Another weekly dose of Monday Motivation coming right up for you guys. I recently read a random quote online in a forum, and it went something like this:
“If the pain of rejection is acute, the pain of regret is chronic.”
Oh, snap.
Talk about a jab right in the kisser. This is one of the realest one-liners I’ve heard in a long time. Whoever said it, props. I’m not sure if you copied it over from elsewhere or came up with this original banger, but either way…it hits two of the biggest things that make us uncomfortable.
Here’s why.
Other than the fact it whacked me upside my own head like a mom about to wreck her kid, it gets right to a couple of our biggest fears: rejection and regret. It basically says if you worry about one, you’ll end up with the other. Considering most of us worry about rejection, it’s not looking good on what we’ll end up with. If you guessed regret, you get a gold star.
Look, rejection sucks really badly; no one is arguing that. Ladies, give us men a bit of leeway in that regards – if you’re frustrated we’re not always quick on the approach, there’s a reason why. Just like you refuse to do it yourself because no woman should have to get rejected outright by a guy, well… we suffer from the same problem.
But whether you’re approaching someone, or something, the quote’s idea is the exact same. Unless you go for it, you’re going to miss it every time you don’t. And missing it every time, unfortunately, is outright failure. That is, until you get it. But when will you get it? When you go for it. Is your brain fried now?
Let’s try to put it another way. Will you succeed every time you go for something? Hardly, and more than likely you’ll fail on the first few attempts. But all it takes is one success, and your life will change. So you need to get used to the idea of rejection because inevitably, when you go for some things, you’ll come up short.
But if you decide to bail out and just figure you’d rather not deal with it, then of course you won’t fail, but you’ll pick up something new: the pain of regret. You’ll constantly play the “what if” game, and it’ll eat you alive.
So what’s the better choice, rejection or regret? This goes to the original quote. Would you rather have a sharp, acute pain that will go away quickly, or would you rather have a nagging dull throb that just doesn’t seem to go away?
The choice is yours, ladies and gentlemen, and I hope you decide that while temporary pleasure over long-term growth is usually the wrong choice, temporary pain over long-term pain is probably the better decision.