Short YouTube micro-class by Brian Johnson summarizing the "pain paradox" from Rory Vaden's book Take the Stairs: doing hard things now creates an easier future, while avoiding difficulty now prolongs pain. Uses two primary metaphors — cows vs. buffalo charging storms, and the "magic shield" from Pilgrim's Progress — to illustrate facing problems head-on.
Chapters
Hi, this is Brian with another micro class. This one is on the pain paradox. It's from Take the Stairs by Rory Vaden. Hey, Rory, check out the philosopher's note. Here's the basic idea. What is easy now is often hard later. And what's hard now often creates an easy later. Meaning if you avoid all the hard stuff now and you just do what's easy, your life is likely to be a lot harder over the long run. But paradoxically, if you do what's hard now, your life will be a lot easier later. All the little fundamentals, all the little disciplines that we can integrate into our lives create much easier long term life. Rory tells a story about cows and buffalo. So he grew up on the plains of Colorado, and apparently when there was a storm coming in, cows and buffalo would respond very differently. Cows would wait for the storm, right? They'd be sitting underneath it. Hi, this is a cow, four legs. That's a sweet cow, isn't it? Spots? Now, the rain would come and the cows, when the rain would come this way, the cows would wait and then once it got on top of them, they'd run and they'd try to avoid it. But guess what? Of course the rain kept on moving with them and they stayed underneath the rain for a long time. Now, the buffalo, on the other hand, same storm is coming, but now the buffalo are sitting here and they're looking at it and they're saying, huh, what can we do? And what they do is they wait until it crosses the peak of a mountaintop and then the buffalo charge at it. They charge right through the storm. So rather than trying to run away from it and getting dumped on, they race right through it. The storm continues, and they only get rained on for a brief period of time. Pain paradox. They chose what was a little harder right now, and it became a lot easier in the long run. They didn't avoid their challenges is the essence of the idea here, of course. One more idea to think about, the magic shield. Paul Bunyan wrote his classic, Christian's Pilgrim's Progress, starring a guy named Christian who had a magic shield. Now, this magic shield would make him invincible against anything with one condition. He had to go straight at his problems. If he avoided his problems, the shield lost its magic and he was vulnerable. Head straight at your problems. That's the pain paradox. A little bit harder now, makes it a lot easier later. Hope you enjoyed. Share more soon. Have a great day.
