The boxing’s the easy part. When you get into the ring to fight, that’s the vacation. But when you get in the gym, you have to do things over and over till you’re sore and deep in your mind you say, ‘I don’t want to do this anymore,’ I push that out of my mind.

The 'bad' workouts are often the most important ones.

It's easy to train when you feel good, but it's crucial to show up when you don't feel like it—even if you do less than you hope.

Going to gym for 5 minutes might not transform your body, but it does reaffirm your identity.

So many people choose to take pain as a way of life; there’s people who live a painful life in order to punish other people who they don’t want to be happy. To me it’s really about the choices you make in your life.

And the Day Two pain of the gym! When you go back to the gym and you're in agony, and every bit of you is in pain. And the gym guy, you go up to him, you go "Why am I in so much pain?"—and he goes "That's because you're using muscles you haven't used in years." And you look at him and go "Why the fuck are we wasting our time with those muscles?"

Let the gym be a sanctuary for you to be at peace. Let it calm you and ground you and allow you to appreciate everything around you. Let it also be a place for you to unload and explode with intensity through your training.

The bad workouts are the most important ones. It's easy to train when you feel good, but it's crucial to show up when you don't feel like it—even if you do less than you hope.

Going to the gym for 15 minutes might not improve your performance, but it reaffirms your identity. It's not always about what happens during the workout. It's about becoming the type of person who doesn't miss workouts.

Life is pain

"I do the exact same thing now as I did when I was 21 in 1975. I sit and play with ideas. I'm never not working on material. Every second of my existence I'm thinking "Could I do something with that". It's like going into the gym everyday. You walk in everyday and say "Oh jeeez... I gotta do this again?!".

Your blessing in life is when you find the torture you're comfortable with. That's marriage, kids, work, exercise... It is not eating the food you wanna eat...

Find the torture you 're comfortable with and you'll do well."

Everybody enjoys what feels good. Everyone wants to live a carefree, happy, and easy life, to fall in love and have amazing sex and relationships, to look perfect and make money and be popular and well-respected and admired and a total baller to the point that people part like the Red Sea when they walk into the room. Everybody wants that. It’s easy to want that. A more interesting question, a question that most people never consider, is, “What pain do you want in your life? What are you willing to struggle for?” Because that seems to be a greater determinant of how our lives turn out.

Every time you confront something painful, you are at a potentially important juncture in your life — you have the opportunity to choose healthy and painful truth or unhealthy but comfortable delusion.

There is a common misunderstanding among all the human beings who have ever been born on earth that the best way to live is to try to avoid pain and just try to get comfortable. You see this even in insects and animals and birds. All of us are the same. A much more interesting, kind and joyful approach to life is to begin to develop our curiosity, not caring whether the object of our curiosity is bitter or sweet. To lead a life that goes beyond pettiness and prejudice and always wanting to make sure that everything turns out on our own terms, to lead a more passionate, full, and delightful life than that, we must realize that we can endure a lot of pain and pleasure for the sake of finding out who we are and what this world is, how we tick and how our world ticks, how the whole thing just is. If we are committed to comfort at any cost, as soon as we come up against the least edge of pain, we’re going to run; we’ll never know what’s beyond that particular barrier or wall or fearful thing.

That's the thing about life. A lot of the time, it isn't easy at all. We just have to try to make the best of it.

Here’s how to live: Pursue pain.

Pain is a part of growing-up. It is how we learn..