Understanding Suffering: Is It the Only Guarantee of Success?

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I — I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference. Robert Frost

Last week, I saw a post on X. It was about someone at an Ivy League college asking Elon Musk what a person must focus on if they want to change the world. His answer, according to the post, was suffering. If you are not willing to suffer, you cannot change the world. Anyone who wants to change the world must suffer every day, alone, and must willingly give up their comforts.

I thought about it, and about my own life. I have seen suffering throughout my life, and I found the idea to be true. But I felt there was more to this simple concept than the post was saying. So I started researching suffering itself.

A lion can go without food for more than a week. Sometimes two. It is not lazy. It is not unwilling. It hunts, and most of the time, it fails. Out of every five hunts, a lion succeeds maybe once, sometimes not even that. So it goes hungry, rests, and hunts again. This happens to the strongest animal in its world. The one every other animal is afraid of.

The lion did not choose this. No lion wakes up and decides to suffer for its meal. It has no other option. Eating requires hunting. Hunting requires failing, most of the time, before it works even once.

This is the oldest kind of suffering there is. It has nothing to do with ambition or dreams or changing the world. It is just what staying alive costs. Long before humans had a word for suffering, or a bad post on X about it, every living thing was already paying this price, every single day.

Humans started here too. Early humans walked for days behind herds of animals, because that was the only way to eat. There was no other plan. No changing careers, no starting over, no motivational post to make it feel meaningful. It was just hunger, followed by effort, followed by more hunger.

Somewhere along the way, though, human suffering became more complicated. We started suffering for reasons beyond the next meal.

In 1996, my cousin got into IIM Ahmedabad. I watched what happened to his life after that. A high paying job. A different world from the one our families lived in. My family was not doing well with money, and IIM looked like the one clear way out. I decided right then, I wanted this too.

By 2001, I was trying to get into a top IIM. I worked hard for it. Only two of us from my entire engineering college, across every branch, got interview calls that year. I did not clear mine. I had come close. I had failed.

Around the same time, Adani Group offered me a job. Thirty thousand rupees a month. A good offer. That year, jobs were hard to come by everywhere. A thousand students had applied for this one. Only eight of us got through the test, the group discussion, and the interview. I was one of the eight.

Now I had a choice. Take the safe job. Or try for CAT and IIM again.

I asked my father what to do. Our family was struggling with money at the time. I thought he would tell me to take the job. He did not. He told me to try again. He said I was too young to give up and settle for a salary.

So I turned down Adani. I took a job at a coaching class instead. I handed out pamphlets outside colleges. Later, I taught quant there. My salary was three thousand rupees a month. In 2001, that was barely enough to live on. Most months, it was not enough at all. I ate one meal a day. Some days, just a vada pav and tea. The rest I borrowed from friends and paid back when I could.

Next year, I worked from six in the morning to ten at night. I even took my mock tests at the exact time the real exam would happen, just to train for it.

A year later, I failed again.

I will not try to describe that week. I will just say I went back to my father a second time. He told me to try once more.

So I did. I was working and studying at the same time now. On my third attempt, I cleared the exam. I got into IIMB.

People had laughed behind my back the whole time. A twenty three year old, giving up a stable job to hand out pamphlets for a dream that most people fail at. My relatives said I needed to grow up. That I was not even helping support my father, who was already in debt. Even after I got in, some of that talk did not stop right away.

I am not telling you this because it ended well. I am telling you this because of what the suffering actually was. Nobody forced it on me. My father was not forced to back me either, not with our money the way it was. I chose this. He chose to let me choose it. That is a different kind of suffering than the one the lion has.

Millions of people think the way I did back then. Study hard. Work hard. Suffer enough. And you can get out of the life you were born into. This is not just an Indian belief. Parents and children everywhere believe some version of it. It might be one of the most common beliefs in the world.

There are two kinds of suffering in this story, and they are not the same.

My father suffering under debt, that was not chosen. He did not sit down one day and decide to take on financial strain. Life handed it to him. This is the suffering millions of people carry every day. The farmer, waiting on rain that may not come. The daily wage worker, whose income depends on whether there is work that day. Nobody asked them if they wanted this. It is not a bet. It is just the ground they were born standing on.

My suffering, the coaching class, the one meal a day, the borrowed money, that was different. I chose it. I picked it as a bet on a future I wanted. I could have taken the job at Adani instead. I had an exit. My father did not have one from his debt.

This difference matters. One kind of suffering is handed to you before you have any say in it. The other kind, you walk into, on purpose, hoping it pays off later. Call the first one inherited suffering. Call the second one invested suffering. It is an investment in the truest sense. You put something in now, not knowing for certain what you get back, or if you get anything back at all.

The suffering did not end when I got into IIMB, either. It just changed shape. Twelve years into my career, I was earning thirty six lakh rupees a year at Dell. I left that job for a startup role paying twelve lakh rupees. My family was shocked. People assumed I had been fired, that no one else would hire me, that I had lost the plot somewhere along the way. Nobody assumes a pay cut is a bet. A pay cut looks like a mistake, right up until it does not.

If it works out, people call it hard work. Vision, even. If it does not, the same choice gets called foolish. Stubborn. Someone who could not hold down a real job. The suffering is identical either way. Only the ending decides what to call it. This is the real, uncomfortable truth. Suffering is not a guarantee of success. Nobody can see that while it is happening. Only once it is over does anyone agree on what to call it.

Why Suffering Is Not a Guarantee of Success

Once you separate inherited suffering from invested suffering, a question follows naturally. Among the suffering people choose, why does some of it lead somewhere, and some of it does not?

Picture a simple chart. One side measures how much suffering someone chose to take on. The other side measures the impact they had. By impact, I mean something specific. Did they build something that outlasted them? Did they change how a large number of people live or work? Not fame. Not money by itself.

The chart has four boxes.

High suffering, high impact. This box is full of familiar names. People who suffered a great deal, and it paid off. A ticket collector who became a World Cup captain. A door to door saleswoman who became a billionaire. A prisoner who became a president. A monk who lost everything and still ended up on a stage in Chicago, changing how the world saw an entire religion.

Low suffering, high impact. This box makes people uncomfortable, so nobody talks about it much. People who had very little suffering, and still had enormous impact, because they started decades ahead of everyone else. A free computer lab in the 1970s. A stockbroker father who taught his son to read a balance sheet at age eleven.

High suffering, low impact. This box is the one almost nobody writes about, and it might be the most important one here. People who suffered just as much as the names above, made the same kind of bet, and lost it anyway. We do not know most of their names. Nobody writes a biography about the founder whose startup failed after five years of eighty hour weeks.

Low suffering, low impact. An ordinary, comfortable life. No particular struggle, no particular mark left either. No judgment intended. Most lives sit somewhere close to this box.

One thing worth saying plainly before we go further. This chart is only about positive impact. Some people suffer a great deal and still cause enormous harm. Suffering did not make Hitler good or bad. It made him determined. Suffering is fuel. What that fuel builds, or destroys, depends on the person holding it.

The chart below has the fuller picture, names and all.

Sit with that third box for a moment. High suffering, low impact.

For every person in this piece who suffered and made it, there are many more who suffered exactly as much and did not. Not fewer hours. Not less sacrifice. Not a smaller bet. The same bet, made just as seriously, and lost.

This is easy to forget, because we only hear from the people who won. Nobody invites the founder whose startup failed to give a talk about it. Nobody puts the person who studied for three years and still failed the exam on a magazine cover. Their effort was just as real. It simply did not end in a story anyone wanted to tell.

I know this because I almost became one of them. If I had failed a third time, there is no version of this essay where I get to write it. There would be no lesson, no pattern, no chart. Just a twenty four year old who left a good job to chase something that did not work out, exactly the way my relatives said it would. The suffering would have been identical. Only the ending would have been missing.

This is what people mean when they say we only hear about the survivors. We build our belief in suffering by looking at the people it worked for, and forget to count the much larger number of people it did not work for. The lesson we draw from a handful of winners feels like a formula. It is not a formula. It is a filter. Most people who go through it do not come out the other side with anything to show for it.

Survivorship bias: A logical error that comes from focusing only on the people or things that survived a selection process, while overlooking those that did not, because their absence makes them harder to see.

None of this means suffering does not matter. It clearly does. Every name in that first box paid a real price. But it means suffering was never a guarantee. At best, it improved the odds. It did not decide the outcome.

So where does this leave us.

I still believe suffering is necessary if you want to build something that lasts. My own life is proof of that, at least so far. But I no longer believe it is simply a choice, available equally to anyone willing to make it. It is a choice for some, and only a choice, because they had something to fall back on if it failed. For many others, the same choice is not on the table at all. Today already takes everything they have. There is no room left to bet on tomorrow.

That is the part I missed when I first sat with that fake Musk line. I believed suffering was the answer for anyone willing to pay the price. I now think the harder truth is this. Being able to pay that price at all is its own kind of luck. I still believe suffering matters. I just no longer believe it is a guarantee of success, available equally to anyone willing to try.

People like to say, get out of your comfort zone, if you want to grow. It is usually said by someone who already got the return on it. Nobody says it while they are still inside the discomfort, not knowing yet if it will pay off. That not knowing is the real cost. Not the suffering itself. The not knowing whether it counts for anything.

There is one more kind of suffering worth naming before I close, even though it deserves its own piece another day. Not suffering you choose, and not suffering handed to you by circumstance either. The suffering your own mind creates on its own, replaying an old argument at two in the morning, dreading a meeting that has not happened yet. That kind does not build anything. It only drains you. It should never be mistaken for the kind this piece is about.

I do not know yet if my life will end up in that first box, high suffering, high impact, or somewhere else entirely. It is still being written. But I know the suffering was real, and I know I chose it, and I know my father chose to let me choose it, at a time when choosing anything at all was not easy for him either.

If you are in the middle of your own bet right now, not knowing yet how it ends, I hope this gave you some company.

Further Reading

Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl — Get your copy

His account of surviving Nazi concentration camps, and the idea that suffering becomes bearable, even meaningful, when it is tied to a purpose. The clearest counterpoint to suffering with no why attached.

Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell — Get your copy

Gladwell's chapter on Bill Gates covers the same early computer access story used in this piece's matrix, as part of his larger argument that success often has more to do with timing and circumstance than individual effort.

Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb — Get your copy

Taleb's case that some systems, and some people, do not just survive disorder and stress, they need it to grow stronger. The intellectual backbone for treating suffering as fuel rather than as unwanted noise.

Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Nicholas Taleb — Get your copy

The clearest treatment of survivorship bias in plain language. Directly useful for the graveyard argument in this piece, the people who bet and lost.

Shoe Dog by Phil Knight — Get your copy

A founder's memoir of the unglamorous, near-broke years before Nike became Nike. A longer, harder version of the Sara Blakely story.

Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela — Get your copy

Mandela's own account of his years in prison, in his own words rather than a summary of them.

Captain Cool: The M.S. Dhoni Story by Gulu Ezekiel — Get your copy

The story of Dhoni's rise from a ticket collector in Kharagpur to India's most successful captain, told without turning it into a highlight reel.

The Life of Swami Vivekananda, by His Eastern and Western Disciples — Get your copy

The most comprehensive account of Vivekananda's years of poverty and wandering before Chicago, 1893, and how that period shaped everything that came after.