When I was a teenager I developed a passion for practicing martial arts. I started with Karate, and then after few years I moved to Taekwondo and eventually decided to practice some Kung Fu. My goal was to build a strong body and mind. The experience was fun and it also helped to compensate for my underweight appearance—I was always among the youngest and slimmest student if the class in school.

What I experienced in my practice of martial arts gave me a good lesson that I could use it in other areas of life. The beginning is painful and discouraging but if you stick around for a while you will start to love it to the point that if you don’t practice it for a while you badly miss it and want to restart as soon as you can.  

When you first join a martial arts class, your body is not prepared. But still, you have to do most of the 90-minute of group exercise with your fellow students. The group includes a mix of beginners and more advanced students.  So when you are new, while the other students have started months earlier than you and therefor they are more experienced with the usual load of exercise, you struggle through the first sessions to keep up with them. But it’s not the challenge of the first session that forces many students to quit but rather the pain they start to feel from the next day on. Just one day after the first session, you can hardly walk and you feel as if you’ve been beaten by ten people with kicks and punches all over your body.

But the interesting thing is that if you continue to go to the next sessions (which in case of martial arts it’s usually three days a week), you feel better and better every day until your body gets used of the heavy load of the exercise. But if you quit just after the first sessions, you are going to tolerate the pain for 2-4 weeks. And not only that you have to tolerate the physical pain but also the metal pain of guilt and regret that you couldn’t continue.

While this is almost the same with all types of sports, it is also true about any journey that you take in life. Whether when you start a new business, or start learning a new language, going on a diet, etc. it’s just that the length of the start-up period may vary but the experience of pain is common in all of them. For some journeys it’s physical pain, for some other it’s mental and emotional pain and still  for others it’s a combination of them. While for sport it’s usually 4 weeks for the body to get used to the exercise and about six month to see some result in the development of your body, in business it may take you a year to get used the daily challenges of running a business.

So before starting any journey in life, it’s important to prepare yourself for the good pain, the necessary inevitable pain that is the result of being not used to the new load of physical or mental work. But you know that you shouldn’t be discouraged by this pain since this pain is the sign that you are building strength for heavier load and you are getting stronger.