What Are You Willing to Suffer For?
“A man cannot remake himself without suffering, for he is both the marble and the sculptor.”
Demis Hassabis was a chess prodigy at the age of four. By his early teens, he competed at the highest levels and could have pursued a comfortable, prestigious life in that narrow domain. But at thirteen, he did something unusual: he walked away.
He realised that excelling at chess, however impressive, wouldn’t help him solve the problems that truly mattered. So he pivoted—toward computer science, neuroscience, and eventually artificial intelligence.
That decision reveals something essential about meaning: it isn’t about talent or even passion alone. It’s about what you decide is worth the cost of a life.
Hassabis didn’t trade one easy path for another. He chose a harder, longer one. Years of study, uncertainty, failed experiments, financial risk, and relentless effort followed.
Founding DeepMind wasn’t glamorous at the start. The breakthroughs—AlphaGo, AlphaFold and Google buying him out—came much later, after sustained commitment. The Nobel Prize, the knighthood, the recognition: footnotes. (By the way, he’s now the head of Google’s Artificial Intelligence Division and rumoured to be the next Google CEO.)
The real story is that he chose something difficult, meaningful, and consuming, then stayed with it long enough to be transformed.
That’s where any honest conversation about goal setting and behaviour change should begin.
Most of us start the year asking the wrong question: What do I want? Or worse: What would make me happier?
But happiness, as we experience it today, is thin and unreliable.
Aristotle described happiness not as pleasure or comfort, but as eudaimonia—flourishing. A condition of wholeness where the practical needs of life and the deeper needs of the soul are integrated. When either side is neglected, life becomes distorted.
Comfort without meaning breeds restlessness. Ideals without grounding lead to exhaustion.
Yet even flourishing doesn’t fully capture what modern life demands. Because happiness, however refined, cannot sustain us through suffering. Meaning can. Meaning allows us to endure difficulty without bitterness.
As Arthur C. Brooks writes, meaning is built from coherence, purpose, and significance—life making sense, life moving somewhere, life mattering. Without that, even abundance feels unbearable.
Strip it all down, and meaning comes from three things: passion, purpose, and effort. Not inspiration. Not intention. Effort. This is where goals stop being fantasies and become serious.
Passion matters because it reveals what we care about—the inner pull toward something that feels alive. But passion alone isn’t enough. Everyone has interests. Few are willing to endure the friction passion inevitably brings.
The real question isn’t what you want in the upcoming year, but what pain you’re willing to go through to get it.
I love writing—not the idea of being a writer, but the actual work: drafting, rewriting, cutting, publishing, sitting with doubt. That suffering feels meaningful.
However, the idea of speaking at corporate conferences, though lucrative and quite accessible for me, is not something I can bear day in and day out. I can’t labour through the PowerPoint presentations, the headline clichés that must be delivered, and the superficial relationships that follow. At the end of each engagement, I felt purposeless.
Purpose gives suffering direction. It turns private passion into a life-plot. Purpose always points beyond the self—it emerges when what matters to you begins to matter to others.
Nietzsche wrote that he who has a why can bear almost any how. The how is the grind, the boredom, the repetition, the setbacks. The why makes that grind intelligible rather than punishing. Without purpose, effort feels like self-harm. With purpose, it feels like initiation.
Effort is where everything becomes real. Khalil Gibran said it perfectly: work is love made visible. Ideas don’t transform us. Struggle does. We don’t admire people for what they believe, but for what they’ve endured and completed.
Goals that don’t require sacrifice don’t change us. They decorate life, but they don’t shape it.
Which brings me to the second truth about goals: they’re not only about what you achieve, but about who you become.
I’m doing a HYROX race in May—not because I care about the event itself, but because of the person the training demands. It requires stamina, strength, recovery, and most of all, showing up to the training day after day.
It forces me to live differently and uncomfortably for months. The finish line is incidental. The identity forged along the way is the point.
A goal that doesn’t reshape you isn’t worth much.
None of this works without continuity. Nothing meaningful is built in short bursts. Staying is harder than starting. To stay is to pass through boredom, doubt, failure, and repetition.
Modern life worships variety, but depth comes from loyalty—to a craft, a discipline, a way of living.
Without consistency, people drift, negotiating with themselves every morning for motivation. Exhaustion follows when nothing higher pulls us forward. Boredom terrifies us because it reveals a will with nothing to aim at.
So here’s where I land.
A good goal isn’t something you want. It’s something you’re willing to suffer for.
Something that justifies blood, sweat, frustration, and time. Something that changes who you are while you pursue it.
Demis Hassabis didn’t build a meaningful life by chasing happiness or prestige. He chose a difficult problem, accepted the cost, and allowed the work to shape him.
That’s the only standard we should trust.
Don’t ask what you want this year.
Ask what pain you’re willing to accept.
Ask who that pain will make you.
Choose goals that demand something real from you.
Choose goals that hurt in a way that feels true.
That’s not how you achieve more.
That’s how you live whole.