Do you know who will most likely survive a zombie apocalypse? Green Berets and Navy SEALs who had to suffer to earn their place. If you have run six miles a day for years, jogging thirty minutes to evade the horde because there are no Ubers is nothing. If you have carried 125-pound sandbags up a hill for two miles, hauling a 30-pound backpack six blocks to a meeting barely registers.
Suffering builds a floor. Once you know where your floor is, almost nothing can drop you below it. And here is the crucial part that most people miss: future suffering does not feel as bad once you have already been through worse. The person who has never been cold does not know how to be warm. The person who has never been exhausted does not know what they are actually capable of.
I did not fully understand this when I was 22. I know it now at 48. And I wish someone had told me to relish every brutal hour of it while it was happening.
If you have the opportunity to work somewhere that demands double-digit hours a day, take it. None of this work from home so you can go play pickleball during the middle of the day BS. Grind for at least ten years. It will feel like a lot while you are in it. It will feel like the best investment you ever made once you are out.
Where My Floor Was Built
Before I ever set foot in a bank or a business school classroom, my floor was already being poured.
I grew up moving between Zambia, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Taiwan. They are places where life is measurably harder, dirtier, and more uncertain than what most Americans grow up with.
Resources are scarcer. Infrastructure is unreliable. The social safety net is thin. You learn early that the world does not owe you comfort, that things break and do not get fixed quickly, and that people around you manage to live full lives on far less than what Americans consider the bare minimum.
When I arrived in America, something clicked that I could not have anticipated. Everything felt easy by comparison. Not easy in an ungrateful way. Easy in a calibrated way. The roads worked. The water was clean. Opportunities were everywhere.
I remember thinking that anyone willing to put in genuine effort in this country had an almost unfair advantage over most of the world. The correlation with effort and reward was high!
Compared to what I had seen growing up, a demanding office job with a good salary was not suffering. It was a gift I was being paid to receive.
Grateful To Have Worked 60-Plus Hours a Week for 13 Years
Now that I am middle-aged, there is no way I would return to banking hours. With likely less than half my life left, spending more time in an office while my kids are still young is a complete non-starter.
But I am incredibly grateful I did it then.
Back then I was unencumbered by childcare, flush with energy, and hungry to prove myself. I went to business school part-time at Berkeley for three years, adding another 20 hours a week on top of a 60-hour job while traveling monthly to see clients. The schedule sounds insane in hindsight. At the time it just felt like what you did.
I had won the lottery by landing a banking job from a non-target school so I was not about to waste it. Save aggressively, invest consistently, endure for a decade, and the math said I had a high probability of breaking free for good.
That part worked out. But the financial outcome was almost secondary to what those years actually gave me. Every 5 am morning, every late night call to Asia, every weekend at the desk was a rep. And reps compound the same way investments do.
Here are some excellent tips from a GS MD on how to get a job and be great at any job. I wish I got this advice when I was still working.
The Real Tests Come After the Job
A demanding career is one thing. The hardest chapter is everything that piles on top of it, or replaces it with a different kind of relentless. This is where the floor you built either saves you or fails you.
Raising young children is a 24/7 job with no weekends, no performance reviews, and no one telling you that you are doing well. The first two or three years before preschool will likely be harder than your toughest stretch in any full-time job. But if you have already done 70-hour weeks for a decade, the exhaustion is familiar. You know you can survive it because you already have.
Caring for aging parents means managing logistics, grief, and medical decisions on top of everything else, often for years, often without warning. The cost of eldercare can crush any family that is not prepared.
Starting a business means tolerating uncertainty and rejection with no guaranteed payoff. Most people grind for years and still fail. Writing a book means showing up for months with no external accountability and no one pushing you but yourself. Having the power go out for 48 hours while caring for young children will test your patience in ways no office politics ever will.
None of these things destroy people who have already been pushed past their limits. They can break people who have not, not because those people are weak, but because they have no reference point for how much a human can actually absorb.
Future suffering does not feel as bad once you have been through worse. It is a mechanical reality. Your nervous system recalibrates. Your definition of hard shifts. It becomes easier to sit with uncertainty. What floors someone else becomes background noise for you.
You Will Quit Faster If You Never Had to Suffer
A hard life earlier makes your future life easier. Too comfortable a life for too long eventually makes life hard.
It is why some people feel genuinely miserable despite living in a paid-off home, driving a luxury car, and having millions saved. Every minor inconvenience gets magnified into a major hardship because they have no reference point for real difficulty. The suffering floor was never built, so every new source of friction feels like the bottom.
Someone who always leaves by 5 pm will find a 6:30 request outrageous. Someone used to working until 7 pm barely notices. Wake up at 5 am for years and a 7:00 am Saturday activity feels easy. Sleep in your whole life and that same schedule feels oppressive.
Without endurance built in advance, it is easy to quietly quit on the things that matter most. Music lessons slip from twice a week to once, then disappear. The business idea never gets past the concept stage. The book stays an outline forever. A year passes and you realize you let a hundred small opportunities slide simply because consistency requires effort and effort requires a reserve you never built.
You cannot fail if you never quit. That motto is why Financial Samurai has had at least three new posts a week since July 2009. AI can scrape every word I have ever written and gut search traffic in the process. Fine. Quitting is not on the table while the kids are still at home.
The Hidden Strain on Relationships
Here is something nobody puts in the parenting books. The couples most likely to struggle are the ones where one partner built endurance and the other did not.
It plays out the same way in household after household. One partner, usually the one who spent years in a demanding job, keeps showing up. Early mornings, late nights, grinding through exhaustion without complaint because they have done it a thousand times before.
The other partner, through no fault of bad intentions, simply hits their limit faster. They are more irritable, more depleted, less able to absorb the relentless repetition that parenting requires.
The partner with more endurance starts to feel resentful. The partner without it starts to feel inadequate or misunderstood. Neither is the villain. But the gap between their floors creates real friction, and over time that friction compounds.
Burnout hits every parent. The question is how hard. If your toughest stretch before kids was a comfortable 40-hour week, a newborn plus a job plus a household will rock you. If you spent years working 60-plus hours and still found ways to function, it will not rock you nearly as much.
Divorce lawyers will tell you the paperwork usually cites irreconcilable differences. What that often means in practice is that one person ran out of gas and could not find a way to refuel, while the other could not understand why.
The solution is not to resent your partner for the life they lived before you met. It is to recognize the gap early, talk about it honestly, and find ways to build each other’s endurance together before the tank hits empty.
Productive Suffering Versus Pointless Suffering
Not all suffering is created equal.
Working brutal hours in a dead-end job, for a manager who does not respect you, toward a future that holds no promise, is not productive suffering. It is just damage. That kind of grind builds resentment, not endurance. If that is your situation, negotiate a severance and find something better.
The suffering I am describing has a return on investment. You are working long hours to build skills, accumulate capital, and develop the grit you will need for all the hard and unknown things life will eventually throw at you. You may not feel the return in the moment, but will feel it later.
There are limits though. Working 70 hours a week while destroying your health or neglecting your most important relationships is not building endurance. It is spending down assets you cannot replace. That is a bad trade no matter how much you earn.
Suffer strategically and early. Protect what cannot be rebuilt.
Push the People You Love to Suffer Too
If suffering has made your life better, you have a responsibility to the people you love to not let them live too softly for too long.
Your kids. Let them struggle with hard things. Resist the urge to rescue them from every inconvenience. The discomfort they feel at 6 or 14 is building a floor they will stand on at 35 when life gets genuinely harder.
Your spouse. Encourage them to take on the challenging project, push for the demanding role, build something that requires real sustained effort. A partner who has been pushed past their limits and survived is a stronger partner, a more resilient co-parent, and a happier person.
Your friends. Be the one who signs everyone up for the hard thing. The half marathon. The camping trip with no amenities. The people who resist it most are usually the ones who need it most.
You are not being unkind by pushing people you love toward difficulty. You are being unkind if you do not, and then watch them struggle with things that should have been manageable.
If You Have Not Suffered Enough Yet, Start Now
If you are in your twenties or thirties and life feels manageable, good. But recognize that you are in the training window. The hardest stretches of your life have not started yet.
Add a side hustle for the extra income and the conditioning. Start the business to experience perpetual rejection. Master a musical instrument to experience the breakthrough of muscle memory. Go back to school while working. Learn a second language that opens your world up. Commit to something that requires sustained effort with no guaranteed payoff.
The endurance you build now does not leave you. At 11 pm when your kid cannot sleep and you have a 7 am call, it is there. On day fifteen of school pickups and homework and dinner when you are running on nothing, it is there. When the business is not working and you have to decide whether to keep going, it is there. When your parents need you and you have nothing left, it is still there.
An easy life is a wonderful thing to enjoy. Just do not let it be the only life you have ever lived before the real tests begin.
Have you ever worked brutal hours long enough to feel genuinely hardened by them? Do you think your upbringing made life easier or harder to handle as an adult? And if you are already a parent, do you feel like the work you put in before kids arrived was enough to prepare you, or did parenthood still knock you flat? Finally, are you actively pushing your kids, your spouse, and your friends to suffer a little more, or are you letting the people you love live a little too softly?
Build the Floor. Then Insure It.
Nobody who grinds that hard plans to leave early. But life does not ask for your schedule.
If you are the primary earner, secure enough life and disability insurance while you are still healthy enough to qualify. Life insurance replaces your income if you die. Disability insurance replaces it if you cannot work, which is statistically far more likely.
I use Policygenius to compare rates across multiple insurers in minutes. It is free and takes less than five minutes.
You have spent years building a floor for the people you love. Make sure it holds even if you cannot be there to stand on it yourself.
