PART THREE: THE PRACTICE

THE TOLL

A Three-Part Series on Pain, Achievement, and the Cost of Everything Worth Having

PART THREE

THE PRACTICE

Operational Principles for a Life That Doesn’t Flinch

 “Understanding that pain is necessary is philosophy. Choosing it daily is character.”

NOW WE WORK

 You have read the diagnosis and you have seen the forge. If Part One did its work, you can no longer pretend the lie is invisible. If Part Two did its work, you understand that pain is not the obstacle to the life you want—it is the mechanism. What remains is the only thing that has ever separated the person who understands from the person who transforms: practice.

This section will feel different from the first two. It should. Demolition and construction are violent acts. Practice is quieter. It is the long morning after the revelation—the part where you discover whether you meant it. There will be no more grand arguments here. The arguments have been made. What follows are tools. They are simple. They are old. Most of them have been known, in some form, for two thousand years. They endure not because they are fashionable but because they work, and the things that work have a stubborn habit of outlasting the things that merely sound good.

A word of caution before we begin: simplicity is not ease. A pushup is simple. Doing fifty of them every morning for a year is not. The practices in this chapter will strike you as obvious. That is because they are. The question has never been whether you know what to do. The question is whether you will do what you know—tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that, long after the motivation of this reading has faded and you are left with nothing but the practice itself and the choice to honor it or abandon it.

That choice, repeated daily, is the only material from which character is made. Everything else is commentary.

• • •

I. REHEARSE ADVERSITY IN ADVANCE

The Morning Discipline That Replaces Panic With Composure

 There is an old practice, predating every self-help industry by millennia, that begins the day not with gratitude, not with affirmation, not with the cheerful fiction that everything will go as planned—but with a deliberate rehearsal of everything that might not.

The ancients called it the premeditation of adversity. It asks you to sit, before the day has started, and imagine—clearly, specifically, without flinching—that today’s plan falls apart. The meeting is canceled. The client withdraws. The body fails. The relationship fractures. The market turns. The thing you are counting on does not arrive. Not because you are inviting disaster through some mystical law of attraction, but because you are doing something far more practical: you are removing the element of surprise from suffering.

Surprise is what converts difficulty into panic. A problem you anticipated is a problem you can respond to. A problem that ambushes you is a problem that controls you—at least until the shock wears off, which can take minutes or months, depending on how thoroughly unprepared you were. The rehearsed mind does not stop bad things from happening. It stops bad things from happening to a person who has never considered the possibility. And that person—the one who assumed everything would hold—is the one who collapses, not because the difficulty was too great, but because the gap between expectation and reality was too wide for his nervous system to bridge.

This is not pessimism. Pessimism says the worst will happen and there is nothing to be done. This practice says the worst might happen and here is what I will do. That difference—the difference between helpless dread and prepared resolve—is the entire distance between a person who is governed by circumstances and a person who governs himself within them.

The Practice

Every morning, before the noise begins, sit for two minutes. Not in meditation’s formal sense. Just stillness. Then ask yourself three questions:

What could go wrong today? Be specific. Not a vague cloud of anxiety but a concrete list. The proposal could be rejected. The conversation could go badly. The pain in your back could flare. The child could have a crisis. The money could fall through. Name it. Look at it. Let it sit in your mind without resistance.

If it does go wrong, what will I do? Not what will I feel—that is not within your control. What will I do. What is the first action? What is the backup? Where does my attention go? What do I protect? What do I release? You are drawing a map of a territory you may never enter, but if you enter it, you will not be lost.

What, regardless of what happens, is within my control today? This question brings you back to the internal frontier. No matter how the day unfolds, your effort, your conduct, your honesty, and your attention remain yours. Reaffirm their ownership. They are the only assets that cannot be confiscated by circumstance.

Two minutes. That is all. You will be tempted to skip it because it feels morbid, or because the morning is already rushed, or because you would rather start the day with something that feels good. Notice that temptation. It is the exact preference for comfort over preparation that produced every unpleasant surprise you have ever suffered. The person who rehearses adversity is not inviting trouble. He is refusing to be ambushed by it. And the refusal to be ambushed is a form of respect—both for reality, which does not owe you a gentle morning, and for yourself, who deserves to meet difficulty standing rather than scrambling.

Preparation is the tax that optimism must pay to be taken seriously. Optimism that has never looked at the worst case is not optimism. It is denial with better branding.

• • •

II. CHOOSE SMALL HARDSHIPS ON PURPOSE

Resistance Training for the Will

 Cold water. A skipped meal. A long walk in weather you would rather avoid. A workout that is harder than it needs to be. An early morning when the bed is warm and the room is dark and every nerve in your body votes to stay. A day without the screen. An hour of silence so complete that you can hear the quality of your own thoughts, which is precisely why you have been avoiding it.

These are small hardships. They will not change your life in a single instance. They are not dramatic. They will not make good content. Nobody will applaud. That is the point.

The purpose of choosing small, voluntary discomforts is not to prove anything to anyone. It is to prove something to yourself: that you can tolerate what is unpleasant without being governed by it. That the discomfort arrived, and you remained. That the craving spoke, and you did not obey. That the cold touched your skin and your body wanted to flee and you chose to stay, and in that choice—which cost you nothing but a few minutes of physical displeasure—you built a tiny, almost imperceptible increment of evidence that you are not fragile.

This evidence accumulates. It has to, because the will is not a permanent endowment. It is a muscle, and muscles that are never loaded atrophy. The person who has not voluntarily chosen anything difficult in months—who has moved from comfort to comfort, from convenience to convenience, from the warm bed to the heated car to the climate-controlled office to the algorithmically curated evening—has a will that has not been exercised since the last time something forced it into action. And a will that only activates under force is not a will at all. It is a reaction. The difference between the two is the difference between a person who governs his life and a person whose life governs him.

The Principle Behind the Practice

The specific hardship matters less than you think. Cold water is not magical. Fasting is not sacred. Early rising is not morally superior to sleeping in. What matters is the act of choosing discomfort when comfort was available—because that act, repeated, rewires something at the level of identity. You stop being the person who avoids and start becoming the person who elects. The frame shifts from what is being done to you to what you are doing on purpose. And that frame, humble as it sounds, is the foundation of every form of agency that exists.

You are teaching your nervous system a lesson it cannot learn from reading or conversation. You are teaching it through experience, which is the only language the body trusts. The lesson is: this is survivable. This is temporary. I did not break. I did not need rescue. The discomfort arrived and it passed, and I am still here, and I am slightly more capable of enduring the next one because I endured this one.

When genuine hardship arrives—as it will, uninvited, on a schedule you did not approve—the person who has practiced small, voluntary discomforts meets it with a nervous system that has evidence of its own resilience. The person who has never practiced meets it with a nervous system that has only ever known comfort and interprets every disruption as catastrophe. The difference between these two responses is not willpower in the motivational-poster sense. It is training. One person has trained for the event. The other has trained against it.

The Bristle You Will Feel

If these suggestions make you bristle—if something in you recoils at the idea of a cold shower or a skipped meal or an hour without a screen and says this is unnecessary, this is extreme, I shouldn’t have to do this—then notice the bristle. Sit with it. Because that bristle is the exact thing we are talking about.

It is the voice of a nervous system that has been trained to interpret voluntary discomfort as a threat rather than an exercise. It is the flinch, dressed up as reason. It sounds like logic—I have enough stress already, this won’t actually help, this is just performative suffering—but its function is protection. Not protection from harm. Protection from the one thing the comfort-trained self fears most: the discovery that it has been weaker than it needed to be and that the weakness was a choice.

That discovery stings. Let it. The sting is the beginning.

• • •

III. THE DAILY LEDGER OF CONDUCT

The Evening Audit That Most People Will Never Perform

 This is not a journal. Journals, as most people keep them, are theaters of feeling—spaces where emotion is expressed, processed, and, in the worst cases, indulged. They have their uses. This is not one of them.

This is a ledger. It is an accounting of what you did, not what you felt. It is a record of choices, not moods. It asks not how was your day but what did you do with it, which is a question that most people would rather not answer honestly, which is exactly why it must be asked.

Every evening—not when you feel like it, not once a week, every evening—sit down with three questions and answer them in writing. Writing matters. Thoughts that remain in the head are negotiable. Thoughts committed to a page become evidence. And evidence is harder to bargain with than memory.

The Three Questions

First: What did I do well today? This is not self-congratulation. It is calibration. If you cannot name a single thing you did well, you are either lying or you spent the day in a way that produced nothing worth naming, and both of those facts are worth knowing. If you can name something, record it. Not as a reward but as a reference point. You are mapping your own terrain. You need to know where the high ground is.

Second: Where did I rationalize, flinch, or lie? This is the question that costs. Because the answer is never nowhere. There is always a moment—a conversation you softened when it needed to be direct, a task you deferred when it needed to be done, a truth you withheld when it needed to be spoken, a standard you lowered when it needed to be held. Find it. Name it. Do not explain it away. The entire value of this practice depends on your willingness to look at the evasion without dressing it in a better narrative. You hit snooze. You avoided the call. You ate what you said you wouldn’t. You agreed when you didn’t mean it. You knew what to do and chose not to do it. Write it down. Let the ink hold what your pride would rather release.

Third: What will I do differently tomorrow? Not what will I try—trying is the language of preemptive forgiveness. What will I do. A specific action, applied to a specific failure, with a specificity that leaves no room for the vagueness that permits repetition. If you flinched on the conversation, the answer is not I’ll be braver. It is I will call at nine in the morning before I have time to talk myself out of it. If you skipped the training, the answer is not I’ll try harder. It is I will set out my clothes tonight and walk out the door before I consult my feelings on the matter.

Why This Practice Is Rare

Most people will never do this. Not because it is difficult—it takes five minutes. Not because it is complicated—a child could understand the questions. They will not do it because it is honest, and honesty with yourself is the most expensive form of honesty there is.

Honesty with others is uncomfortable but social—you can share the burden, receive absolution, trade your confession for sympathy. Honesty with yourself has no audience, no absolution, and no sympathy. It is just you, and the page, and the record of what you actually did with the hours you were given. There is no one to perform for. There is no one to blame. There is no narrative that makes the evasion sound reasonable. There is only the gap between what you said you would do and what you did, written in your own hand, in your own words, with no one watching.

That is why it works. Improvement begins precisely where excuses die. And the ledger is the executioner. Not a cruel one. A patient one. It does not judge. It records. And the record, over weeks and months, reveals patterns that no amount of introspection can detect—because introspection, left to its own devices, edits. It softens. It rationalizes. It remembers selectively. The ledger does not. The ledger is the mirror that does not adjust its angle to flatter you.

If you are willing to face that mirror nightly, you will change. Not because you are motivated, and not because you have discovered a system. Because you have made evasion expensive. You have removed the gap between action and accountability. And in that removal, the cost of avoidance rises above the cost of effort, and the calculation tips—not once, dramatically, but a little more each day, until the person who writes in the ledger and the person who lives during the day become the same person.

That convergence is character. And there is no shorter road to it than this.

• • •

IV. THE PAUSE BETWEEN IMPULSE AND ACTION

Ten Seconds That Contain Your Entire Freedom

 When the anger rises—when the email arrives that makes your jaw tighten, when the comment lands that makes your chest flush, when the craving tugs with its familiar, urgent whisper of now, now, right now—there is a moment. A sliver. A gap so narrow that most people pass through it without knowing it exists.

In that gap lives the entirety of your agency.

Before the gap, there is stimulus: the provocation, the craving, the fear, the insult. After the gap, there is response: what you say, what you do, what you reach for, what you become in the next thirty seconds. The stimulus is not yours—it arrives from outside your jurisdiction, uninvited. The response is entirely yours—it is one of the few things that genuinely is. But between stimulus and response, there is this gap, and the width of that gap determines whether you are a person or a mechanism.

A mechanism has no gap. Stimulus produces response instantly, automatically, without intervention. The angry email produces the angry reply. The craving produces the purchase. The fear produces the retreat. The insult produces the retaliation. Input, output. Cause, effect. No pause. No choice. Just reflex wearing the costume of personality.

A person has a gap. It may be narrow—ten seconds, sometimes less. But in that gap there is room for a question: What do I actually want to do here? Not what does my anger want. Not what does my pride demand. Not what does my fear advise. What do I, the person who will live with the consequences of the next ten seconds for the rest of the day or the rest of the year or the rest of a relationship—what do I want to do?

Without the pause, you are stimulus and response—a machine. With it, you are a person. The gap is narrow. But it is the only territory where freedom lives.

How to Practice the Pause

The instruction is absurdly simple: when you feel the surge—anger, craving, reactivity, the urgent need to speak or act or reach—wait ten seconds. Do not suppress the feeling. Do not deny it. Do not argue with it. Just wait. Let it be present without letting it be in charge. Feel the wave rise, crest, and begin—even slightly—to recede. That recession is the evidence that you are not the feeling. You are the one watching the feeling. And the one who watches has options that the feeling does not.

In those ten seconds, you can ask: Will this response serve me in an hour? Will I be glad I said this tomorrow morning? Is this action coming from my values or from my reactivity? Am I about to build something or break something? These are not complex questions. A child could ask them. But they cannot be asked inside the reflex. They can only be asked in the pause. And the pause is a skill, not a trait. It must be practiced. It must be installed, one instance at a time, until the nervous system develops a new default—not the suppression of impulse but the sovereignty over it.

Why This Practice Fails—and Why the Failing Is the Practice

You will fail at this. Often. You will send the reply before the pause. You will eat the thing before the question. You will react before the gap has time to open. This is not evidence that the practice does not work. It is evidence that you are training a reflex that years of unexamined reactivity have wired in the opposite direction. The wiring does not reverse in a week. It reverses through repetition—through the accumulation of instances where the pause held, even partially, even for five seconds instead of ten, even after you failed the last three times.

The failure is part of the training. This is not a platitude. It is a structural fact. Every time you fail at the pause, you create an opportunity to notice the failure, which is itself a form of the pause—a delayed, after-the-fact pause that says I see what I just did. That noticing is not as good as catching it in real time. But it is immeasurably better than not noticing at all, which is how most people live: reacting, forgetting, reacting, forgetting, in an endless loop that never interrupts itself long enough to produce change.

The practice is not perfection. The practice is resumption. You fail. You notice. You resume. You fail less. You notice sooner. You resume faster. Over time, the gap widens. Over time, the pause becomes reflexive—not because the impulses have stopped, but because you have trained a second reflex, a watcher, that fires alongside the first and gives you the fraction of a second you need to choose rather than merely react.

That fraction is the whole game. Guard it accordingly.

• • •

V. MEASURE BY INTEGRITY, NOT APPLAUSE

The Only Metric That Cannot Be Manipulated

 There are two ways to measure the quality of a day. One is external: Did anyone notice? Did anyone approve? Did the numbers go up? Did the audience respond? Did the boss acknowledge? Did the post perform? Did the effort produce a visible, shareable, quantifiable result that other people can see and validate? This metric is available, immediate, and addictive. It is also a weather pattern—shifting constantly, governed by forces entirely outside your control, and about as reliable as a foundation as a cloud.

The other metric is internal: Did I act in accordance with my own standards today? Not someone else’s standards. Not the market’s. Not my industry’s. Not my social circle’s. Mine. The standards I set for myself when I was being honest about what kind of person I wanted to be—before the pressure to perform for others crowded out the quieter, more durable question of what I owe myself.

If the answer is yes—if you trained when you said you would, told the truth when it was expensive, did the work no one will see, kept the promise no one would have enforced, held the line that no one was watching—then the day was a success. Regardless of whether anyone noticed. Regardless of whether the market responded. Regardless of whether the effort produced anything the world can measure. The day was a success because you met your own standard, and your standard is the only metric that cannot be gamed, manipulated, or revoked.

If the answer is no—if you lowered the bar, cut the corner, softened the truth, skipped the commitment, chose the comfortable option when you knew the harder one was right—then no amount of external success repairs the deficit. You can receive the promotion and know you didn’t earn it. You can get the applause and know the performance was hollow. You can win the argument and know you didn’t believe what you said. The world may not see the gap. You will. And you are the one who has to live inside it.

Applause is a weather pattern. Integrity is architecture. One shifts with the wind. The other holds when the wind arrives.

The Cost of This Metric

Measuring by integrity rather than applause will cost you. This is not a hypothetical cost. It is a real one, and it should be stated plainly so that you choose it with open eyes rather than discovering it later and feeling betrayed.

It will cost you promotions, when the promotion requires you to say what you do not believe or to perform enthusiasm you do not feel. It will cost you friendships, when the friendship depends on your agreement and you can no longer provide it honestly. It will cost you followers, when the audience wants comfort and you can only offer truth. It will cost you invitations, when the room runs on consensus and your presence disrupts it. It will cost you the warm, easy feeling of being liked by everyone, which is a feeling that can only be sustained by a person who has agreed to be no one in particular.

What it buys is something none of those things can provide, individually or collectively: the ability to look at yourself without flinching.

That ability is not a luxury. It is the foundation of every other practice in this chapter. The person who cannot look at herself honestly cannot keep the ledger. The person who cannot sit with his own reflection cannot sustain the pause. The person who measures herself against an external audience is always performing, and a performer cannot rehearse adversity in advance because the performer’s job is to pretend that adversity will not come.

Integrity is the load-bearing wall. Everything else is decoration. Build accordingly.

• • •

VI. TELL SMALLER TRUTHS SO YOU CAN TELL LARGER ONES

The Discipline of Clearing the Throat

 You will not wake up one morning and suddenly possess the ability to tell the hard truth—to your partner, to your employer, to your family, to yourself. Nobody does. The capacity for costly honesty is not a talent. It is a skill, and like every skill, it is built incrementally, starting with repetitions so small they seem trivial. They are not trivial. They are the foundation.

Start here: stop exaggerating stories. The fish was not that big. The meeting was not that disastrous. The insult was not that severe. The accomplishment was not that impressive. When you catch yourself inflating a detail for effect—for the laugh, for the sympathy, for the impression—stop. Correct it. Say the actual thing. This will feel like nothing. It is not nothing. It is the first time you have chosen accuracy over impact, truth over performance, the real thing over the version that gets a better reaction. That choice, made enough times, rewires the relationship between your mouth and your mind. The default shifts, slowly, from what will land well to what actually happened.

Stop the convenient omission. The thing you leave out of the story because including it would make you look worse—include it. The context you withhold because it complicates the narrative you prefer—provide it. The detail you skip because it weakens your case—state it. Each omission, no matter how small, is a lie by subtraction. It trains the same reflex as the explicit lie: the reflex to curate rather than to communicate. And a curated life, as we have seen, is a counterfeit life, convincing from the outside and corroding from within.

Stop the performative agreement. When someone states an opinion you do not share and you nod along because disagreement feels costly, you are not being polite. You are practicing cowardice. You are training the reflex that will, when the stakes are higher, prevent you from telling your partner the truth she needs to hear, your colleague the feedback that would save the project, your friend the honest assessment that might save him years of misdirection. Every nodded agreement you do not mean is a rehearsal for the silence that will cost you when it matters.

The Throat Accustomed to Truth

There is a reason this practice begins with the trivial. A throat that has never spoken difficult words cannot suddenly produce them under pressure. It seizes. It hedges. It wraps the truth in so many qualifications that the truth suffocates before it reaches the listener. You have seen this—in yourself or in others—the painful, circuitous delivery of a point that could have been stated in one sentence, diluted beyond recognition because the speaker’s throat was not trained for the weight of direct speech.

A throat accustomed to truth can deliver hard news without cruelty, because it has practiced the calibration between honesty and brutality. It knows, from experience, that truth does not require a weapon’s edge to be effective. It requires clarity and a steady voice and the willingness to let the words land without rushing to soften the impact. That calibration is a skill. It is developed through hundreds of small, low-stakes moments of choosing accuracy—at dinner, in passing conversation, in the daily texture of life where the consequences of honesty are minor and the habit being built is invaluable.

A throat accustomed to evasion, by contrast, chokes on everything that matters. When the marriage needs a hard conversation, it cannot deliver one. When the career demands a boundary, it cannot set one. When the friendship requires a confrontation, it cannot initiate one. The words are there. The understanding is there. The courage is not—because courage, in speech, is a physical capacity as much as a moral one, and the physical capacity was never developed. The small lies trained the throat for retreat. And now, at the moment it matters most, retreat is all it knows.

Do not wait for the large truth to arrive before you begin training. By then, it will be too late. The throat will not be ready. Begin today, with the smallest truth you have been avoiding, and let the practice build from there. The words will come easier. The flinch will grow shorter. And one day—not tomorrow, but one day—you will say something that costs you something real, and you will discover that your voice held, and that the world did not end, and that you are standing on ground you built one small truth at a time.

• • •

VII. PAIN AS THE FILTER FOR SERIOUSNESS

The One Question That Saves Years

 Before committing to any goal, relationship, venture, or change—before investing time you cannot recover and energy you cannot borrow back—there is one question worth asking. It is not the question most people ask, which is do I want this. We have already established, in Part One, that wanting is cheap and that most people who say they want something are in love with the fantasy of the outcome rather than willing to pay the reality of the cost. The question that actually matters is different. It is harder. And it saves more time than any productivity system ever devised.

The question is: Am I willing to pay the specific pain this will cost?

Not the abstract pain. Not the romanticized difficulty. The specific, concrete, daily, boring, inglorious pain. The predawn mornings. The financial exposure. The months of no visible progress. The rejection. The solitude. The social cost of being misunderstood. The ego cost of being bad at something before you are good at it. The relational cost of saying no to things that would make you popular and yes to things that make you alone. The physical cost of showing up when you do not want to. The emotional cost of confronting yourself in the ledger every evening and discovering, again, that you fell short.

If, having looked at the specific cost, the answer is yes—genuinely yes, not the optimistic yes of a Monday morning or the inspired yes that follows a podcast but the sober, informed, eyes-open yes of a person who has counted the price and decided to pay it—then proceed. Proceed with everything you have. You have a commitment. It is real. It will hurt, and the hurt is the proof that it is real, and you have chosen it, and that choice is the foundation upon which everything durable is built.

If the answer is no—if, having looked at the specific cost, you know you will not pay it, not because you cannot but because you will not—then stop pretending. Stop telling people you are working on it. Stop telling yourself you will start next month. Stop occupying the goal with your attention while refusing to occupy it with your effort. Release it. Let it go. Grieve it if you must—the mourning of an unlived possibility is a real and honorable pain—but stop carrying it as a commitment when it is, in truth, a decoration.

The pretending is more expensive than the admission. It costs you the time you spend maintaining the fiction. It costs you the self-trust you erode each day the gap between claim and action widens. It costs you the energy that could be directed toward something you are actually willing to pay for. And it costs you the clarity that comes from knowing, with precision, what you have chosen and what you have released—a clarity that most people never experience because they are carrying forty aspirations and paying for three.

This single question, asked honestly, will save you more years of your life than any strategy, hack, or system. Because it eliminates the single greatest source of wasted time: pursuing things you were never willing to pay for.

Ask the question. Answer it honestly. And then live the answer—not the version that makes you feel ambitious, but the version that makes you act.

• • •

THE QUIET EDGE

 You have now read the thesis, faced the forge, and received the tools.

Nothing external has changed. The economy is the same. Your body is the same. Your relationships are the same. Your bank account, your inbox, your obligations, your commute, your living situation, the face in the mirror—all the same. The world did not rearrange itself because you read something. It never does.

What has changed—if anything has changed—is internal, and it is this: you can no longer pretend you didn’t know.

The comfortable ignorance is gone. You may choose to act on what you now know, or you may choose to set it aside. But you cannot un-know it. You cannot return to the clean, unburdened state of a person who has never been told that pain is the price and that he has been refusing to pay it. That innocence is over. What replaces it is a choice—the oldest choice, the only choice that ultimately matters: whether you will select the pain or wait for it to select you.

The difference between those two experiences is the difference between a life you built and a life that happened to you. The difference between a body you forged and a body you inherited by default. The difference between a character that was tested and held, and a character that was never tested and therefore never existed in any meaningful sense. The difference between arriving at the end and knowing you paid full price for what you have, and arriving at the end with a drawer full of receipts for things you meant to do and comforts you chose instead.

 This is the quiet edge. It is not dramatic. It does not announce itself. From the outside, the person who possesses it looks like anyone else—perhaps a little steadier, a little harder to rattle, a little less interested in the things that consume everyone else’s attention. But from the inside, the difference is total. He has stopped bargaining with reality. He has stopped demanding that life be fair, comfortable, or easy as a precondition for his engagement. He has accepted the toll—fully, soberly, without resentment—and in that acceptance, he has gained something that cannot be purchased, inherited, or conferred:

The ability to stand upright in a world that is always, in some measure, falling.

 That is the edge. Not talent. Not luck. Not circumstance.

Just the willingness to stop flinching.

Now close this, and go do something that hurts... on purpose.

 • • •

END OF PART THREE

END OF THE TOLL

 “The difference between success and failure is one’s willingness to accept pain.”