Your Pain Portfolio Is Your Real Resume
Why your failures and struggles matter more than your achievements
Your resume is bullsh*t.
That fancy PDF with your accomplishments? The degrees, the promotions, the awards? Nobody cares. What they actually care about is something completely different. Something you've probably been hiding.
Your pain portfolio.
Let me explain...
NASA has a weird hiring practice. When selecting astronauts, they don't pick the people with perfect records. They deliberately choose people who've failed spectacularly... and then bounced back.1
Why? Because space is hard. Things go wrong. And when you're floating 250 miles above Earth, they need to know you won't fall apart.
GE's legendary CEO Jack Welch did something similar. When picking executives, he didn't just look at their wins. He looked at their "runway," how much they could grow when faced with challenges.
Naval Ravikant put it perfectly, "your real resume is just a catalog of all your suffering."2
Think about it. The most meaningful parts of your life probably came from your hardest moments.
The breakup that forced you to rebuild.
The failure that made you rethink everything.
The loss that showed you what really matters.
These aren't just stories – they're your actual qualifications for life.
There's fascinating science behind this. Your brain's anterior midcingulate cortex, the part responsible for willpower, only grows when you do things you'd rather avoid.3
No pain, no brain gain (literally).
Most people don't get this. They spend their lives avoiding discomfort. They're constantly borrowing from their future selves:
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