Pain is Scary, but Quitting is Scarier

All my life, I’ve been a quitter.

I quit Karate when I was a kid, I quit Boy Scouts when I got to college, I quit the gym when I started my new martial arts routine, and I quit running for a few months when I did my delivery job. And when I got that delivery job, I quit looking for better jobs that would actually give me some degree of professional satisfaction.

Even now, I still quit way too easily. I hate having the drive for something, then hitting a mental wall that throws me out of my rhythm. Part of it is the fact that pain sucks. Physical and mental.

But the other part of it is the fact that I never prepared myself not to quit.

David Goggins talks about how he organizes his “garage” in his mind. It’s clean, militant, simple. He spends two hours a night meditating, cleaning his mental garage. By doing this, Goggins is able to make space for what he needs to work on and improve. He can pick out useful tools that’ll help him accomplish those goals.

It’s a novel concept to me. It reminds me of Marcus Aurelius’s “Inner Citadel,” though his reason for building a castle in his brain was to strategically acquire tranquility. I never thought that you could reverse-personify your mind like that, but human beings are strange creatures that can seemingly alter universe’s limitations.

It’s in the most troublesome parts of my life that I remind myself how painful quitting is in retrospect. How I could’ve had so much more by now if I didn’t give up some of my pursuits, good habits, and ambitions. That this isn’t just the typical FOMO bullshit, but that I’ve missed out on my true, personal goals and aspirations from this.

Still, I’m grateful for having that past experience as a quitter, because now I know the price that is paid by always giving up.

And here’s another thing: I’m a guy that when he goes shopping, always looks for the best value.

So, I’m not paying that ridiculous price ever again.