Chosen Suffering

In April 2025, I drove to Columbus, Ohio, to meet with legendary wrestling Coach Tom Ryan...

Chosen Suffering

In April 2025, I drove to Columbus, Ohio, to meet with legendary wrestling Coach Tom Ryan. Multiple people had told me that if I wanted to meet the ultimate "Learning Leader," I needed to talk to him. They were right. Watching his wrestlers move through their morning practice, something struck me about the atmosphere in that room. These athletes weren't just going through the motions. They were choosing to be there, choosing the difficulty, choosing the grind. After practice, Coach Ryan and I sat down for a 90-minute conversation that shifted how I think about human motivation. "Chosen suffering is a fancy word for love," he told me, "because you will suffer the most for the things you love the most."

This gets at something fundamental about how we're built. We're pattern-matching machines, constantly calculating what's worth our effort and what isn't. The interesting thing is that our calculations aren't always rational. We don't optimize for comfort or ease. We optimize for meaning. Watch a parent staying up all night with a sick child. That's not rational behavior if you're trying to maximize sleep or minimize stress. But it makes sense when you understand the underlying motivation. The parent isn't thinking about cost-benefit analysis. They're responding to something deeper. The same dynamic plays out everywhere. The musician practicing scales for hours, the writer rewriting the same paragraph twenty times, the coach reviewing game film until their eyes burn. None of this looks efficient from the outside. All of it makes sense when you understand what drives it.

Here's what Coach Ryan understands that most people miss: suffering isn't the point. Love is. Suffering is just what happens when you care about something more than your own comfort. It's a byproduct, not a goal. This flips the script on how we think about difficulty. Instead of asking "How can I avoid this?" we might say "What does my willingness to endure this tell me about what I actually value?" Your tolerance for discomfort becomes a tool for understanding yourself. The people who seem to have endless energy for certain activities aren't superhuman. They've just found something they love enough to suffer for. The suffering doesn't feel like suffering when it's in service of something that matters.