How to Be Great by Being with Suck

Early on, you arrived at the conclusion that you weren’t okay with things not being okay. Somewhere, somehow, someway, a consensus was reached inside your brain: It was not okay for things to suck.

And so you embarked on a transformational process — a process by which you learned ways to ensure that things most certainly did not suck.

You learned to create a really good life where everything was well put together, and nice, and good. There were some hardships, but you were able to handle them, because not being able to do so would suck. There were the right level of hardships. Kind of like the goldilocks effect.

It’s okay for there to be hardship in your life, provided it’s okay.

You surrounded yourself with a good life, creating good results, and surrounding yourself by other people that aren’t capable of having things suck either.

You became a perpetual optimist, turning everything into a glass half-full situation. Whenever you’re presented with a problem, you find some way to turn it into a positive thing.

You are nice and self-effacing. Everyone likes you because you are nice and kind and easy to be around you. When you are there nothing sucks.

You spend a lot of time trying to convince yourself that things are good these days. Not because they aren’t good, but because on some level, you are always present to a bit of the suck.

The trouble with keeping everything good is that it can never be great. In order to have a great life, you have to be willing to experience all of life. And currently, you have lobotomized that part of your experience.

If you really want to be fully-expressed in your life, you have to be willing to fully experience it.

And if you’re unable or unwilling to experience the parts of life that suck, there’s no hope for you to experience the greatness that you’re hoping for.

You keep trying to get there by making things MORE GOOD — but it won’t work. Keeping things good is what is keeping you stuck. You know, on some level, that failure is an essential part of success, but that’s also part of the problem, because knowing that feels good.

And you can even allow some failures to creep in, but it’s mere nanoseconds before you let yourself feel better about the failure. You turn it into a sign that you’re growing, or an empowering experience, or you write a motivating post about it.

Stop that.

Be in the experience of the suck.

I’m not suggesting that you need to go out and make your life crappy. This isn’t a lesson in finding places that would otherwise be great and turning them into shitfests — that would simply be doing the opposite (which is the same).

I’m inviting you to consider that life already has plenty of suck. You don’t need to go out and create it. You just need to be willing to sit with it and allow it to suck. What you’ll discover is that the more you allow life to suck, and practice simply being in the experience of that suck, the more you’ll begin to grow a capacity for life’s magnificence.

If it can be okay for life to suck, you don’t need to manage your expectations to ensure you aren’t overly disappointed. If you can be okay with sucking yourself, you can let go managing people’s opinion of you (lest you fall from the pedestal they may put you on). If you’re able to be with the lows, then you can start to be with the highs that come before and after.

So yes, your life is good. (Nice work on that, by the way).

But if you want it to be great, you have to be willing to let it suck.