The Capacity to take Pain
The Punishment of Leadership
It was a cool summer morning in the desert. Vikid got himself some coffee and headed to work.
Something turned up on his feed…
He wasn’t too concerned with “achieving greatness” though what Mr. Dyson said, resonated strongly.
And, it wasn’t about “excellence” either.
It was the capacity to take pain.
The capacity for a loved one to look at you coldly, like you’re a failure, to accuse you of being absent or not caring, to say things deeply hurtful, and yet, to have the capacity to do what needs to be done.
Stress is a very strong type of punishment.
It’s insidious because it’s constant, it eats you from the inside, calcifying your arteries, robbing you of sleep and disrupting your hormonal balance.
Leadership is also a form of punishment, let me explain why.
For a start, we human beings are naturally quite diverse and have conflicting desires. Each person generally has a different idea about how to get things done due to a variety of reasons. Some people think a beach holiday is a perfect way to relax, while others would prefer to climb an ice-capped mountain, for example.
When you become a leader of a group of people in any type of organization, one has to set a goal or direction that you want the group to move in. And even if everyone agrees upon the goal, which they won’t, they most definitely won’t agree upon the way to get there.
It’s a recipe for conflict. The leader then becomes nothing much more than a conflict resolution specialist.
Conflict resolution is pain.
You have to get people to do what they don’t want to, for the benefit of everyone as a whole, and in this hyper-individualized world, it is basically a very big ball ache.
Thus there are very few real leaders. Most are fakes, in positions of power with nothing more than self aggrandizement / enrichment at play.
It’s also why psychopaths do very well as leaders. They have an infinite capacity to take pain because they effectively don’t feel it. Most world leaders fit this profile.
If you are in the private sector, there is the pain of competition. Most of it is unfair competition. You have to compete with sovereign powers and mafias, who have endless amounts of cash and very little in the way of scruples. You have to deal with one-sided contracts. The modern form of indebted servitude.
That’s heavy pain.
The pain usually comes in the way of cashflow (or the lack of it). Sovereigns create their own cash. Mafias extort it. You, on the other hand, have to fight for it in the gladiators arena everyday, any blow risking fatality.
Finally but not exhaustively, for we could go on about this forever, you have to compete with the salaried man (or woman).
The salaried man is relaxed.
He goes on pleasant vacations with his wife (or husband) and family. He takes weekends off, watches TV, and hangs out in sports bars with his friends. He changes jobs, moves the family to exotic locations.
In contrast, your partner, looks at you as if you are a twat. You get compared with the salaried man.
This is pain.
Most often you cannot explain why, because the real leader shields his family from the onslaught, creating a bubble of pleasantness for them to live in.
This is real pain.
Vikid thought, this is what Dyson was talking about. Yeah, he makes $300m a year now, a good prize. But most leaders will not. They will have to make unpleasant decisions day to day, to push their tribe towards some (usually abstract) goal.
It’s the dilemma of leadership.
The dilemma of Why? Is it for the prize or is it something else? How much pain to tolerate? And is it worth it?
It’s a question only you can answer, and it’s a function of your capacity to take pain.
And that’s,