How to Change Yourself: Pain vs. Perceived Pain

If you want to change something about yourself, focus on two things: pain vs. perceived pain. What I mean is the pain of your current situation versus the perceived pain of changing your situation. If the perceived pain of making a change is lower than the pain you are currently experiencing, then you will make the change. Otherwise, you won’t. This simple comparison will ultimately determine whether you can alter some part of your life.

For example, if you want to save more money, but saving money feels awful, you probably won’t make much progress. When the perceived pain of doing something is too high, willpower alone is rarely enough for lasting success. This gives you two options:

  1. You can either decrease the perceived pain of saving money, or
  2. You can increase your current pain when you don’t save money.

In other words, you can make saving money fun/easy or you can hate yourself for not saving money. All financial content creators use one of these two methods when trying to get people to change their behavior.

For example, when Grant Cardone says that earning only $400,000 per year would embarrass him, he’s trying to increase your current pain. If you make less than $400,000 a year, he wants you to think less of yourself so that you go looking for a solution (ideally from him). Ironically, the solution Grant provides is a high priced course/seminar that makes him richer.

Creators in their 20s use the same strategy when they rent a lambo or take pictures on a private jet to convince you that they’ve made it. They want to increase your current pain by making you think less of yourself in comparison to them. That’s how they try to get you to sign up for their day trading course or whatever else they might be promoting.

That’s one way of creating content. Make your audience feel inadequate. Increase their current pain so that they buy what you are selling. Dave Ramsey and Suze Orman have both followed this style throughout their careers. Their brutal honesty with their audience is what made them famous.

But, you don’t have to take this path. Instead of increasing your audience’s current pain you can lower their perceived pain. The Automatic Millionaire by David Bach is one example of this. Bach’s idea to automate your finances through automated transfers is one way to lower your perceived pain when it comes to saving money. Since you don’t notice the money automatically coming out of your paycheck, this method makes it much easier to accumulate wealth.

I tend to use this method when I create financial content as well. My first book, Just Keep Buying, was all about lowering your perceived pain when it comes to saving and investing. To build wealth all you had to do was “Just Keep Buying.” While my book was about more than just those three words, the end goal was to make it easy for the typical person to accumulate wealth.

Outside of the financial space, I see the same pain vs. perceived pain continuum. All content creators fall somewhere on this spectrum. They use their insights and experiences in their given domain to either increase your current pain or decrease your perceived pain of changing. Once you recognize this, you’ll quickly realize who is following which strategy.

For example, when David Goggins goes on a rant and says “Stay Hard” at the end, he’s trying to get you to raise your current pain. He wants you to think that you are always making excuses so that you feel bad enough to change your behavior.

On the flip side, there are workout routines like 8-Minute Abs, which took the U.S. by storm in the 1990s. This hugely popular fitness fad lowered the perceived pain of getting abs. After all, who could say no to a workout that only takes 8 minutes?

In the world of cooking, you have Gordon Ramsay, who makes chefs feel inadequate, and Jamie Oliver, who has a cookbook where every recipe is just five ingredients. Pain and perceived pain. I could go on.

The best part about this idea is that you can use it to make lasting changes in your life. If you want to lose weight through diet and exercise, you either have to make it easy or you have to hate being overweight so much that you don’t give yourself another option. Of course, “self-hate as motivation” isn’t a strategy I would recommend due to the other negative outcomes it could cause. In other words, be careful when increasing your current pain.

If you’ve failed to make a change in your life recently, it’s likely because your current pain was too low or your perceived pain of changing was too high. So, you either need to change one or both of them to make progress.

Of course, that’s easier said than done. The difficulty of pursuing the “pain vs. perceived pain” strategy is getting an accurate gauge of your current and perceived pain. After all, it’s easy to seduce yourself into thinking that you don’t need to change (i.e. current pain = low) or that the path to change is much harder than it looks (i.e. perceived pain = high). But until you reason through this, you won’t know for sure.

For example, if I wanted to become a billionaire, I can already tell you that the perceived pain of doing so is extremely high. To accomplish this task, I would need to start an ultra-successful business and eventually sell it. This would require me to stop blogging, leave my job, and give up all my free time for the foreseeable future. And, even then, there’s no guarantee that I’d become a billionaire.

As you can see, the perceived pain for me to become a billionaire is massive. That’s why I wouldn’t even waste my time trying such a thing. My current pain of not being a billionaire is too low and the perceived pain to get there is too high.

While this example is extreme, it highlights how the pain vs. perceived pain framework can be used to evaluate a specific goal and make better decisions. After all, what’s the point of all this if not to make better decisions and live a more fulfilling life?

Until next week, thank you for reading.

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This is post 422. Any code I have related to this post can be found here with the same numbering: https://github.com/nmaggiulli/of-dollars-and-data


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