To live any life worth living, we must learn to love suffering.

The concept is strange, but there is joy that shows up when you choose to do hard things on purpose. The simplest way I can explain it is the cold water effect.

Jumping into a cold lake for no reason just sucks. But picture a long summer hike to a mountaintop lake. You sweat through your clothes, swat away bugs, and by the time you reach the top you’re dusty, hot, and worn out. Then you see the water. Relief washes over you before you even dive in, and when you do, it feels incredible. The effort is exactly what makes it worth it, and that contrast is the whole point.

That’s the upside of voluntary discomfort, and the Stoics understood it better than most people do today. Every time you push through something hard, you prove the doubting voice in your head wrong, and that proof gives you the resolve to take on something bigger next time. But the acceptance of suffering is a double-edged sword.

The trap is turning struggle into your whole personality. You start chasing discomfort for its own sake and never let yourself feel good about anything. Like a dopamine-starved masochist, you never congratulate yourself. You wear “toughness” like a badge and call it virtue, when really it’s just fear that if you stop to pat yourself on the back, you might stop moving forward.

But even the Stoics, the original advocates for hard things, never confused suffering with virtue. Seneca put it plainly:

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“We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.”
Seneca, Letters from a Stoic

Most of the pain we carry isn’t the work itself, it’s the story we pile on top of it. Stoicism was never about chasing pain. It’s about choosing the right pain: the kind that buys freedom, builds competence, and makes the next version of you more resilient. Everything past that is suffering you manufactured.

Stoicism also teaches us to focus only on what we can control. The ‘struggle’ that comes with chasing a hard goal is unavoidable. But the extra layer of self-punishment, the refusal to ever feel good, is a choice. Choosing to live in needless misery when you don’t have to isn’t admirable. It’s foolish.

And if you never celebrate progress, you end up on the same hamster wheel entrepreneurs love to mock corporate people for running on. Ironically both groups end up in the matrix: perpetual suffering with no pay-off.

To make a long point short: celebrate the small wins. You don’t need to throw a party every time you accomplish something—but give yourself some grace and a pat on the back from time to time, for heaven’s sake.

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idea of the week 💡

Credit: ideabrowser.com

  • Problem: Small medical and dental clinics waste a ridiculous amount of time doing insurance benefit checks the same way giant hospitals do. Front desk staff call payers, sit on hold, fight automated menus, and try to decode coverage details one patient at a time. A 1 to 5 provider clinic can burn 10 hours a week here. Every missed or sloppy check risks a denied claim worth $200 to $2,000.

  • Idea: Donedial is a voice agent that runs pre-visit benefit confirmation end to end. Staff drop patient and plan details into a dashboard, the agent calls the insurer, navigates the menu tree, handles the hold time, and returns a clean breakdown in a few minutes. Coverage status, expected out of pocket costs, and red flags that trigger denials show up as structured output before the appointment.

  • How it works (wedge): Start with one payer. Reverse engineer the IVR paths, build the calling layer on a live voice API, and make the product earn its keep by absorbing waits, drop calls, and changing menus. Use transcription plus an LLM to turn messy spoken answers into structured fields. Run pilots with a handful of offices, validate against manual checks, then expand payer by payer. Each new payer adds data and increases accuracy.

  • How it makes money: $200 per provider per month. One prevented denial pays for the tool. Distribution is office manager Facebook groups, billing community forums, and partnerships with practice management platforms like Dentrix and Eaglesoft.

  • Why it might fail: Accuracy is everything. If the output feels unreliable, clinics will go right back to humans on the phone. The only way through is tight scoping, relentless validation, and building a dataset payer by payer instead of pretending you can cover the entire insurance world on day one.

workouts this week

at-home

12-minute AMRAP:

  • 10 push-ups

  • 15 air squats

  • 10 sit-ups

  • 8 burpees

gym

Strength + conditioning. 4 rounds:

  • Trap bar deadlift: 6 reps (moderate-heavy)

  • Dumbbell incline press: 10 reps

  • Chest-supported row: 10 reps

  • Assault bike: 45 seconds hard

Rest 90 seconds between rounds.

outdoors

  • 10-minute easy jog (warm-up)

  • 5 rounds: 2-minute run (hard), 1-minute walk (recover)

  • 5-minute walk (cool-down)

tweet of the week

used this life hack in many times

my plugs

every second counts

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