avoiding hard conversations and difficult actions only multiplies the damage.
Chapters
We are revisiting acute pain and chronic pain. It's a good reminder. It's something that we always have to be reminded of because you got to think about where in your life you can put yourself into some acute pain. If you have chronic pain in your life right now, things that are bothering you, you have issues that are chronic, that have been hanging around, it could be a teammate, it could be a situation, it could be a client, it could be a nagging vice in your life. Whatever it is that's been hanging around that doesn't help you be more successful in life. The only way out of it is to inject some acute pain. Otherwise again, you're just going to choose the misery that is inevitable down the road at some point anyways. The unhealthy teammates is the best example of this. You know, you have the wrong person on your team and you don't do anything about it. You're just delaying the inevitable. You're delaying, you know, a situation where it's just going to be harder down the road. So the longer you wait, the longer you delay, you know, injecting some acute pain into your life, you know, the heart's going to be. People know they have to go to rehab after they have something health wise and they ignore it. You know, someone has a toothache, they ignore going to the dentist, what's going to happen, they're going to have to get a root canal. So you're actually making the problem so much worse. And the fact is you're choosing worse by not choosing the acute pain up front. And it's, it's a hard thing for us to grapple with because who wants acute pain? But you know, a lot of times you're going to have unchosen suffering, as our friend Grappy likes to say. And you know, again, these are the moments of truth that really make us who we are. So whether you're going to wait for the pain or you're going to inject it, it's a reminder for you today on, you know, day 147 to understand not only the difference between acute pain and chronic pain, but to identify where chronic pain is showing up in your life and injecting acute pain in so that you can get out of the chronic pain. And it's a choice, your choice may have consequences.
