For a long time, I thought success looked like ease. I wanted to remove every obstacle, optimize every system, and protect myself from uncomfortable jams. In a way, it made sense. I still understand the impulse. But I also realized that looking for ease couldn’t possibly prepare me to be resilient when the rock met the hard place.
Since I had that wake-up call, I've been deliberately choosing hard things: things I'm not sure I can finish, situations where the outcome isn't guaranteed, physical challenges with my ego on the line.
It’s absolutely one of the best business decisions I've made.
Pressure Reveals Your Response
When a deal falls apart, a key hire walks out the door, or the market shifts and your assumptions no longer hold, none of us get time to prepare. We respond with whatever is already wired into us.
Most people optimistically assume they'll rise to the occasion. Under real pressure, we default to our most practiced patterns.
There's a name for the deliberate practice of rehearing challenges: stress inoculation. It's the framework behind how military units, elite athletes, and first responders train. The idea is that controlled, repeated exposure to hard conditions builds the neural pathways that keep you functional when conditions get genuinely dangerous.
You're not just toughening up; you're also pre-loading your response so that when real pressure hits, handling it becomes a reflex.
Voluntary discomfort is a version of that training. You're teaching yourself that hard is survivable, that discomfort has an end, and that you can keep functioning even when everything in you wants to stop.
I’ve been there and (somehow) keep going back for me.
Stress Inoculation for Business Leaders
Leadership under pressure is a skill. Like any skill, it degrades without practice and sharpens with repetition. The problem is we can't manufacture a genuine crisis on demand (and wouldn’t want to), but we can manufacture difficulty.
Signing up for something you're not sure you can finish puts you in contact with the same psychological terrain you'll face when the stakes are high. The specific challenge doesn’t particularly matter. What matters is that it's real, it's hard, and you chose it anyway.
Voluntary suffering is categorically different from suffering that happens to you. You're training your decision-making under duress. Every time you follow through on something hard that you didn't have to do, you're reinforcing a self-concept: I'm someone who doesn't quit when it gets uncomfortable.
Over time, strengthening that identity changes how you make decisions, how you lead, and how you respond when the choice is out of your hands.
The Trap of Chasing Comfort at All Costs
Once you reach a certain level, you start unconsciously engineering your life to avoid discomfort. You hire people to handle the hard conversations, stop taking on projects where failure is genuinely possible, and optimize for certainty.
It can feel and look like maturity to hedge so much. Just risk management, right? I’d argue it’s a recipe for atrophy.
The capacity to handle pressure isn't something you accumulate once and call it done. It requires maintenance and routine effort, just like building muscle.
Voluntary suffering is how I cultivate that in myself.
What Voluntary Suffering Looks Like in Practice
Now, not everyone will pick the same challenges I do. You don't have to run an ultramarathon to get the benefit. But the challenge you choose does need to meet a few basic criteria to work as training:
Uncertain. If you already know you can do it, you're not building anything new. The point is to find something where the outcome is genuinely in question.
Sustained. A single hard moment doesn't rewire much. The stress inoculation effect builds through repeated exposure over time.
Chosen. Not assigned and not accidental. You have to opt in with full awareness of what you're getting into.
Does the outcome matter? Yes and no. Finishing isn't the only metric worth tracking. When a challenge doesn't go the way you planned, the instinct is to file it away as a failure and move on.
I’m saying from experience, though, that an unwanted outcome holds some of the most useful data you can collect on yourself—where your preparation broke down, where your thinking got cloudy under pressure, where you made decisions you wouldn't under normal circumstances.
That information is directly applicable to how you lead and how you build. Don’t waste your failures by not looking closely at them.
Tough times and crises will show up whether we're ready for them or not. It’s our choice whether or not to prepare ourselves to handle them when they come knocking.
What's the hardest thing you've done voluntarily in the last year — and what did it teach you about yourself?