🕺🏻 The Hidden Trap of a High Tolerance for Discomfort

For most of my life, I was proud of my high tolerance for discomfort. It felt like a superpower. I expected it to be hard if I started something. I expected pain, struggle, and resistance—but I pushed through. And on the other side of that suffering, I found success. This was my approach to business, training, and daily tasks.

This mindset wasn’t unique to me. I grew up in a post-Soviet society where perseverance wasn’t just a virtue—it was the only way forward. Everyone operated under the same rule: struggle is inevitable, and only those who endure it deserve success.

Then I moved to the U.S.

For the first time, I encountered people who didn’t see suffering as a prerequisite for achievement. They would quit reading a book after ten pages if it wasn’t interesting. They would leave a toxic job without feeling the need to “prove” anything. At first, I saw this as weakness. They lacked perseverance. They weren’t willing to push through discomfort. How could they expect to succeed?

Yet, many did.

Some quit books quickly, but read more great ones. Some dropped out of college, only to start successful businesses. Some failed at multiple startups, but launched the right one. They weren’t just giving up—they were focusing their energy toward what mattered to them.

This forced me to ask a hard question: where is the line between perseverance and pointless suffering? When does enduring discomfort make you stronger, and when does it keep you stuck?

To answer that, I had to examine why I was pushing through in the first place. My default mindset wasn’t just “hard work leads to results.” It was deeper. I believed results couldn’t exist without struggle.

Then I saw examples where that was not the case.

One of the first cracks in my belief system came through boxing. I trained for 20 years with many coaches, most shaped by the same mindset: “hard training, easy fight.” They pushed me to exhaustion, convinced pain was the only path to improvement. Until I met a US coach who trained differently. His goal wasn’t to break me—it was to make training enjoyable. I dismissed it as nonsense and stayed with him only to give myself a break and rest until I found a proper coach who knew how to do things right. But six months later, my technique improved more than ever. I barely noticed the effort.

The same thing happened in business. One of my investors once joked, "George, I finally figured you out—you like suffering. You seek it, and you find it." I laughed, but the comment stuck with me because it was true. I wasn't just working hard—I was choosing the hardest path, over and over, as if that alone gave it significance.

I started picking the paths I enjoy. Before, if I had two options, I'd automatically pick the hardest one, believing it was obviously the right choice.

This approach saved me so much energy that I focused on things that worked easily, which gave me better results.

It’s like wearing shoes two sizes too small to prove you can walk in them. You can push through and take pride in your perseverance. But sometimes, the real key to moving forward isn’t endurance—it’s finding the right shoes to walk farther and enjoy the journey.

PS In my previous newsletter, I dug deeper into some of the roots of this issue.

Until next Sunday,
George Levin
^{LinkedIn | Consulting}