Eric Siu argues that wealth comes from enduring pain and persisting through setbacks, not from being smarter than others. He draws on business challenges he's faced to show how the capacity to handle repeated failure separates the rich from everyone else.
To become rich, you must chase pain. Excellence is the capacity to take pain, right? How much pain can you take? And when you look at people around you, it's not that you're smarter than them or anything. Most of the time we're like pretty much the same level of intelligence, right? I think that's the case with most people. But then they complain, they blame the rich. It's like, oh, why can't I be rich or whatever? But you look, we've talked about this before, like the amount of times we keep getting kicked in the nuts throughout the years that we've been in business. Sometimes you get kicked multiple times per day, right? In the nuts. It is your capacity to take pain because never once in my, I don't know, 15, 16 years of knowing you have you completely lost your mind when things got difficult. No. Right? And it's the same with me. Like, you just keep going, and most people just give up too early. And it's not that anybody's smarter than you. It's— for the most part, it's not because they're richer than you or whatever. It's just that they had more capacity to take pain.
