If I feel more pain, I must be progressing more

During a recent conversation, a friend proudly shared how intensely he’s been grinding in coding. He declared, “I’ve been coding six days a week, hoping to compress three years of software engineering skills into one.”

These days, I find such announcements unnecessary. What’s the point of showing off? What is there to prove? It’s not that I want to discredit his hard work, but coding six days a week is just a regular routine for me.

I wonder, does proving this point make people feel better or more self-assured about enduring the grind?

For me, learning engineering is driven by intrinsic motivation and personal interest. Working at a tiny tiny startup aligned with my interests naturally fuels my passion for learning. With the pressure to survive, it simply becomes a daily habit, including weekends. That’s it — nothing to prove, and nothing to broadcast. When learning and working become a flow of life, I wonder if comparing oneself to others and self-judgment are just another moment of distractions.

When work doesn’t feel like a burden, it becomes indistinguishable from life — just a continuation of doing what I’m interested in. It brings me peace and joy, like engaging in a daily intellectual exercise and contributing to beautiful creations in the world.

Reflecting on the conversation, I realized that, on the surface, my friend and I might seem similar — we both aim to bridge the gap in our skills quickly. But I’ve already found joy in the process of trying, not just in the shortened path to the goal.

A founder in our incubator has a sarcastic term for the culture in San Francisco: “hustle porn.” Everyone is eager to showcase how hard they’re working, but this relentless pursuit often leads to serious physical health issues. We’ve witnessed some alarming cases — successful investors so overwhelmed by stress that they experience frequent vomiting during tough times. While everyone is focused on moving fast, there’s little guidance on how to work sustainably, both physically and emotionally, over the long term. Those qualities are called discipline and patience. The drive to succeed can blur the line between short-term victories and true, lasting success.

Society has sold us the idea that there’s no such thing as a free lunch, creating two big illusions: (1) If I feel more pain, I must be progressing more. (2) If I want to progress, I must feel pain.

But is that really true?

Many of us think trying is hard and painful, but it can be hard yet joyful. Doing hard things don’t equate to absolute pain. Depending on personal motivation, hard things and pain aren’t dot products of parallel vectors. The key difference lies in mindset: a result-oriented mindset (“I’ll be happy when I get there”) versus a process-oriented one (“I’m happy because I’m trying to get there”).

In fact, I’m actually arguing that having a none grinding mindset allows me to perform better. In the high-pressure environment of startup life, I’ve learned that maintaining my chill and happiness actually boosts my productivity. Without the burden of mental barriers, it’s easier to dive into focused work. This is just a basic concept called “desired difficulty”. Moreover, psychology has shown that stress narrows our mindset, leading to poorer decision-making. It’s really not that strong as a correlation between pain and optimal performance. The correlation between pain and optimal performance isn’t as strong as some might think. That simply doesn’t make psychological and biological sense.

This realization led me to wonder — why not apply this mindset to all aspects of my life?

I realized I’ve been biased by a result-oriented mindset in other areas. For example, in one relationship, I kept questioning myself, “Why can’t I solve this problem, even though I’ve tried so hard for so long?”

I was clouded by fear of a bad outcome, disappointment in my abilities, and confusion from others. It felt like a knot in my heart every day. I worried that trying would waste my time and make me look foolish and laughed by others. But isn’t this just another instance of overemphasizing winning while forgetting to enjoy the game?

Life is a game. Trying to win is important, but the joy comes from simply playing. It’s the fun of continuous play that will carry me forward to the long term success.