TLDR: How much pain are you willing to endure to minimize regrets and to realize your potential? The beta region is the space between “not so bad” and never finding out.
People often avoid temporary pain in favor of enduring something that’s “not so bad.”
I’m talking about the things that are “just ok,” or “not great, but manageable.”
A job you’re not excited about or a relationship that should be great but somehow isn’t working.
We persist through many things simply because we don’t want to confront the short-term consequences, but sometimes that’s an approach that generates tremendous regret.
I’ll back up.
Imagine you’re going to lunch and the restaurant is 20 minutes away—you spend the time and walk it out.
Then your friend calls and changes the restaurant to a 40-minute walk, and you decide to spend the $20 on a cab.
The 40-minute walk is too much work so you opt for a different approach, but when you take a car to the second place, you pass right by the first spot in 10 minutes instead of 20.
This is the beta region.
The space where the temporary pain and work isn’t so bad, so you endure it even if the outcome isn’t nearly as good.
People often get stuck on these 20-minute walks for their entire lives, enduring the “just ok” and “not so bad” rather than taking on the temporary pain required to change course.
We stay in jobs we don’t love longer than we should, we stay in relationships that we shouldn’t, and we fail to realize our potential because we are unwilling to experience a deeper pain for a shorter period of time, even with our happiness as the opportunity cost.
Take the example of a job.
You might have a good job, one that keeps you fairly happy. Staying in that job is the easy thing to do, but you may never get where you know you want to go.
Quitting on the other hand is deeply painful, but it may be the catalyst you need to force you into action, erasing the regret of never trying and potentially altering your life’s trajectory to one that you are happier with.
The question is how much pain is too much pain?
What are you willing to endure to minimize regrets and to realize your potential?
See you Monday.
PS: My first book, Inevitable, is now available on Amazon.
About Inevitable. Founders nor career professionals have the time to read every book or listen to every podcast on operating with an entrepreneur's mindset. The goal with Inevitable was to create a powerful cliff notes style handbook, distilling advice from around the tech world on building generational companies. At the end of each chapter there is a QR code to a digital repository with the full-length works if you do choose to go deeper on any given topic.