If you’re going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don’t even start

How many times have you said yes too easily, committed to things you really dint have an attachment for, did things just to impress other people? Most people today don't need a 'YES' or a 'NO'. We need to figure out if it is a "HELL YES" or a "NO" and that is what Charles Bukowski is trying to point out when he says

" If you’re going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don’t even start"

Most of us say yes to much stuff, and then, we let these little mediocre things fill our lives… The problem is, when that occasional, 'oh my god, hell yeah!' stuff comes along, you don't have enough time to give it the attention that you should because you have said yes to too much little, half-ass stuff, right?

"This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery — isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. And, you’ll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. If you’re going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It’s the only good fight there is."

So, if it's a hell yes, does that mean things will come easy for you? certainly NO, 

WITH PASSION COMES PAIN

 The author and poet Charles Bukowski once said: “Find what you love and let it kill you.” Bukowski was a shameless drinker, womanizer, and all-around fuck up. He would get drunk on stage at his poetry readings and verbally abuse his audience. He gambled a lot of his money away and had an unfortunate habit of exposing himself in public. But underneath Bukowski’s disgusting exterior was a deep and introspective man with more character than most. Bukowski spent most of his life broke, drunk, and getting fired from various jobs. Eventually, he ended up working in a post office filing letter. All his life he wrote fruitlessly, a total unknown and a loser. He wrote for almost 30 years before finally getting his first book deal. It was a meager deal. When accepting it, he wrote, “I have one of two choices—stay in the post office and go crazy … or stay out here and play at writer and starve. I have decided to starve.”

In my opinion, the honesty in his writing—his fears, failures, regrets, self-destruction, emotional dysfunction—it is unparalleled. He will tell you the best and worst of himself without flinching, without shifting his eyes or even muttering a “sorry about that” as an afterthought. He wrote about both shame and pride without qualification. His writing was equanimous—a silent embrace of the horrible and beautiful man that he was. And what Bukowski understood, which most people don’t, is that the best things in life can sometimes be ugly.

Life is messy, and we’re all a little screwed up in our own special snowflake kind of way. He never understood the baby boomer obsession with peace and happiness or the idealism that came along with it. He understood that you don’t get one side without the other. You don’t get love without pain. You don’t get meaning and profundity without sacrifice. what Bukowski understood more than most was that doing what you love is not always loving what you do. There’s an inherent sacrifice to it. Just like choosing a spouse, it’s not choosing someone who makes you happy all the time, it’s choosing somebody who you want to be with even when they’re pissing you off.

Just like few of us experience love at first sight, few will experience passion and meaning at first experience. Like a relationship, we must build it from scratch, piece-by-piece, until after years of brick and sweat, it can stand on its own. And once we’re there, like a plane in full nosedive, we let it take us to our grave, holding hands, blanketed upon the earth in a laughing roar of wind and fire and love. “We’re here to laugh at the odds,” Bukowski said, “and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.” And when Death does come, how will he take you? If I ask you, “What do you want out of life?” and you say something like, “I want to be happy and have a great family and a job I like,” it’s so vague and unclear that it doesn’t even mean anything. A more interesting question, a question that perhaps you’ve never considered before, is what pain do you want in your life? What are you willing to struggle for? Because that seems to be a greater determinant of how our lives turn out.

Everybody wants to have an amazing job and financial independence—but not everyone wants to suffer through 60-hour work weeks, long commutes, obnoxious paperwork, to navigate arbitrary corporate hierarchies and the blasé confines of an infinite cubicle hell. People want to be rich without the risk, without the sacrifice, without the delayed gratification necessary to accumulate wealth.

Happiness requires struggle.

At the core of all human behaviour, our needs are more or less similar. Positive experience is easy to handle. It’s negative experience that we all, by definition, struggle with. Therefore, what we get out of life is not determined by the good feelings we desire but by what bad feelings we’re willing and able to sustain to get us to those good feelings. People want an amazing physique. But you don’t end up with one unless you legitimately appreciate the pain and physical stress that comes with living inside a gym for hour upon hour, unless you love calculating and calibrating the food you eat, planning your life out in tiny, plate-sized portions. People want to start their own business or become financially independent. But you don’t end up a successful entrepreneur unless you find a way to appreciate the risk, the uncertainty, the repeated failures, and working insane hours on something you have no idea whether will be successful or not.

What determines your success isn’t “What do you want to enjoy?” The question is, “What pain do you want to sustain?” The quality of your life is not determined by the quality of your positive experiences but the quality of your negative experiences. And to get good at dealing with negative experiences is to get good at dealing with life. If you want the benefits of something in life, you have to also want the costs. “How do you choose to suffer?”, What is the pain that you want to sustain? That answer will actually get you somewhere. Who you are is defined by the values you are willing to struggle for? People who enjoy the struggles of a gym are the ones who get in good shape.

People who enjoy long workweeks and the politics of the corporate ladder are the ones who move up it.

People who enjoy the stresses and uncertainty of the starving artist lifestyle are ultimately the ones who live it and make it. This is not a call for willpower or “grit.” This is not another admonishment of “no pain, no gain.” This is the most simple and basic component of life: our struggles determine our  successes. So, choose your struggles wisely.

If you’re going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don’t even start