Recruit Them

Frustration and failure are going to travel with you the entire way. Stop trying to lose them on the road.

They are not obstacles blocking the path to the work. They are companions for the whole length of it. Every man doing anything hard has them walking alongside — and the only question that matters is whether they walk as enemies you flee or allies you put to use.

Recruit them.

Frustration is not proof you are failing. It is the friction of a man pressing against his own edge, and perseverance is what gets born from it. Failure is not the end of the road. It is the most honest teacher you will ever have, and wisdom is what it leaves behind.

Run from them, and you run from the only two forces that were ever going to grow you. Turn and put them to work, and they build the exact strength you were chasing all along.

This is the whole difference between the men who get there and the men who do not. The soft, the comfortable, the ones always scanning for the exit — they treat frustration as a stop sign and failure as a verdict. So they flee both, and they never reach what was waiting on the far side of them.

Only the man willing to walk with frustration and failure unlocks what they were guarding.

So stop running from your two best allies.

Turn around. Put them to work.

"What is to give light must endure burning." — Viktor Frankl